gb1607
04-02-16, 10:55
Good morning,
I have never posted on anything like this before but I am serious need of help, I have been to the doctors, the hospital and I am currently working with a CBT practitioner.
I believe that my anxiety has caused me to have extremely weird thoughts and has completely changed my view on life making it very hard for me to live and leaving me feeling hopeless and trapped in a meaningless existence.
A bit of background knowledge: I would class myself as a highly functioning, intelligent girl. I have always been confident, enjoyed making others laugh and have always enjoyed being sociable and seeing my friends etc. but at the same time I have always been happy in my own company.
I have suffered from bouts of ‘sad episodes’ as far back as I can remember, but I have since always gone back to ‘normal’. I would say my first experience of anxiety happened when I was 19 after a major panic attack at university (not caused by anything obvious as far as I am aware). After this episode I became convinced that I had something wrong with my heart but after some time at home and a few months on citalopram I returned back to ‘normal’ life.
For the next 6 years (I am now 25) I have led a fulfilling life, I have completed uni, held down good full time jobs and have found a loving boyfriend. In May 2015 I moved to a different city with my boyfriend and started a new job. I was really happy with my new life and new sense of freedom despite not enjoying my job. I decided to leave that job and got a new job which I really enjoyed in September.
Towards the end of October 2015 I started to have weird thoughts about death and existence in bed at night along the lines of ‘ I will be dead one day’, amongst other thoughts such as ‘what if my boyfriend leaves me’, ‘where will I be in 10 years’. I carried on with normal life i.e. working, seeing friends but I could feel a sense of sadness and anxiety slowly building up, along with tearful episodes, and began to sense that something wasn’t right with me, and even saying to my boyfriend that I felt I was on the verge of a mental breakdown.
Towards the end of November thoughts about death began to plague my mind nonstop, I stopped being able to eat or sleep properly and had a few major panic attacks leading my mum to drive down and pick me up to be at home for a few days. I saw the doctor who advised it was anxiety and put me back on citalopram. Gradually over the next couple of weeks I started to accept that death was really nothing to waste time worrying about and that I needed to focus my attention on living life… cue a couple of weekend feeling normal.
Towards the beginning to middle of December my thoughts took a drastic turn for the worse and became more and more weird. Instead of being scared of death, I became scared of the fact I was alive instead. I pondered how weird existence was with constant thoughts like “why am I here”, “what does everything mean”, “why am I me”, “everything is pointless”. Over the next couple of weeks I couldn’t eat or sleep, I would heave and be sick for no reason other than the fact that I was alive. Everyone started to look like strangers, I felt that being alive was a burden and that I had been sleep walking all my life and never realised how weird it was before, I started to become scared of absolutely everything… the fact I could see and hear, the world instead, words, the sun, nightie etc.. This lead me to be stuck in bed for a few days with a rapid heartbeat absolutely terrified.
On December 18th it became so bad that I became convinced that I needed to kill myself because life was such a burden, but I was scared and afraid because I didn’t know how to do it, so I decided to try and get some help as I was sure that I was going crazy and suffering from a psychosis. With no way out of my misery I rang 111 who advised me to speak to my doctors or go to a and e, I called the doctors and protested that it was an emergency and that I was going to do something stupid, but they advised they couldn’t help. I then rang my boyfriend’s boss as he wasn’t answering and he came home and took me to a and e.
I can’t really remember much about that day but I remember seeing faces dancing on my curtains, becoming convinced that I could control other people’s thoughts and being convinced that I was invisible, being convinced everyone else were either robots or figments of my imagination. I finally saw a psychiatrist who assessed me and said I was suffering extreme anxiety, she explained that the fact that I thought I was going crazy showed that I actually wasn’t as I could accept that what I was experiencing wasn’t ‘normal’ and my ‘normal reality’. I was send home from the hospital referred to A and E along with a note written to my doctor explaining why I went in etc.…
Since my stay in hospital I have tried to go back to normal life, getting up in the morning, seeing my family and friends etc., but nothing quite feels real. I don’t feel like myself and don’t really know who I am anymore. Looking at old photographs of me upsets me even more because I can’t correlate myself now with myself then. I feel afraid and like I am living in my own world and that I am past help. I feel like I am watching myself trying to act normal whilst not knowing who I am anymore. I do not feel that CBT is helping as I am not worrying about anything in particular but I am worried about everything to do with my existence. I want to lead a happy life and I had so many things I was looking forward to but now I am just trying exist and hold it together. I have found myself walking around and feeling like a robot with no emotions, only pretending to be myself for the sake of people I know.
I am still on citalopram, still carrying on with CBT and trying to live my life in the hope that I will feel like myself again, but the truth is that I feel alone and frightened in the world. I still feel unsure that nothing is real, or that I have schizophrenia or something serious wrong with me that is making me feel like this. Every so often I will have moments of clarity where I realise that it is anxiety but then I will go back to feeling weird a few moments after. I feel that my life is now pointless I am the only one who has to be me and who knows how I feel. I don’t know whether I have discovered that life is weird and isn’t real and that I am the only person that exists, gone crazy or simply suffering from severe anxiety due to analysing everything instead of just living – before all of this I was very carefree and lived day to day.
Please someone give me some advice or help. I would love to hear that I am not alone!! I don’t know what else I can do the doctors do not seem to understand !!!
