|
I really need some advice
Hi, I'm new to this site.
I'm writing because I would like some advice on my situation. I'm a teenager who has been diagnosed with severe anxiety and depression. However, Im not sure if this is what I actually have, or if there might be something else. this is why I'm writing and seeking advice, because after thinking and contemplating about myself, I've decided that perhaps my worries might be true. I haven't talked to my psychiatrist about my mental health worries because it's hard to meet up with him right now. Please don't dismiss this as just a teenage phase or anything, because some of the things that are bothering me, such as my behaviour, have been present since I was a kid. I’m not saying that this isn’t a teenage problem, it could be, but it’s just that after a long time of reasoning with myself and introspective thinking, I think that I should consider this to be an issue that needs to be looked at. Sorry if this is really long, I'm in a terrible state right now with few people to turn to. My parents have difficulty understanding I’ve opened up to them many many times, but it’s just difficult, and I'm dealing with this mostly by myself, so any advice is deeply appreciated.
Basically, this is about my behaviour and the symptoms I've been experiencing. I've always had a depressive, and introverted personality. I'm also imaginative, and I've never had that many friends. My behaviour or personality, like my preference to be alone has never caused me significant issues and I’ve never felt that it was a problem until I developed mental health issues during my teenage years.
I tend to spend a lot of time in my head, fantasizing about my own stories and other things and I would also say that I'm a bit of a messed up person, because my imagination tends to get quite dark, as I like to write about dark and profound fictional stories about the human experience and all that. People have stated that I'm weird, eccentric, and that I say weird things, and the friends I had as a child also stated the same thing. For a while, I just assumed that I’m a creative person, and I didn’t care about my introversion or what people thought about me. However, my mental health issues made me reconsider whether or not there is something wrong with me because I suspect that my melancholic personality and tendency to fantasize al the time is one of the causes of my mental health issues.
I have difficulty making friends, like in terms of communication I just can't seem interesting enough to people or become close friends with them. It’s like the things I talk about usually seem inane to other people, judging by how they talk to me. The things I like to talk about don’t seem to be able to make other people feel like they want to continue talking to me, or catch up with me. When I talk to people, the other person just laughs, nods, or comments a bit, and then it just turns into silence. It doesn’t feel like there’s anything deeper going on between us. I just think to myself, am i really that difficult to talk to, am I really that boring? When talking to people, I find it a bit draining to come up with something to say and I always want to ensure that I don’t sound too weird. Im graduating from high school this year and throughout the years, I felt that the last couple of years were the ones that I felt like I had some friends. The last couple of years were also when I developed mental health issues, so I was in a period of intense despair and I had really started working on my social skills in order to prevent myself from getting possibly worser, because I feared that I was predisposed to psychotic disorders. (I’ll expand on that below). In all the years before, I felt like I had people to talk to, but we weren’t that close and I didn’t really care either because I felt fine being alone with my family and my imagination. Right now, even those friends that I have started talking to and developing what I feel like is a closer relationship with, seem closer to one another than to me. I feel like they’re pretty close friends to me, especially with this girl, but I don’t know about them or her. Other people that I talk to don’t really seem like that, so I assume it could just be her personality, but I still feel that I’m distant to the people I talk to and in general I do feel like I have difficulty making close friends. They talk to one another in a really relaxed way, while to me, they seem less relaxed and almost forced.
When I was a kid, the friends that I had back then also seems closer to each other than to me. I’ve wondered for a long time if it was just the way I think that’s different than to these people, or my innate personality being deficient in this field. I also feel uncomfortable when talking after a while because I don’t seem to be able to continue the conversation in an interesting way and I just feel shy. The thing is that I probably look relatively normal, and not weird, when people first get to know me. Then it’s just that I can’t seem to get close to people and that the things I say don’t seem to spark the other person’s interest for too long and the verbal exchanges between us don't eventually lead to anything deeper, and the other person doesn’t really talk to me that much afterwards either. I just feel that I can’t seem to hold conversations that well, and neither can I start one in an interesting way. I also don’t want to appear too weird eventually, as I am a pretty unique person.
I also grew up with an autistic brother who's really low-functioning, but for a long time I've never felt that growing up in this environment was distressful or anything. It wasn't until when I suddenly developed mood and anxiety issues later on that I began to think carefully about my past and its effect on my behaviour and mental state. I’m not sure if it’s just my innate personality, or if whatever kind of stress I experienced at a young age eventually gave me depression or something, which eventually became my personality. Either way, nothing really bothered me until I suddenly developed mental health issues.
