Waffle House posted:

Post-schizophrenia, public diary 1:


I remember working my city job, cruising around downtown in a Sprinter van and being completely terrified by the homeless around me experiencing the same things I did; there but for the grace of god go I, rambling into the ether, talking to people that aren't there, suffering grand states of delusion, lost, entranced, entrenched in their own little worlds.

I spoke to some of them.

"There's no way you're schizo."

"poo poo, man, god bless, it's hard. This all loving sucks out here."

When I first started experiencing symptoms, it was truly unsettling and terrifying. Your brain will do anything it can to escape the torture of it, grasping for answers wherever you can find them in all five stages of grief.

First a Denial: no, I'm not sick, this is something terrible that befell me. I simply must get to the bottom of this.
Anger: No loving way. I'm not sick. gently caress this poo poo, CLEARLY the goddamn government uses a pre-war AI that lives in the airwaves found me by accident because I tripped ECHELON by some awful trick of my compounded existence. Clearly I am not to blame.
Bargaining: Okay, now that I've happened on the above suuuuuper universal truth, I say as I corncob into a nightmare state of paranoia exacerbated by the times and how people interact with media and each other, I'll just work with it until I figure out a solution to the situation that befell me, and I'll grow stronger for it.
Depression: This ever-changing and ever-adapting landscape of my delusions is really hurting me; I can't seem to escape it. I can't get out of bed. Everything is compounding, and no matter where I turn or what I turn to, there's rejection, fear, and the looming hoary specter of eternal suffering and the distance I'm falling. What's worse is that with no solution, and no therapy or help, I'm picking up more and more bad habits.
Acceptance: Wow, I'm in loving bad shape. What the gently caress happened? I have to get back up, even if I have *gulp* permanent damage, I know the body and mind can unlearn bad habits just as hard as they learned them.

Like the turtle on its back, you flail around for all explanations and remedy, stuck in a permanent-feeling cycle of falling, failing, and then in your vulnerable state validating your secret, dreadful, internalized narrative by angel-numbers-ing through life. Everything in the news seems to point to your One Horrible Path that you've carved out, and because nobody writes a manual or managed to survive the experience, you end up dying over and over to this awful Gotcha! feeling of the paranoia that creeps in over your thresholds in a poorly-tuned but pervasive Bad Stoichiometry of self-exploiting misunderstanding and that horrid Sink into the comforts of inevitability and despair that you feel on Can't Get Out of Bed depression days. Your internal monologue becomes Voices In Your Head; you forget your beautiful voice and perfectly normal responses to things to a sense of being invaded by Another, or an Otherness. You become easily distractible by anything that validates what you have come to Know, and you've forgotten oh so much of yourself. It takes sincere effort suddenly to cling to the you that you know, and your natural ebbs and flows become terrifyingly lost to this new feeling of being torn apart. Even your body feels possessed as you start attributing your old and new quirks to, and becoming the disorder; before you know it you're stuck in a multiple personality, uncertain hell.

Your body's hormonal secretions start to gently caress you up because you internally lost sight of the normal processes that regulate YOU, not just your body. You become afraid of endorphins. You sink further into grief, which only starts to potentiate itself. It's then that all your mental illnesses start to really burn you up and compound; time-kneaded feedback loops of pain and suffering start playing the most significant role in your life, and you continue to wither as you shut down all over yourself. In my case, because this was happening during COVID, you just succumb to your latent isolation, stop going out, give up on your basic responsibilities in life, lose your apartment, and forget your friends and family for this new hell that you're trapped in, day-in-day-out.

There's no escape.

There's no rope out of the chasm.

Later it turns out that nobody tricked you to be here, and you've developed this horrible instinct to stay with it, because it gave you comfort in uncertainty. With only yourself to blame, there's no enemy to slay, and you're a ghost, forever falling back to, and chasing yourself through a maze of your own unconscious design, constructed and trapped by the sum total of your life's experiences and the human brain's amazing natural ability to rationalize and construct as it forges onward through shot and storm, firing HARD on whatever it is it's fed, as always.

But you fight.

YOU GET UP.

gently caress YOU, REALITY. I DO NOT ACCEPT THESE CRUEL CARDS SO DEALT.

WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP.

