Here’s a message board for Bi-Polars. Read their posts and you will have insight into the daily struggle which is mental illness.
I used to be a counselor in a group home for adults with chronic mental illnesses. I can’t claim to know what it feels like to live with a mental illness like schizophrenia, but some of the residents were kind enough to try to explain it to me.
One person told me that the voices cycled constantly, like a tape on a loop. When people would speak to him, he could only get about 1/3 of it because of this constant noise in his head. He said, “y’know when you set the radio dial between stations, and you hear a little bit of one station, a little bit of the other station, and mostly static? It’s like that.”
Someone else told me that part of him knew what was real and what wasn’t, yet he couldn’t tell his sensory organs. For example, one time we were talking in my office, and very calmly he said, “I know we’re in your office, and you’re sitting next to me. I can hear your voice. But what I see is that I’m in a burning church with the Devil, and my parents are being tortured.” It was heart-breaking.
I realize this isn’t reassuring. The place where I worked was usually “the end of the road” for most people. I’m sure others have more success-oriented stories.
Good luck, astro, and everyone else who has responded so far.
I understand competely what you all have gone through. I have a 2:00 appointment with a counselor to find out how to be a real person, and not this ugly, lazy, depressed thing that I am. All I want is to be loved, and to love, but when you put your picture up with a personal Internet ad, and suddenly the people ypu have been writing to stop writing back, it’s tough.
Life sucks.
It’s odd, I’d describe depression as probably the worst pain I’ve ever had to endure, but the main thing about the pain, what makes me think that “pain” is maybe the wrong word to describe it, was that it was almost abstract - a pain of detachment. It snuck up on me in college, and settled gently around me like wet concrete, and I couldn’t feel anything, except maybe hopelessness. You know how some people will describe Hell as a permanent separation from God? It’s kind of like that, except rather than God, it was my sense of Self, every mental and emotional point of reference that I had, up to that point, taken for granted.
As I unraveled, I drank, a lot. I hated having to live in my head, and preferred the sweet, crippled silence of utter shitfuck drunken oblivion to having to spend another sober moment as someone so paralyzed as to regard the excercise of my will - even for something as simple as getting out of bed, or going to the dining hall, or reading my homework, or, hell, talking to people - with the same fear one gets when anticipating physical pain.
Prozac helped. I took it for a year or so, and it broke through the chemical morass in my head and made me capable of having a good day every once in a while. I still, six or so years after it started, haven’t totally recovered in terms of being a socialized, functional human being, but I can fake it pretty well these days, and, of course, I’m no longer a slave to curdled neurotransmitters. I do now find that, in terms of emotional pain, the normal stuff like broken hearts and grief, while being unpleasant, are manageable and unscary. I reserve The Fear for when, every once in a while, I start to feel the first stirrings of that old deadness. Knock on wood, though, I’ve never lapsed back into the true deep black funk.
I was diagnosed with depression last year, and have been suffering from it for at least 5.
I can’t explain it all, but this is a small snipet of my life. Tended to happen at night when i was trying to sleep.
Depression Voice: You’re worthless, you know that?
Me: No, I’m not.
DV: Yes you are. It would be much easier for everybody you just disappeared.
Me: Easier for who?
DV: Your parents. You know it costs them a lot of money to take care of you, and they are always saying they don’t have enough money to make ends meet. And what about Jaime? Do you really think he deserves to have to put up with you?
Me: He loves me.
DV: Does he? Does he really? I doubt it. Don’t you think life would be easier for him all around if he didn’t have you in it?
Me: No…
DV: Sure it would be! Everybody’s would be. Now come on, look at this objectively. Sure you can see it.
Me: Maybe…
DV: There’s a reason you don’t have any friends. Your family puts up with you because they have to. So do something right for once and give 'em a break…
Me: Uh…
Anyway, that is part of a dialogue that ran through my head constantly for five years. Now it only happens once or twice amonth.
I used to be schizophrenic and suffered serious delusions. I never heard voices though. I just had delusions about who/what I was.
