I don’t know if this can be quantified. Is crippling depression worse than bpd or ptsd disorders? Addiction seems unpleasant because you can lose a lot of things (money, friends, dignity) but at least you can self medicate (you can do that with other disorders too though).
I would assume because bpd and depression both involve constant, inescapable negative emotions and mess up your ability to obtain social support that they would be worst or among the worst. Ptsd has constant negative emotions which can effect social interaction too though.
Then again can you really compare them and say one is worse? There are hundreds of mental illnesses. Plus you have the social stigma factor. People may be more accepting of ptsd than bpd, which may be seen as just a bad personality…
This isn’t meant to be trite, I’m curious if one really stands out as the most painful, isolating and miserable from the rest.
I think what constitutes the “worst” hinges on the resources someone already has.
Like, I would think depression would be really bad for someone who is very sensual, active, and sociable. If a someone’s baseline is already on the “dull” side, then the same dose of depression probably won’t hit them as hard.
People with schizophrenia who have higher IQs have a more favorable outcome. People who are more socially connected also do better. So smart sociable person is going to have a different subjective experience of schizophrenia than someone who isn’t these things.
I was going to mention that in the op but forgot. Unpleasant to the victim. Some Cluster b personality disorders (antisocial, narcissistic) are deeply unpleasant for those around the sick person but not really unpleasant to the sick person themselves.
I did some relief work at a pharmacy whose main clientele was the chronically mentally ill (the clinic was in the same building) and it convinced me that schizophrenia and severe bipolar disorder are the worst things that can happen to a person and their family.
Doesn’t bipolar disorder mean that you go through manic phases and depressive phases, whereas depression means that you only feel depression? In other words, doesn’t bipolar disorder have highs and lows, whereas depression only has lows? Because I can’t imagine how bipolar disorder would be worse than depression.
I should think that schizophrenia would win here in a walkaway. Most mental illness presents as exaggerated aspects of “normal” functioning, but schizophrenia seems to be a tragedy in every way, IMO.
With bipolar, you get all the life crushing misery of depression plus the real world consequences of everything you do during a manic phase - which might include out of control spending, impulsively quitting jobs and severing relationships, and some more exaggerated behavior resulting from delusions of grandeur in extreme cases. Bipolar is also harder to treat than depression.
My mother-in-law has bipolar disorder. There are times when she goes off of her meds for a while, because, as much as she dislikes the low swings, she really, really likes the high swings – for her, the meds even everything out, and remove both the peaks and the valleys.
Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are tragic but I wouldn’t call them the most subjectively unpleasant. I have talked with schizophrenics who hear voices and they get used to it just like people get used to lots of things. It makes it hard for them to function in normal society but it isn’t constantly unpleasant.
I think the most unpleasant psychological disorder would be a severe general anxiety disorder almost by definition especially if accompanied by frequent panic attacks. The nature of the disorder itself is to experience extreme anxiety and fear and that comes with physical as well as mental symptoms. Imagine having to stay in your house all the time so that you don’t collapse in a panic attack or at least have a place to wait it out if it does happen. Lots of people really are trapped in that situation.
There are also some very rare and strange mental disorders that can’t be very fun either. There is cotard delusion that causes people to truly believe that they are dead (not that they are dying or a fear of death, they truly believe that they are already dead or that parts of their body are missing). That isn’t someone you want to party with.
There is also Capgras delusion which causes people to believe that a loved one has been replaced with a clever but not perfect imposter. That has to be a very bad feeling as well.
I have a psych degree and worked in a mental hospital for about a year. I think that depression is the most subjectively unpleasant.
Just from what I saw, people with schizophrenia aren’t really aware of their emotions and/or are so out there that they don’t know anything is wrong with them.
The worst is people who have multiple disorders, like depression with PTSD and borderline personality disorder.
As far as stigma goes, that’s a hard one. I’m tempted to say that the “crazies” (bipolars and schizophrenics) have to deal with more stigma than the depressed and the anxious, but I’m not sure.
I know if someone told me they were schizophrenic, I’d feel more sorrow for them than I would if they were depressed/anxious. People are less likely to tell a person hearing voices to “get over it” or “quit yer whining”. Schizophrenia is the very definition of “serious”. For many people, the other disorders are just varying degrees of normality.
