TPBurrows3005
10-02-12, 10:01
Hello everyone, my name's Phil and I am a 20 year old male from Wales, UK. I have always been an anxious person, and a bit of a hypochondriac. As long as I can remember, if I get a thought into my head, I have a tough time shaking it off, in other words, I am pretty obsessive. My problem has always lied in the fact that once I think there's something wrong with me, off to the internet I go, which I never seem to learn, is a horrible idea. So over the years I have made many extreme self-diagnosis, ranging from a brain tumour, to HIV, to heart disease and so on. Regretfully, at the age of 15, me and my friends got into alcohol and drugs, and it's fair to say, any regard for our mental and physical health went out of the window. I think that's why I enjoyed them so much, certainly alcohol, I felt like it rid me of my anxiety and I was able to be the person I always wanted to be whilst I was on it. Anyway, skip forward a bit, my drug use eventually became a bit problematic, and one night (which what has lead me to posting here today), I experienced an awful panic attack after taking ecstasy with my friends. Thoughts of "I'm going to die" and "This is it, I have permanently screwed my brain up" were rushing through my head, and I could feel my heart beating incredibly fast, and then it felt like it would stop, which would send me into worse and worse surges of panic. One positive I can take from that night is that I decided to stop drinking and taking drugs, and joined a gym and started living a healthy live. During this time, I noticed myself having moments where I would panic and feel like I was going crazy, at the time I had no idea what was going on, until I found good old Dr. Google. I soon realised I was suffering from anxiety, and I relentlessly researched anxiety, which has done nothing but make it worse. What really sent my anxiety got out of control was reading up about Schizophrenia. One night I read a page on Schizophrenia and experienced an awful panic attack. As the months went by, and as I was panicking on a daily basis, everything started feeling unreal and I felt like I was no longer in my body (so to speak), things at the worst of times felt so unreal that I would ask myself stupid questions like "Have things ever been real?". I would constantly panic about my alcohol and drug abuse and think to myself, "how could I have been so careless?", "I am going to go schizophrenic". I eventually went to a doctor as I realised something need to be done, I needed to shake off these irrational thoughts. Unsurprising, my GP wrote me up a prescription of Citalopram 10mg. I am now on my second week of using Citalopram, and all it's done is made my anxiety worse, yesterday in work I was an absolute mess. But of what I've read (unfortunately), it is normal to experience heightened anxiety in the first couple of weeks. It is fair to say, I haven't made this any easier on my myself, but my god it has been awful. I am hoping the Citalopram will start to work soon, which I will keep you updated on. I've also requested a counsellor, as I feel the Citalopram will only help in numbing these thoughts, I think to truly eliminate this anxiety, I'll need to do it myself. Anyways, that's enough of me, thank you for reading! :)