What were they like? They sucked, they ruined my life almost. I will have to live with chronic depression and bouts of suicidal idealation that come and go until I die because of the things I did and that happened to me while I was delusional. What hurts the most is knowing I never seriously got depressed or considered suicide before I was mentally ill (before I was 17), so I know I didn’t have to spend my life feeling this way (not that i’m always unhappy. I’m pretty happy a good deal of the time, its just that your past catches up to you). Plus Its hard to discuss it with people. Sucks really badly.
I don’t know if i’m comfortable talking about it. i know alot of people ahve talked about their own bouts with trauma and shame. Ah well.
I thought I was the messiah for about 4.5 years. Started in 1996 in December when I was 17, I don’t know the exact date when this delusion started but I guess I just slowly fell into it. I think the stress of graduating high school did it to me. Maybe I just react badly to stress and change, I don’t know. But I doubt its a coincidence that I went mentally Ill halfway through my senior year in high school. I had no post graduation plans and I guess I couldn’t handle it.
During my mental Illness I thought that a particular musician who will remain nameless was the reincarnation of merlin the magician and I was the reincarnation of King arthur. I would listen to his songs and think I was getting messages about what I should or shouldn’t do with certain areas of my life. I figured we were linked telepathically and the songs were a means of communicating what I should do next.
I was convinced I was put on earth to fix all the worlds problems. My priorities as a result were very skewed compared to conventional priorities. I had no ambition to get a job or education or anything like that. I was too wrapped up in my ‘mission’ to worry about that stuff. I was 90% certain I would spend my life homeless (one of the reasons I post so much about saving money here, because I still have that fear of ending up homeless in the back of my mind).
I also though It all came to an end on December 14th 2000. I was reading info on schizophrenia and realized “I have this mental illness and all these ideas are just a delusion due to mental illness”. The delusions stopped cold after that, it was like a religious zealot finding out beyond a reasonable doubt that God does not exist and being expected to still follow or something along those lines. It was impossible for the delusions to exist or have any effect when I knew they were false.
Is your whole world different? More or less all that happens is your priorities change. Read the book ‘combatting cult mind control’ to get a better idea of what it is like to have your entire worldview and priority system hijacked by a mental illness. Even though the author wasn’t ‘mentally ill’ I relate very well to his situation because he, like me, had his mind and priority system hijacked by a false religious system of grandeur. You are still ‘sane’ in your own mind, you just have different priorities. In the book the author tells how he went from a college student studying business to a religious fanatic who sold flowers on the street 16 hours a day. In his own mind he was still sane, he just had different priorities. It was the same with me, I never considered myself insane I just thought my priorities had changed because I was a religious figure. There is a book I think it was called ‘Gods other son’, written by an ex schizophrenic about his delusions. He had delusions about aliens and being the messiah too. But when I try to find the book I can only find Don Imus’s book instead.
Hopefully people will still respect my opinions on this board because this all ended 4 years ago. I am in college now, have career ambitions and most people would never know any of these things if I didn’t tell them. I don’t mind being called nuts, I call myself nuts all the time and joke with my brother about it. But it hurts when all people do is laugh at you on one hand and be afraid of you on the other. But its a message board so it doesn’t matter much.
I’m going to break it into sections for the sake of clarity.
I suffer very badly from depression, very rarely compounded with hallucinations - auditory and visual.
Describing what happens during them is hard, because nothing on paper can really show how it feels when it’s happening, but I’ll give some examples.
AUDITORY HALLUCINATIONS:
I frequently hear noises. Never voices, but noises. Specifically, I hear someone scratching at the window… doors creaking open… a rattle of the doorknob. Any number of sounds that indicate my safety in my home is threatened. I had to have a full alarm system installed in my house, connected to read switches on every window and external door before I could sleep at night at all. Now when I hear the noises, I refuse to give into them. Usually it works.
One thing I’ve discovered about the auditory hallucinations is that I hear them only out of my left ear. Depending where the sound comes from it can be hard to tell if I’m only hearing it with one ear, but if it comes from the right and I hear it only on the left, I know it’s not real. Generaly I tell myself it’s not real anyway.