Everything just seems really subtle; I feel as if everything is alright, I’m just a normal creative girl. I might have had unhealthy traits as a child, such as the depressive temperament, and pessimism, but that was my younger self and I can always change as I grow older. That was my thought process. I might not have been extroverted or good at making many friends, and I might’ve identified with some of the questions for a schizophrenia predisposition test (i’ll expand below), but that doesn’t necessarily mean theres anything wrong with me. But then mental health issues hit me hard and now I’m still struggling, so I don’t believe that its just a personality due to the amount of misery I’m going through, and how different I am from my peers. They all have enough social skills to get by in this world, and don't have such a dark personality with such dark thoughts at an age as young as 11, and they seem to be able to overcome the difficulties they have in life.
.
When I was 12 years old, I read about schizophrenia because I was interested in psychology and thought about pursuing a career in it in the future. I did a predisposition test on it for fun back then, and some of the questions seemed eerily like me, and it had me seriously worried about myself. I didn't finish the test because I was alarmed by how some of the questions applied to me, like lack of friends, or interest in making friends, spending a lot of time in my head, not making sense when communicating, and being a fearful person. Sometimes people say that I don't make sense when I talk, usually when I'm cracking jokes. My writing also doesn’t make sense to certain people, but this could probably be because I think a lot and I like complex subjects. I also read that people who are predisposed or prone to developing psychotic disorders tend to be fearful individuals from a young age who have difficulties making friends, spend alot of time in their head, and show signs of depression at a young age. I had a depressive temperament, not depression in the mental illness sense, as a child. I had suicidal thoughts when I was 11 years old, but never acted on them or anything. It was just part of my dark thinking, and I also had some other disconcerting behaviours as a child as well. I felt that I’ve had these behavioural problems that I’ve written about since I was like 6, but they were very insignificant back then, so they never seemed to be an issue. My issues just started multiplying as I grew older. I was worried that I was prone to developing the disorder. it’s a spectrum, so I was worried that it’s possible that I might develop a milder type, since it’s less possible to get the more severe type. My parents also say that I was a pretty fearful kid with a slightly neurotic personality, and now I have an anxiety disorder. I’ve probably always been neurotic and fearful, and now, my anxiety is literally an extension of that; I’m thinking about irrational things and fearing them. I heard anxiety can do this to you if it’s really bad and I hope that despite everything I’ve written about myself here, I might jus have anxiety and that I’m not in the prodromal stage of something.
I had found that i identified with some of the traits of schizotypal personality disorder to varying degrees. It made me feel like I am just so messed up. Had I been an emotionally healthier person and still found that I identified with some of the traits, I wouldn’t have paid that much attention to it. But since I have so many issues, I wondered about the possibility.
I got over this fear eventually and told myself that it was just a test, although developed by some kind of mental health institution, may not be an accurate measurement at all, and I'm just scaring myself for nothing. Then I vowed to work on the parts of my personality that made me fear that I am predisposed to it. I was able to live without any mental health concerns, and I truly felt that I was silly to pathologies myself like that.
The first anxiety issue that I had experienced was when I was 15 years old. It got triggered when someone told me about sleep paralysis, about the hallucinations and the fear, and it invoked a visceral fear within me. I think that I was reminded of schizophrenia and of how fragile my own mind was, since I was easily scared by that test when everyone I talked to, like my parents and my friends didn't buy into things like that so easily. My fragility and how easily I get scared made me afraid that I might get something as terrifying as that. Eventually I snapped out of it and After this, I continued to work on some parts of my behaviour to reduce my likelihood of getting another episode of anxiety.
The reason why I have anxiety and depression right now is because of something very disconcerting that I had experienced 2 years ago. I've been experiencing mental health issues for two years now as a result of this even though I've tried reasoning with myself; the intense emotions didn't leave, even though I've changed my thought process, and also my mental state has completely changed.