YOU HAVE TO LIVE. YOU ARE DOWN TO THIS EDGE, AND THERE'S NO TURNING BACK. GLORIA GAYNOR HELP ME I WILL SURVIVE. THERE ARE PEOPLE OUT THERE WHO STILL LOVE YOU, AND YOUR HARD SUPERDENSE rear end REMEMBERS ALL THE WAY BACK TO YOUR CHILDHOOD. YOU CAN DEFINITELY HAZARD A COUPLE OF loving GUESSES AS TO WHAT STICKS IN YOUR SPOKES BROKE YOU DOWN AND BROUGHT YOU HERE, AND YOU CAN FASHION A loving OAR TO GET YOURSELF ACROSS THIS STYX AND START AVOIDING AND WRITING OVER IT ALL.

You are a modern man! EMPOWERED absurdly beyond anyone even the wildest dreams of a decade as recent as the 1980s! You can figure this poo poo out! It takes nothing to see through the same despairs and pitfalls that other people have endured! YOU WILL BUILD BETTER BACK, AND YOU WILL BEAT THIS poo poo.

gently caress IT, there's nothing to lose and everything to gain!

Slowly, you put down the broken pieces of presumption and paranoia you picked up and refashioned into cognitive comfort, instead accepting the hard truth; that these were sharp and dangerous things which you picked up the wrong way, and they are actively hurting you unless you let them go. You start to mend, the painful first steps of figuring out what to do with your damage merely the tip of the iceberg to your inevitable success.

You start getting up every day and establishing routine where even you didn't have it before. You go outside and start walking. You start cooking again. You stop flinching every time something sensitive triggers you in every medium. You don't fall prey to your old ways, feeling better every time you notice something lovely gone, or a vast improvement you never had before.

You start healing. You survive. You live. Things start minimizing, mitigating, and resolving. Even the relapses start to feel less painful, because you accept that nothing happens overnight, and slowly you become a better person and stronger for it.

You reach back out and find not only therapy and medication, but meditation, community, old friendships, your fuzzy children, playing games with your old LAN party high school homies again who never left you. You reconnect with your family. You do things you've needed to do for a long time. You resolve old problems. You start mending things, and so do you mend the very same.

You are more careful with yourself and your habits, because you caught a lucky break, and this is your moment; be stronger. Better. Harder, faster, even. This is it.

You only get one shot.

Waffle House posted:

Karach posted:

As a person who identifies as mentally deranged, some of this seems similar to the hosed up junk that goes on inside my own head, but the stuff that isn't seems bizarre and terrifying; there are whole horizons of madness out there I could walk toward, apparently.

So, uh, good job for hauling yourself back to something resembling reality again, I guess?

Rookoo posted:

The positive part at the end gave me a boost so thanks, same goes for some other posts I've seen when skimming this thread.

[Edit]nm felt self conscious, will just keep improving myself and getting out there

Ronwayne posted:

Speaking of the hierarchy, thanks to being able to secure the bottom bit I was able to rest, eat, drink, and sleep away this horrible cold (not roni thank god) over the past week and not make it worse trying to rough it/tough it out.

I mean, I have been unable to get much higher than the bottom rung of the pyramid but reliably having the bottom sure beats the alternative.

Ronwayne posted:

Thank you. The truly hosed up part (one of them) is realizing there are tiers of homelessness and I'm like "okay, got a foot stamp card, a car that works to sleep in and $150 for the month, I'm technically hobo royalty".

limp dick calvin posted:

I have been doing pretty poorly since uh, November? scheduled an appointment with my psych to see if we can make some adjustments. I’d love to try ketamine but I think I need to fail a few more meds first.

anyways I’ve been mostly unemployed since November and normally it should drive me up the wall being bored but I just don’t care. i want to be in bed laying face down 24/7

SardonicTyrant posted:

Reading through The Body Keeps The Score, holy poo poo it explains what I've been going through so well, stuff like mindfulness never quite clicked with me until I read it, I feel more relaxed and in tune with the present than I have in weeks.

mahershalalhashbaz posted:

if i'm writing a book and my therapist doesn't like it, does that mean i should stop writing it

(it's not porn)

by "doesn't like it", i mean they say "you need to channel your feelings into creative work" and i say "well i've almost finished the book" and they go "no, no, that's not what i meant, i meant visual art". they read the first two chapters and refuse to discuss it, when i bring it up they look uncomfortable and then change the subject. which obviously is not great feedback, i'm just trying to figure out if it means "you suck at writing" (in which case i will continue) or "in my professional opinion, writing this book is psychologically unhealthy for you" (in which case i should stop)

Tulip posted:

If your therapist thinks this is actually bad coping they will tell you. Unless they're a really bad therapist. But therapists are not really in the business of tip-toeing around telling somebody they have bad coping mechanisms, it's pretty important to their whole practice that they just tell you.