VISUAL HALLUCINATIONS
I’ve been known to have visual hallucinations. The worst, I think, happened at work where I needed to confirm something with a co-worker and saw her in the hall and stopped to chat. During the entire conversation, the person I saw was Karen. Turns out it was a real person, but it was Jan. I didn’t just see Jan and mentally think ‘Karen’, I actually physically saw Karen. I can’t quite describe it - there was a sense of unease on some level, as though Karen wasn’t quite 100% in focus, but I’d have still sworn it was Karen.
My boss came up partway through my conversation and caught the last bit where I got around to asking the question I needed to ask Karen, and she chuckled and said “I think you need to chat to Karen instead of Jan about that one, hey?”. As soon as she said it - there’s no word to describe it really - but Karen’s features kind of fuzzed out into Jan’s and I saw her properly. I just laughed, rolled my eyes and said ‘Oy, I’ve been working too hard - of course you wouldn’t know THAT, Jan!’ and we all laughed and the moment passed. Scary stuff when you don’t know who’s who though, with people you’ve worked with for years.
Standard visual hallucinations that happen maybe 3 or 4 times a year are things like giant spiders. I see them sometimes on the walls. They’ve easily identified as unreal though, as they’re sort of smoky, and I only ever see them out of one eye. If I put a hand over one eye and then the other, the thing will disappear and then come back once I remove the hand from the affected eye.
(I wondered, much later, if the reason Karen seemed a little out of focus was because I was seeing a different person out of each eye, and my brain was firmly telling me to go with one interpretation over the other. I wonder, if I’d put a hand over each eye, would the illusion have been exposed?)
One other hallucination I had - which occurred around the same time as the Jan/Karen one - involved a duck. I quite clearly saw a duck on the highway that wasn’t there. It appeared right in front of me and I went over it in the car (no bump or sensation of hitting anything) and then when I turned the car to check there was nothing there. The difference with the Karen and duck episodes is that they were believable and - in the case of the duck - extremely vivid and clear. One thing that points to the duck being imaginary is actually how damned detailed that thing was before I ‘hit’ it. I dont’ pick up detail that fast, especially not in a moving vehicle. 
I’m sure most people don’t see individual feathers on a bird when they’re travelling at over 100km/hr.
*(It says a lot about a person’s state of mind when they’re not sure if they’re seeing something or not. On the one hand, it’s unlikely a duck was on the road. On the other hand - why would I hallucinate a duck, of all things?) *
BUT THERE’S AN UPSIDE.
I used to find the cracks on the toilet wall where we used to live incredibly fascinating because if I looked at them with my eyes slightly relaxed, they’d form into cartoon creatures and do all kinds of interesting stuff. Turns out, being able to unfocus and make cartoons appear on walls isn’t normal. Who knew? Not me. I figured if you knew it wasn’t real, that was okay.
There’s also an upside on auditory hallucinations. I used to have to travel to the city every day for work, which was an hour’s train ride. I discovered years ago that if I kind of twisted my consciousness just a bit to the side, I could quite happily listen to music in my head. Enya was particularly clear. I could effectively set the CD running in my mind and hear every nuance, every musical instrument. Sometimes I’ve found out lyrics to songs just by having them play in my brain afterwards. It’s a tight line to walk, but it’s kind of neat really, and utterly non-scary. Sure, once or twice they got a little loud and I’d have to be very firm in turning it off, but that’s the price you pay for a mental CD player.
It’s a source of sadness to me that I couldn’t see the cartoons or hear the music after going onto medication. Up until that point I’d figured the first was just a cute unfocussing trick, and the second something everyone did. I mean, heck, you hear people say all the time that there’s a song running through their heads, right?
PERSONALITY:
I’ve never been dangerous or aggressive - only fearful, apathetic or deeply sorrowful. What makes this so incongrous is that I’m a super-optimistic person most of the time.
I can’t leave my home and deal with people when I’m depressed. I feel that their expectations of me are so much higher than I’ll ever be able to meet that I just can’t deal with them. It’s not agoraphobia - the space outside worries me not at all. It’s the fact that there’s people in it that makes me curl up under the covers and shut my eyes against the world.