Basically what happened was that I was listening to a song I had recently found and began to really like. It ignited my creativity greatly and I just felt really great listening to it. But then one night a fragment of the song just got stuck in my head on repeat for the whole night. I couldn't dislodge it, or lessen the intensity. I tried singing it to the end, cocentrating on my breath and doing mindfulness breathing , and replacing it with another song, but it didn't help at all and the new song started getting a little stuck in my head as well. Eventually it got worser and I couldn't sleep for the whole night. There was no clear trigger to this. The day before this happened, I had felt relatively normal, just slightly more happier because of the song, and it also happened on the night before summer school started, but I didn’t feel extremely worried about it or anything. There was no cause for worry or stress, so stress and anxiety, one of the causes of stuck songs (earworms) that I had found online, didn’t apply to me. It occurred from within me, with no obvious trigger. The only answer I can come up for this is that I must have unwittingly lost control of my excited, or happy mood and I must have unconsciously felt anxious about summer school. These moods combined together, it caused this to happen. Now, every song I hear would get stuck in my head and occasionally my brain would repeat fragments of what people say. I don’t mind it now that I kind of got used to it, but I wasn’t like this in the past, and these things just pop into my brain without my control.
I know that stuck songs are common and that everyone gets them, and what I found online all state that having this is normal. But none of it stated anything about having it for the whole night, interfering with sleep and causing great distress. Eventually, I dug deeper and what I found was that people who experience severe song looping episodes already suffer from mental illnesses like OCD, or bipolar disorder. I was reluctant to pay any attention to bipolar disorder, but for OCD, I can see how my neurotic brain might be prone to obsessive thoughts since I already have anxiety. But then I read that creative people have a higher chance of suffering from bipolar disorder, and seeing how I already have moderate to severe anxiety and depression, I might be prone to mood disorders as well, since anxiety disorders are often comorbid with mood disorders. Some of my friends have also told me that my mood is either really high or really low, with no in betweens. This might be that I'm just an energetic person, since I've been pretty energetic as a kid, but considering the fact that I’m hypersensitive and moody as a child and I’ve also developed mental issues, I don’t know what to think. When I watch a movie or see something that excites me, I get shivers down my spine and my creative side gets stimulated too and my mood becomes high and it takes a while to come back down. This didn't happen that much when I was younger (my creativity would get stimulated, but my mood never took a while to return to normal) This only started becoming more prominent recently prior to my anxiety episode and during it. If mood was the trigger for this stuck song, then I wouldn’t have had any control over it, since on the surface I felt that everything was fine, and then my brain decided to go crazy at night.
So since the severe song looping episode occurred after a period in which I felt really happy, as I was listening to the song, I am worried that I might be prone to mood disorders, or if I'm already in an early stage of one. I feel that the frustration that this song looping caused me is abnormal; it is a stuck thought that had gone completely out of control and the anxiety it caused me was also completely out of control and abnormal. If it isn't just a possible mood disorder, then I probably have some symptoms of OCD too, since this episode really interfered with my life. During the early periods of my anxiety episode, I also found out that apparently nothing can prevent the onset of mental illnesses like psychotic disorders, or mood disorders, so apparently nothing I did in the past would be able to avoid the development of these mental disorders. This made me feel extremely hopeless. I also found a bunch of other stuff that completely changed my view of mental illness as a whole, such as how every mental illness share similar symptoms, so it’s hard to tell if someone has one mental disorder or if they possibly have another more serious one as well. Apparently, OCD is related to Bipolar as well.
My therapist didn’t really help. I don’t feel comfortable sharing my thoughts with her. Our next session is our last one, because she feels that I've gotten better when I'm not. I’m still conflicted, and it seems it will be a while before I recover from the chaos in my mind. It really just seems like all the anxiety is right; I would worry about having a mental illness, then dismiss it a being incorrect thinking. But then later on down the road, I developed an anxiety disorder. Then I would just say that there’s no point in paying attention to anxiety and that it doesn’t mean that I’ll develop anxiety again after I overcome one episode. Then 2 months later, a mentally distressing event with no clear caused occurred out of the blue and that intense feeling of anxiety came back full force I worked so hard at changing my behaviour, but then I’ll fall back ten steps. It’s challenging to live doubting my sanity, but I’m determined to overcome by mental health issues by any means possible.
If anyone has been through something similar to what I’m experiencing right now, any advice on how to navigate through these issues are deeply appreciated. In short, my behaviour and recent events in my life ( song-looping ) have led me to question my mental health. According to my personal history, should this stuck song episode warrant any concern, since it is so bizarre ? Has anyone been through an earworm like that before? And according to my personal history, should I be concerned about my mental health, or should I just consider that I have a greater chance of just having anxiety and depression?
To anyone who read this, I am deeply grateful for your help. Thank you very much.
|
