The Mental Illness Thread

[Saxmoof]

Thanks for sharing Rob


Does your ME make you fatigued mentally aswell? I'd imagine it would be nigh on impossible to deal with the depression if so. Once my medication lifted my depression slightly I was able to start exercising which I think has helped

I've been suicidal (but again managing not to act on it) pretty much all that time, including now. If no one would be much affected by my disappearance, I would be planning my suicide right now. But I've promised I won't do that to my wife, and that promise has made me hang on. I went through the very worst of it about 5 years ago, I felt like I was at hell's gate. I literally could not stop myself thinking about suicide 24 hours a day, and could barely think about anything else. I can only describe that level of depression as a kind of continuous mental torture where time slows down to prolong the agony. How I got through that I will never know, and without my wife sticking by me I certainly wouldn't have. Things are much more manageable compared to how I was then. I still have what I consider to be a negative standard of life,  but that was like approaching minus infinity.

Well done for not acting on it. I can relate to much of what you said although thankfully my life isn't something I endure now, I wouldn't go as far as to say it's enjoyable yet but i'm over the worst of it. At it's worst I enjoyed nothing, even passive things like watching tv were impossible, i couldn't focus on anything for more than a few seconds such was my mental fog, all i wanted to do was lie down and wallow all day, that's all I could do - so the time slowing down thing makes total sense as there's nothing to take your mind off of the despairing, hopeless thoughts. It completely eroded my sense of identity aswell, all my core beliefs, personal qualities and ability to form a cogent opinion disappeared and with them went my pride - those things require effort, energy and clarity to maintain, i was incapable of that. The slim hope that my anti-depressants would take effect was the only thing keeping me alive and thankfully they did

I should be getting a new series of therapy sessions soon

I'm sceptical about therapy for the very depressed, like detailed above. CBT basically boils down to positive thinking, if you're as hopeless as I was that just feels pointless, and therapy can't work if you don't buy into it - it took me 6 years to feel like therapy was something that could help. And with severe social anxiety, you don't even want to leave the house let alone sit and talk to a stranger for an hour

I remember you saying in my introduction thread that your social anxiety was very bad, how is it now?

This forum has been a great help to me

I struggle being on here tbh, i had to force myself to introduce myself, post regularly and start this thread. Writing the OP took me about 6 hours, and I put off doing it for about a week before that. In all social interactions I get very apprehensive, thoughts of all the reasons not to talk to people and all the things that could possibly go wrong from doing so pop into my head - they're very hard to power through, it takes a lot of time and effort and is quite stressful. Expressing any sort of personality/individuality especially brings out these thoughts, opinions i'm ok with

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We don't do enough as a society to allow those who have problems to feel comfortable to talk about it.

I don't think healthy minded people are comfortable talking about mental illness, I feel like I have to pretend to be reasonably happy around healthy people, takes tons of effort, I hate it