Considering my super-goal of the day during a depressive period (measured in months, not days) is to bathe daily, you can imagine the kind of goals I can’t meet include the ability to go food shopping(comparison shopping? I can’t!), pay for it (the cashier wants me to interact - I can’t!), get it home and unpack it (I can’t unpack it - it’s too hard. I don’t know what to do with it. I look at things and can’t think where I should put them), use the stuff I bought to cook dinner (but I’m so tired!). I see all the steps as being one enormous task instead of little bits, so the concept of food shopping overwhelms me - there’s too much involved. The same goes for housekeeping chores. I see the table is cluttered but I can’t even begin to see a point to start at. It’s just a huge, enormous task that I cannot possibly see a beginning - let alone an end - to.
At the moment I’m on my way out of the slump. I can ‘talk’ to youall here in complex sentences, I can formulate a reasonably coherent post. With any luck I’ll be my old self again soon.
SUMMARY
Well, you wanted to know about people who are seriously nuts. I think I qualify.
I think it’s important to note that I don’t suffer visual hallucinations often, and that aside from that one time (mind you, that was a biggie!) i’ve always known they were false. Auditory hallucinations are harder to tell, depending on where they seem to be coming from. I also hear the doorbell from time to time, which is kind of easy to recognise as a hallucination since we got rid of it about a year ago. 
I get up to answer the imaginary door knocks fairly regularly though.
Following the Karen and duck incidents (which occurred within a couple of days of each other) I quit my job and refused (wisely, I think) to drive anywhere. I got a referral for a brain scan in case it was a tumour, but nothing seems to be the problem there. I went on medication for depression which took the edge off and seemed to stop the hallucinations pretty much dead. I was still extremely depressed, apathetic and tired, but at least I wasn’t seeing imaginary ducks and people, which - when you’re in that sort of situation - can be seen as a big step up.
D’oh, forgot one other thing. (ironically)
Forgetfulness. Can you begin to imagine how hard it is to study anything when it can spontaneously leave your brain, leaving you not only with the lack of the knowledge, **but also without the memory of ever having heard of such a thing before? **
Sometimes information doesn’t come back, sometimes it does. When it does, that’s great. When it doesn’t, it can be pretty weird. Take my school photos. At 30, nobody really expects me now to know who my classmates were in those photos. Problem is, I didn’t know when I was 17, either. Nor did I remember ever having known. I knew I must have known it, but not only the information but the very recollection of having had that information was gone. Erased. I’ve never actually got that back in full, but I have had a couple of names and faces slide together over the years. I can point out maybe 4 or 5 people now, which is more than I could do a year after finishing high school.
Sometimes I’ll be doing something else and with an almost visible lightbulb over the head I’ll have some missing info pop its way back in. It’s a strange feeling - I can actually feel the information slotting itself back in; a sudden awareness that wasn’t there before. Out of the blue, it’ll come to me.
I imagine it’s very similar to the experience of amnesiac patients, though I’ve never bothered to look into it. All I know is it’s bloody inconvenient and unaffected by medication.
The most positive thing about all this is that although I suffer hallucinations occasionally, and memory lapses frequently, at least my feet are firmly grounded on terra firma. It has, however, made me a fairly firm skeptic and I certainly take people’s accounts of ‘ghosts’ and ‘aliens’ with a pinch of ‘hey, I’ve got my own hallucinations and don’t need yours’ salt.
Wow. This is frightening. I, too, live with a secret identity. I’ve been depressed since my son committed suicide, 4 years ago.
At first it was expected, and everyone knew, but, as you say, they all wanted me to get back to who I once had been.
So, now, I “act as if.” I know I will never be the person I was then. I’ve been physically changed, in some way. I can’t even really remember what I was like then. Shallow, I guess.
My husband understands, but I still keep most of it hidden. I’m afraid if I show how little it all means to me, I won’t be able to put it back, and I’ll fly apart.
Sometimes, I wonder if I’m alive because I’m a coward. But, I love my husband, and I would never put him through the pain my son’s death has left for me.
There’s always someone who, no matter how weak and sad I feel, their need is greater.