I have never posted on anything like this before but I am serious need of help, I have been to the doctors, the hospital and I am currently working with a CBT practitioner.
I believe that my anxiety has caused me to have extremely weird thoughts and has completely changed my view on life making it very hard for me to live and leaving me feeling hopeless and trapped in a meaningless existence.
A bit of background knowledge: I would class myself as a highly functioning, intelligent girl. I have always been confident, enjoyed making others laugh and have always enjoyed being sociable and seeing my friends etc. but at the same time I have always been happy in my own company.
I have suffered from bouts of ‘sad episodes’ as far back as I can remember, but I have since always gone back to ‘normal’. I would say my first experience of anxiety happened when I was 19 after a major panic attack at university (not caused by anything obvious as far as I am aware). After this episode I became convinced that I had something wrong with my heart but after some time at home and a few months on citalopram I returned back to ‘normal’ life.
For the next 6 years (I am now 25) I have led a fulfilling life, I have completed uni, held down good full time jobs and have found a loving boyfriend. In May 2015 I moved to a different city with my boyfriend and started a new job. I was really happy with my new life and new sense of freedom despite not enjoying my job. I decided to leave that job and got a new job which I really enjoyed in September.
Towards the end of October 2015 I started to have weird thoughts about death and existence in bed at night along the lines of ‘ I will be dead one day’, amongst other thoughts such as ‘what if my boyfriend leaves me’, ‘where will I be in 10 years’. I carried on with normal life i.e. working, seeing friends but I could feel a sense of sadness and anxiety slowly building up, along with tearful episodes, and began to sense that something wasn’t right with me, and even saying to my boyfriend that I felt I was on the verge of a mental breakdown.
Towards the end of November thoughts about death began to plague my mind nonstop, I stopped being able to eat or sleep properly and had a few major panic attacks leading my mum to drive down and pick me up to be at home for a few days. I saw the doctor who advised it was anxiety and put me back on citalopram. Gradually over the next couple of weeks I started to accept that death was really nothing to waste time worrying about and that I needed to focus my attention on living life… cue a couple of weekend feeling normal.
Towards the beginning to middle of December my thoughts took a drastic turn for the worse and became more and more weird. Instead of being scared of death, I became scared of the fact I was alive instead. I pondered how weird existence was with constant thoughts like “why am I here”, “what does everything mean”, “why am I me”, “everything is pointless”. Over the next couple of weeks I couldn’t eat or sleep, I would heave and be sick for no reason other than the fact that I was alive. Everyone started to look like strangers, I felt that being alive was a burden and that I had been sleep walking all my life and never realised how weird it was before, I started to become scared of absolutely everything… the fact I could see and hear, the world instead, words, the sun, nightie etc.. This lead me to be stuck in bed for a few days with a rapid heartbeat absolutely terrified.
On December 18th it became so bad that I became convinced that I needed to kill myself because life was such a burden, but I was scared and afraid because I didn’t know how to do it, so I decided to try and get some help as I was sure that I was going crazy and suffering from a psychosis. With no way out of my misery I rang 111 who advised me to speak to my doctors or go to a and e, I called the doctors and protested that it was an emergency and that I was going to do something stupid, but they advised they couldn’t help. I then rang my boyfriend’s boss as he wasn’t answering and he came home and took me to a and e.
I can’t really remember much about that day but I remember seeing faces dancing on my curtains, becoming convinced that I could control other people’s thoughts and being convinced that I was invisible, being convinced everyone else were either robots or figments of my imagination. I finally saw a psychiatrist who assessed me and said I was suffering extreme anxiety, she explained that the fact that I thought I was going crazy showed that I actually wasn’t as I could accept that what I was experiencing wasn’t ‘normal’ and my ‘normal reality’. I was send home from the hospital referred to A and E along with a note written to my doctor explaining why I went in etc.…
Since my stay in hospital I have tried to go back to normal life, getting up in the morning, seeing my family and friends etc., but nothing quite feels real. I don’t feel like myself and don’t really know who I am anymore. Looking at old photographs of me upsets me even more because I can’t correlate myself now with myself then. I feel afraid and like I am living in my own world and that I am past help. I feel like I am watching myself trying to act normal whilst not knowing who I am anymore. I do not feel that CBT is helping as I am not worrying about anything in particular but I am worried about everything to do with my existence. I want to lead a happy life and I had so many things I was looking forward to but now I am just trying exist and hold it together. I have found myself walking around and feeling like a robot with no emotions, only pretending to be myself for the sake of people I know.
I am still on citalopram, still carrying on with CBT and trying to live my life in the hope that I will feel like myself again, but the truth is that I feel alone and frightened in the world. I still feel unsure that nothing is real, or that I have schizophrenia or something serious wrong with me that is making me feel like this. Every so often I will have moments of clarity where I realise that it is anxiety but then I will go back to feeling weird a few moments after. I feel that my life is now pointless I am the only one who has to be me and who knows how I feel. I don’t know whether I have discovered that life is weird and isn’t real and that I am the only person that exists, gone crazy or simply suffering from severe anxiety due to analysing everything instead of just living – before all of this I was very carefree and lived day to day.
Please someone give me some advice or help. I would love to hear that I am not alone!! I don’t know what else I can do the doctors do not seem to understand !!!