My suspicion is that your therapist has helped people with visual art before and is comfortable talking with clients about visual art but isn't as used to dealing with books and is probably thinking "ah crap now I've gotta do more research on this."

802.11weed posted:

My first thought is that they didn’t read any of it.


I’ve been doing alright. Actually applying to jobs. I’m going to be just fine. It’s been a difficult road but I have had some great help along the way. It’s not entirely over yet, I am sure, but I’m through the worst of it.

802.11weed posted:

I’ve been doing alright. Actually applying to jobs. I’m going to be just fine. It’s been a difficult road but I have had some great help along the way. It’s not entirely over yet, I am sure, but I’m through the worst of it.

mahershalalhashbaz posted:

overthinking

Screaming Idiot posted:

Writing is great! I had to quit though because I would start thinking about economy and resource management stuff, get mad at capitalism, and then get so depressed at my own helplessness that I'd lose interest in my work altogether.

Ronwayne posted:

It is okay to have a power fantasy where you get your way. Dante's inferno was self-indulgent, self-insert fanfiction where he got to watch his personal enemies be tortured in hell, for example.

Organic Lube User posted:

Whiny long post warning.

I'm not doing well.

Organic Lube User posted:

Whiny long post warning.

I'm not doing well.
So my wife has been suffering from increasing health anxiety, to the point that she's spending basically every day in either urgent care, the ER, or doctors offices. Sometimes multiple in the same day. It started with being hyper vigilant about her heart rate and BP, and now she is just constantly monitoring herself and having panic attacks every time any reading isn't precisely nominal, which always convince her she's having either a heart attack or stroke.
I get why shes anxious about her heart and brain:
1. When she was 8 she was being watched by her grandmother who died of a heart attack right in front of her, leaving her to deal with notifying family and authorities on her own.
2. A week after we got married, when I was 37, I had a widowmaker heart attack and spent about a total of a hour and a half being dead.
3. A couple years back in the middle of COVID lockdown they found an aneurysm in her head that was in danger of killing her. She went into the ER for a sinus headache and they just happened to catch it on the CT. She got a stent and it seemed to relieve the bubble, but now she gets regular migraines.
4. She sent her mom to the doctor for some eye problems she noticed and they found an aneurysm in her as well.