I’ve always been expected to be strong and solid. I don’t want to be strong anymore. I’d like to be able to say I’m in pain, and I’m weak, and not have it disappoint someone.
Other than my husband, I no longer have any close friends. Oh, they’re still out there, but they don’t call, if I don’t call first. I no longer call.
Since I was a little girl, I’ve believed I was invisible. Not in a looks-like-water, see-through-me sense, but emotionally invisible. I’ve always thought that when I walk out of a room, everyone forgets I was ever there.
I’ve never been very likeable. I’ve been told many times that I’m intimidating. I don’t know how to stop being so, because, I can’t imagine anyone being intimidated by me.
I guess, I come off as being self assured, but its just that I’m missing a filter between brain and mouth. I rarely think about what impact my words will have on someone. good or bad, its the way I am.
I won’t post here again, and I won’t be back to read what each of you has added. I can’t. I won’t fly apart yet.
astro –
The answer to your question is: Being seriously nuts is like having little or no control over your own life, or even over your own thoughts & feelings.
As based on the statements in this thread.
You all have my very real sympathy. I’m a lifelong clinical depression case.
One additional perspective on clinical depression: I would describe the feeling, oddly enough, as waking up from a dream into a numb reality. I was convinced that this was how it was really supposed to be, and any pleasure or joy I had in my life while not depressed was an illusion and totally undeserved.
You first. What’s it like to be normal? I’ll do “compare and contrast”.
I’ve been diagnosed with a slew of disorders at various times - bipolar, clinical depression, generalized anxiety, social anxiety (my parents went through a phase where they HAD to find a doctor to give a diagnoses they liked).
My answer to the question - as everyone else has implied: It sucks. Hugely. I do suffer from panic attacks (less now that I’ve been through some vaguely succesful therapy), and I am bipolar. I’m not on any medications - I was, and technically should be, but I’ve taught myself to have a decent level of control without needlessly fucking myself up.
Before I got this control, I’d be in an utterly manic state, for a week or so. I wouldn’t sleep, would barely eat. I’d be on top of the world, absolutely perfect, invincible - in my eyes. To everyone else, I looked like a strung-out junky. I’d be sure that I could take the world on and win; I distinctly remember once sitting at my computer writing for two hours straight, utterly convinced that I was going to win the nobel prize in literature and be the youngest to ever do so. I couldn’t sit still, couldn’t really form a coherent thought. Things I wrote were vaguely, if you kind of squinted real hard, sensical and resembled short stories or novellas.
I didn’t get manic that often, though, and it inevitably would end in a panic attack: heart absolutely pounding, feeling as if there’s something impossibly heavy on your chest, vomiting, tremors, cold sweat. I don’t know what usually triggered it. Once, I know, it was enough of a glimpse at reality to realize how out of control I was, and how horrible I looked. Once I calmed down I’d cycle into depression. It wasn’t so much a sadness for me as extentialism to the extreme. Nothing mattered, at all, because we’re all going to be in pine boxes underground sooner or later.
IMO, the meds got things under control, which I couldn’t have done without them. But I personally don’t advocate them for the long run. YMMV.
I’ve been ‘crazy’ a few other (vaguely-related) times as well. I occasionally (very occasionally) have flashbacks to a traumatic incident I survived. This can be nightmares or triggered by something real that’s both currently going on and similar to what happened previously. The end result is I’ll suddenly be absolutely convinced that I’m back there. generally, a decent amount of the aforementioned hysterical panic ensues.
It kinda sucks. What’s sanity like?
Wow. I can’t believe how many mentally ill people post on this board. Just today I was feeling like, I don’t understand why there is so much mental illness in my family yet none of us can comfort each other because we are all really scared to ever talk in depth about our realities.
For me, I have been diagnosed as Bipolar and I am certainly struggling with depression but I haven’t had anything like a manic episode in 7 years and I have not been medicated in 3 years.
I lost control a few times in my late teens/early 20s. At that time I didn’t have too many responsibilities that couldn’t be put off. The really bad thing about it is that you have no control over your experience and you have no reason to believe you will ever regain control. That is a terrible feeling. For me the big thing is that you can’t relate it to anyone because they all think you’re nuts. So you are totally isolated in it.
