Hello again,

I've been registered with this forum for a while now, but I haven’t logged on for quite some time though. While I still had various symptoms of anxiety, depression, and obsessive thoughts since then, I thought I had learned to manage them. But they seem to have got much worse lately, and I feel I'm basically stuck in a vicious circle, either feeling depressed on one hand, or suffering agitation/intrusive thoughts on the other.

In the past, I had a lot of irrational and intrusive thoughts – I was worried about stabbing others and myself, yelling "bomb" on a plane, deliberately breaking something or making a fool of myself, that kind of thing. I also worried about a lot of things that may happen which I believed were outwith my control - for example, I worried that my friend was going to lace my food with laxatives, worried that I would be sick on the day of an exam, worried in case I was a victim of fraud, that drugs would be planted on my luggage, etc, which caused me a great deal of worry.

None of these worries ever materialised. However, now I seem to worry more that I myself may somehow deliberately jeopardise something. The thing is, all the thoughts I have, such as worrying about losing control and stabbing myself, deliberately smashing something/attacking someone etc, happen when I feel I've achieved some kind of success in life. It's like my intrusive thoughts somehow want to prevent me from getting better or doing the things I want to do, and this has sometimes stopped me from doing things for fear of these thoughts becoming worse. The thing is - I WANT to do the things to help me have a successful and productive life, but whenever I feel like this is happening, the agitation kicks in again.

However, the alternative to this agitated, almost self-loathing state, is one where I feel depressed and feel like I can't be bothered with anything in life or haven’t achieved anything. I can rarely find a middle ground where I am content with everything and want to achieve the things I want in life, without experiencing some kind of agitation or thoughts that somehow things SHOULD turn out for the worst. I either feel agitated, restless and feel that something is trying to destroy all that which I have achieved, or I feel like I can't be bothered with anything any more.

I have been diagnosed in the past with anxiety, depression, and OCD (just the obsession side - Pure "O" I think I've heard it descrived as) and I am on 40mg fluoxetine at the moment (I was on 20mg until around November last year). Can anyone else relate?