But more people are able to relate to the horribleness of depression or anxiety, because people are more likely to suffer from these conditions than they are schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. And there’s fear associated with people who are “out of their minds”. If someone caught me crying in the stairwell, I’d be embarrassed. But I’d be horrified if someone caught me talking back to the voices in my head. Weird emotions, I can explain. Weird thoughts and behavior? Nope. And even if I tried, who believes crazy people?
Word. With depression, everything sucks but you can talk yourself into believeing on some level that, hey, this is just my brain chemistry messing with me. Mania can give you all kinds of stuff to be genuinely hard on yourself for. If depression is a drop into darkness from sea level, mania is what drops you into darkness from 30,000 feet.
The wind of my soul, mania can feel good when it manifests as grandiosity. Other times it comes on as what I can only describe as “extraordinarily entitled rage.” It’s like grandiosity except the “everybody loves me because I am fantastic!” element is replaced with a paranoid “everybody is screwing with me, how dare they!” It’s very ugly and leads to some pretty nasty meanness. I would think that the life of a schizophrenic might be confusing, but maybe something you’d get used to unless it was really severe. I get some pretty wonky delusions & false memories when I’m blooming manic but I can usually minimize them into minor distractions.
My vote would be for chronic anxiety & panic. Those are very unpleasant symptoms that anyone can get when life throws you a curve, but to be bushwacked by knee-buckling dread for no good reason would be like coming under sniper fire at a little kid’s birthday party.
As stated above, manic phases can result in impulsive and reckless behavior, such as spending, unsafe behavior, delusional thinking, grandiosity, altercations with police, etc. Worse, manic phases don’t only consist of elevated mood - in severe cases of bipolar disorder, particularly type I, the manic phase can manifest itself in extreme agitation, even psychosis. The individual goes through and past symptoms like elevated mood, delusion and grandiosity and starts exhibiting symptoms like extreme agitation, extreme anger, panic, hallucinations, thinking they’re talking to their dead father, fear that they will burst into flames or explode, and so on.
That’s definitely not everyone suffering from bipolar disorder, though, which I why I was careful to say severe. The people with severe bipolar or affective disorders or severe psychotic disorders I have known, when untreated or untreatable, have been some of the saddest cases one can imagine.
The social stigma attached to schizophrenia certainly seems greater than some other mental illnesses. Probably because often when a murderer or other violent criminal is in the news, it’s mentioned that they’re schizophrenic.
I am quite used to depression, even occasional psychosis (usually medication induced, I have little blood brain barrier) but I now have a reaction to anticholinergic medications (used for all sorts of body stuff) in which they make me totally paranoid within minutes, so paranoid I can’t trust anyone to tell them I am in trouble. I “know” all sorts of stuff and everyone is out to get me, my partner is having affairs and everyone wants to kill me. I lived like that for months, even worked a job in a prison, my shrink knew something was up but thought it was same old same old and put me on anti psychotics but they did nothing. Then I stopped taking a lung drug and it cleared away - until I took an OTC pill for stomach cramps (15 hours in hell) and once an old fashioned anti-histamine (8 hours but I knew what was happening). I have a psych file a foot thick and have been in many dreadful states but to feel that paranoia was the worst thing I have ever experienced and all my doctors agree, my lifespan will be shortened because I can’t take standard medications for some of my health issues but that is no life. Even now it scares the flying fuck out of me that I was able to feel and believe such awful things about everybody I love and I still cannot handle being in the vicinity of anyone in a blue uniform - cops or not.
It sure as hell is not like in the movies.
I wear a flourescent wristband that contains this info 24 hours a day in case and buy nothing at a pharmacy without both googling and speaking to a pharmacist first. My doc didn’t even know how many common drugs are of this class so she triple checks all prescriptions before the pharmacist also has a look. Voices telling me to do stuff i can learn to live with, the constant grey of depression can be sort of comfortable after a while, even the suicidal moments are understandable but to even think of returning to that state is far worse than actually living in any of the others for me.