I have noticed that I have a really bad memory for feelings. When I feel okay, I actually enjoy being sad. I think, hmmm being depressed is okay because feeling sad isn’t that bad. Then I get depressed and it’s months and months where I am up half the night just pulling my hair out in torment and can’t eat and can’t stand to talk to anyone or think about anything. I spend as much time as possible sleeping. I spent a stretch on antidepressants and I think this confuses me a lot because I was never happy at any point when I was on them, but the sadness was totally different and was not depression. When I am depressed, I say, “oh shit now I remember.” Then I get angry that I forgot. And I get really really upset that I know that it is ALWAYS going to come back and there is just nothing I can do that will make it stay away for good.
It’s like what they say about how your brain can’t see everything that exists so your eyeballs somehow filter stuff out. If your eyes worked like video cameras you would see too much and fall down. Depression is like your eyes turning into video cameras instead of eyes. You see too much and you can’t take it. If you take medication or sleep or drink a lot you can fog up the lense a bit and be okay.
It really really comforts me to know that a lot of people have mental illnesses. This thread reminds me of the pot and paranoia thread because it is one of those things that is very difficult to commiserate about. Even when people are mentally healthy (and not high) they have a hard time explaining what being alive feels like from inside their body.
Well, I’m not sure if I like calling myself “seriously nuts,” but since that’s what a lot of people would call me I guess I should get used to it, right?
I’ve dealt with what would probably be diagnosed as agoraphobia for most of my life. If I leave the apartment alone, my heart immediately feels like it’s being shocked repeatedly with an electrical paddle, and I find it hard to walk. I experience deja vu, and everything I see kind of melts together visually into a giant monolith, like everything sort of runs together and becomes this giant wall that I can’t cross unless I want to be trapped there forever. (I’m not talking literally here, like it’s a hallucination… it’s sort of difficult to explain.) Once out of the apartment, I feel like I’m always going to be trapped outside, like I’ve wandered into a maze or a house of mirrors, and I’ll never find my way back to the right apartment. Intellectually, I know this isn’t true, but it’s hard to listen to my intellect when I’m in panic mode. When I’m panicking, it feels like my senses are much sharper, in fact they’re painfully sharp. If I’m out with someone I know well (basically either my s.o. or parents, though there’s a few other people I feel kind of at ease with) it’s not as bad, but it’s still worse than being in a “safe zone.” But even when I’m inside, I always feel like I’m having a low-level panic attack. My chest always hurts, I’m always kind of flinchy and on edge. I only can recognize these sensations as not being normal because I didn’t always feel like this. I’ve always been agoraphobic but the anxiety was usually confined to the times when I left the house, it wasn’t a general feeling of dread and panic that was always there.
For the past few years I’ve been experiencing this really weird thing that is hard to describe where I get a really sick idea in my mind and then can’t shake it. Like, say, I’ll be in a store, and all of a sudden I’ll get this urge to start pulling things from the shelves and throw them all around the room. It’s not a voice telling me to do this, and I never act (or want to act) on my thoughts, but I still get them, and the only way to stop it is to leave the place where I am. Sometimes these thoughts will be about people. I’ll see someone in the mall and think about how it would be if I were to attack them, just start whaling on them until they start to bleed. Seeing as how I’m a pretty nonviolent person, and weak and a girl to boot, that’s a pretty unrealistic scenario, but once the idea is planted it will bother me until I latch onto the next thing. I never, ever want to do the things that I’m thinking, but I’m worried that even the fact that I’m thinking these things means that I subconsciously want to do them. At those times it feels like my mind is possessed, and even though I don’t actually believe that it really does feel like the ideas come from somewhere other than my own mind.
I sleep very little because my thoughts and the pain in my chest keep me up at night. I usually sleep no longer than four or five hours a day, which has occasionally led to “hallucinations” which I think are caused by sleep deprivation. Once I held my hands in front of my face and very clearly saw the face of a screaming man. Other times I see things like giant mosquitos climbing up the walls, or people’s shadows looming behind me. Since I know these things are fake, I’m not upset by them, but I don’t tell anyone (except random strangers on a message board) about them. I’m pretty sure that these “sightings” are the product of anxiety and not something like schizophrenia since they’re always hazy in form (well, except for the face, that did freak me out something good), and only seen out of the corner of the eye. They also appear only when I’m already wound up about something.