So she's had some definite PTSD and has also had the experience of having successfully had her worst suspicions confirmed a couple of times.
We had a daughter about a year after my heart attack, and that definitely seems to be contributing to her anxieties, worrying that she's not going to be there for her. About six months ago she tried going off of her Lexapro because she thought it was giving her unwanted side effects (I honestly don't recall what exactly at this point), and that's when the anxiety really seemed to start spiraling, though that could be coincidental. She has since tried several times going back on SSRIs but each time after the first dose she convinces herself she is getting serotonin syndrome and quits.
But now my wife is basically non-functional. She spends what little time she's not in a medical office either having or desperately fighting off panic attacks. She won't stick with any treatment plan that her various doctors propose because she inevitably finds or has some side effect from the prescribed medication, goes off of it, and winds up back where she started. She's not sleeping, barely eating, and just really isn't able to be there for her family anymore. I try to support every decision she makes, make sure I make it as easy as possible for her to get to her appointments, offer to go every time (declined, because I have to watch the kid when she's in the hospital). I've even taken off work because of her daily health scares.
I recently started a really good job. But it's also very challenging, and takes a lot of my focus. I have AuDHD so focus is hard to muster in the best circumstances. I'm trying my best to make a good impression and learn my job well, and I just feel like I'm already fumbling everything out of the gate. I'm 3 weeks in, still in training, and I'm already asking to leave early and to WFH on in-office days. I feel like if I lose this opportunity, it will mean we go back to poverty. So I'm super stressed about the impression I'm making, despite my boss seeming fairly cool and like he has a family-first mentality. But I'm also bad at reading when I'm actually pissing people off and they're just being polite to my face. So between that and also being constantly terrified that something might actually be wrong this time when my wife has a medical complaint, she has started to almost become a trigger for my own anxiety when I'm around her. I'm so stressed with all the constant routine and plan changes with her constant ER visits and general inability to be present, and I can feel my heart rate increase in a bad way when I'm around her now. I find myself getting angry frequently and having no clear target for the anger. I'm not mad at her, I believe she is actually experiencing the symptoms, but often by the time we get to the ER the symptoms have subsided for the most part, and generally her EKGs and CT scans all show her to be quite fit. There was one visit where they noted some sort of spinal degeneration on the imaging report, a condition which specifically could cause the headaches she was complaining about in that visit, and nobody in the ER actually brought that up with her; she only found out because she obsessively reads her lab results. So now we get to add a general distrust of the medical system (also justifiable, imo) to all the factors.
At this point I think she has exhausted her body and mind and honestly dont see much of a way out beyond having her admitted to some sort of inpatient facility where she could get sedated sufficiently to allow her body to recover from exhaustion while they get her re-medicated on some sort of antidepressant, preferably with anti anxiety features as well, while being able to monitor the constant side effects and other panic triggers she always gets on medication. But I'm also anxious about admitting her, because of all the horror stories out there. I dont want her to be stuck somewhere where I couldn't help her if she was scared or abused. She is also not fully convinced on being admitted.
Tonight, she is back in the ER. I'm at home putting our kid to bed, and they're apparently admitting her overnight. Her heart rate was jumping over 100 any time she wasn't lying down, when it would return to the 50s and 60s. I'm not sure if this is from just being generally exhausted, or if it's from withdrawals from the two weeks of Ativan that some doc gave her that I'm surprised she actually took, for all the good it did for her anxiety. They switched her to clonopin but didnt account for having to crossfade the tolerances, which could have triggered withdrawals for the Ativan.
I dont really know how to handle this anymore. I feel my nerves straining to their very last fiber. It's hard to not become resentful. I'm fully in a Depression from this, and I have nobody to talk to about it. I can't talk with my wife because she always has so much on her mind and doesn't have the bandwidth for anything but focusing on her own health for the past few months. I feel like I've lost my partner and I'm actually in mourning and don't fully realize it yet. I focus on my kid where I can to keep distracted, but Ive been finding myself dissociating constantly during the evenings when trying to spend time with my family. She co-sleeps with our kid, because our kid has lots of problems sleeping on her own so we just stopped fighting that battle, if we ever fought it at all. I haven't shared more than a brief daily perfunctory goodnight hug and maybe kiss for a long time, and that's about all I get for any sort of intimacy anymore. I'm not even talking about sex, I just want to be close and talk about, well, anything. But she's always so pent up and stressed out that I know it would be burdensome to her.

I don't know what to do. I don't know how to help my wife. I don't know how to help myself. I don't know how to keep myself remotely sane while keeping this new job. I'm just getting my ADHD treated with Strattera, finally worked up to a functional dose. Can't do stim meds cause of my heart bullshit, and my ADHD med doc isn't fully on board with the autism diagnosis I gave myself but she's also a pill mill doc at a firm focused on ADHD so when you're a hammer, every problem is a nail. But all of this lack of routine while I'm adjusting to a change in my work life is just eating at my brain in all the wrong places. I had adjusted to the lack of time with my wife at night by just playing video games, and that has become the only source of dopamine in my life lately besides my kid. Not the best coping strategy, but it's let me hang on this far I guess. But I still wind up nearly crying to sleep some nights from pure loneliness. I wake up in the worst moods because I realize yet again that I'm alone, despite having a wife and kid.

But what the hell do I do? How can I help her with her health anxiety, keep myself from spiraling into depression, keep my job, and be a present dad? I mentioned some of this to my ADHD med doc and she was like "poo poo that sounds like a lot, I don't even know where to begin to unravel that, good luck."

Isn't this what fugue states are supposed to be for? I could use one of those. I'm tired. Thanks for making it this far.

Jorge Bell posted:

drat, that sounds like a really tough situation. A therapist might be able to help give you some coping mechanisms and be a good touchpoint for self evaluation to make sure you're hanging on well enough to be able to take care of this huge situation.