As much as I tell myself that my fears are unfounded and ridiculous and yes, “crazy,” I can’t stop my body from creating the physiological reactions it does. I’ve tried breathing exercises, tried counting backwards by twenty to calm down, etc. The gist of most of these exercises is that the panic will go away if you intellectually know you’re not in any danger. Er, no. I’m not an idiot, I know that really it’s okay to leave the house and the world doesn’t really look like some kind of hyper-sensory house of mirrors, but that doesn’t mean I can stop my body from interpreting it as such and launching into the panic routine. The same goes for the unwanted “what if?” scenarios. Just because I know that I don’t want to molest children or punch out an old lady at the bank or chop off one of my own hands doesn’t mean that there isn’t still that (non-literal) voice in the back of my mind that tells me “yeah, you really do want to do this, you sicko.”
I’ve never sought any help for any of this, because I’m terrified of chemicals and I don’t want to take pills and I also don’t want the treatment to be on my “permanent record.” I’m also afraid that if I went in to be treated for anxiety they’d diagnose me with something far worse. There’s a family history of depression and bipolarism and even though I don’t believe I have either one of those things someone with more power than me who’s basing my symptoms on some sort of “checklist” might say that I do, based on the unhealthy sleeping patterns alone. I’m also afraid that if I tell someone about the “what if?” scenarios, that they’ll think I really want to do terrible things to myself and others and I’ll be in some very real legal trouble. But then again, what if it really does mean I want to do that? In that case, I really should be locked up. But intellectually I don’t think I do… and we’re back at square one.
Wow, this is a long post. I didn’t mean for it to last this long. I’ll probably regret posting this in ten minutes even though I’m just posting it on a semi-anonymous message board. Really, I’m okay most of the time, as long as I don’t leave the house or do anything.
I just noticed this… I can do the same thing, but I attribute it to having a really good memory. I can also replay movies and TV shows I’ve seen multiple times. Then again, I’m not sure if I’m hearing the music or just remembering it really well, probably the latter. It only works if it’s something I’ve listened to more than a dozen times. So yeah, we’re probably not talking about the same thing.
You are not the least bit shallow. Loving someone who suicides does change you forever.
I see alot of Guests on this board in here.
It takes alot of courage to spill your inner demons to anyone, let alone a web of strangers. I hope everyone above here ( sorry, I am too lazy to take names.) joins our little community.
Anyone who has ever been around or is mentally ill, you know the suffering first hand. You know the darkness and gloom. Sharing your story, what you’ve been through and what has worked or is working for you can change someone’s life to realize their are treatments and therapy out there. Mental Illness is no longer in the closet and something to be ashamed of. As I like to say, “Everyone Is Nuts!”
There is no reason to suffer, help is available. The hardest part is to take that first step to get assistance.
That said, GoldenGael:
This has alot to do with alot of people (Irish Catholics)I know and their behavior. The shame, the guilt, the fear, the “I’m not worthy”. Religion in general, IMHO YMMV, is just a power-control trip over the masses. Since I’ve given up Organized Religion (and Organized Sports) I’ve never been more mentally and emotionally free in my life. I fillup the free spots in my weekends by surfing the web and napping. It doesn’t get much more relaxed and guilt free than that.
However, I am not dissing those who have the faith if it gives them comfort and solace. ( I said " Dissing". I feel like such a homie.)
Shirley being free of organised spot is a wonderful thing 
But you said what I wanted to say.
I swear, Calm Kiwi that either I am paranoid and you are always *around * me, or, despite being a world - and a bajillion timezones apart - we are on the same Circadian and Dopian Posting Rhythms. Translation: we have no life.
YAY!
Sorry, please continue with this thread about mental illness. HNL ( Having No Life) Syndrome is curable, treatable, contagious and, apparently, SDMB is the Asylum for The Stubbornly Inflicted.