Personal Experience: C-PTSD

I wanna talk about a series of issues/symptoms that can arise from C-PTSD, at least how I’ve experienced it. Essentially, childhood surgeries, assaults, etc. that I don’t feel like mentioning. It’s hard to articulate as it’s really all connected so sorry if this feels disjointed or confusing. 

When I was 15, I stopped sleeping entirely, only sleeping when my body would crash (usually for no longer than an hour and in classes). It was an escape method I admit but I didn’t choose it. Figured the traumatizing stuff couldn’t affect me if I wasn’t awake to experience it (what a mistake that was, esp considering the surgery issue). Over several years have passed and it’s worse. I get so worked up when set off sometimes that I stay awake up to 72 hours, just trying to handle the buzzing and constantly looking over my shoulder. I now have hypersomnia, usually showing itself after intense sleep deprivation. We’ve discovered that when I’m set off, I just can’t stop going no matter how exhausted I am. Occasionally, I can’t stay awake longer than 6 hours. It really depends on what sets me off that time. We’ve collectively agreed that there’s nothing really to be done about it at this point (if something was going to work, it would’ve by now) so I don’t really expect to hold a job again. My nightmares are usually pretty bad and I’ve more than a few times slammed my partner into a wall in my sleep. We both have PTSD so things admittedly get difficult. One wrong move, either of us are gonna be messed up for a bit. Lovely guilt issues too since neither of us have great memory.

I found myself, during the last few years, hiding in the garage habitually to avoid noises in the home, drinking and smoking for hours. Or I found people willing to get plastered with me in places I could control so I wouldn’t have to think about what I was feeling. Honestly it felt like I was going to shatter if someone so much as looked at me wrong. 

The thing is, I got to this point of self-medication because of medical trauma. I can’t walk into a medical building, especially if it has that smell, without panicking. I got asked to do a rather invasive test recently and I burst into tears and cold sweats, scratching my arms as hard as I could. Didn’t do it. I still get calls about a blood test I was asked to do in 2013. I see blood donation signs, the little bandages, and it takes everything I’ve got not to vomit. I really really detest blood drives.  Eventually, I got fed up trying to fight doctors about specific treatments. They found me difficult to work with because I have a tendency to vanish if asked to do anything invasive or needle based. Everyone around me treats me like I’m being childish.

So I smoke and I drink. Keeps the nerves at bay, allows me (somewhat) to sleep. Also manages to keep the rage outbursts I’m prone to tightly locked up. At this point, I’m well aware where it’s coming from and what I need to do with it, it is just a matter of actually feeling it. And not exercising it away, which was my childhood coping mechanism. I recently moved into my own place so things aren’t as bad now. A solid chunk of triggers are gone simply by changing environment and people in my living space. I still heavily smoke but drinking I’ve lessened for my own good.  I never wanted to be like this but if it keeps the pain out of my arm and it can turn off that constant over-analyzing and hypervigilance, then I’m gonna do it. Admittedly, I’ve only been aware of my trauma for about 3 years so I’m having quite the delayed response to it. I like to think I’m starting to heal but bad days happen. 

Shrink’s note: Thank you for sharing your personal experiences.

Personal Experience: The route to diagnosis, c-PTSD and anorexia nervosa edition

CW: eating disorders (anorexia), child abuse, substance abuse mention

//This might be under the jurisdiction of the trauma blog, but I’ll go ahead and submit. //

It is incredibly frustrating when you get misdiagnosed. The only thing more frustrating than months of ill-targeted therapy and medications that don’t help is having to go through the ordeal more than once. And that’s what happened to me.

My troubles started in late teens, I was having violent mood swings and just couldn’t predict how I’d feel in the next couple of hours. It was exhausting. Prior to that, I was a docile and withdrawn child and I went through continuous abuse and several traumatic events from the ages of 9-15. It was as if something inside my brain broke and the flood of emotions couldn’t be held back.

My first visit to the psychiatrist was uneventful. My official diagnosis was “hormones” and a desire to skip school. My mother agreed. Then came insomnia, obsession with my diet, nightmares, periods of depression, extreme distrust in everything and everyone combined with a pathological “clinginess” . Since I had no access to mental health resources, I self medicated with increasing amounts of illicit substances. Then it was apparent I had a problem. The second psychiatrist was determined that I had rapid - cycling Bipolar disorder (I). Needless to say, the medications didn’t do anything except make my symptoms worse. I knew something was wrong, yet I had no way of helping myself constructively. I was already underweight, with a bmi of 16, but it wasn’t seen as a big deal because of shitty Eastern European culture.

Eventually, I completely discontinued all my medications, got financially independent, moved to the UK, while remaining equally miserable and adding a substance abuse problem to the mix.

In the UK I was able to get better help, to an extent. The diagnosis that I had stuck on my forehead for a long time was BPD and my eating disorder was finally addressed. I didn’t agree, but it didn’t really matter. The little amount of DBT that I received was, however, incredibly helpful. It might’ve saved my life. After this whole incredibly boring story, the ultimate conclusion was that I didn’t have a personality disorder or a mood disorder. I had, and still do have a thing they call complex PTSD, and according to my understanding it is caused by prolonged trauma instead of a particular traumatizing event.

The diagnosis was huge for me because I could finally admit to myself that I was, in fact, abused and that instead of running from the memories and feelings I needed to deal with them constructively. My personality wasn’t flawed per se. There was still hope that I would become complete.

The moral of the story is - shit happens. Misdiagnoses happen. Especially when symptoms overlap or you don’t have a typical presentation. From what I’ve heard from other sufferers, c-PTSD is often mistaken for something else. It’s too common to be my unfortunate coincidence or a fundamental flaw of a post-communist medical system.

[Thank you for sharing your personal experiences! - Shrink]

Living in a Group Home Pt. 1/2: General Situation

(I’m going to do a Part 2 later, on actually working with the staff on recovery goals, but right now I have to do my chore (see below))

Let me start by saying a little about myself, for perspective: I’m 28, cis female, asexual and aromantic. I was diagnosed with depression at a young enough age that I can’t actually remember if if was before or after starting elementary school, and with ADHD a few years later, and I’ve been on meds for them (immensely helpful) ever since. I was diagnosed with Aspergers in high school. For almost three years, I’ve lived in a group home run by a local non-profit. I haven’t lived in a facility of this sort run by anyone else, so I can’t tell you anything about the spectrum of experiences different facilities afford.

The organization that runs my group home has three levels of care:

(I started in level three but moved to level two because I couldn’t handle keeping things clean by myself, to a degree that it could have caused trouble for the organization if there had been an inspection.)

I know a lot of people don’t like labels like ‘high functioning,’ but these levels of care do roughly correspond to those kind of descriptions. The people in the 24-hour house are often those most clearly unable to take care of themselves.

To be in the program I’m in, you have to be on disability, and like most of the others, the organization is my Representative Payee, meaning they receive my checks and give me an allowance. I usually have about $150 to work with a month, plus a little over $100 in food stamps. This has to cover food and other expenses like most toiletries. I have yet to figure out how the people who smoke (not allowed in the house, but so common on the side porch that the neighbors once complained) afford it.

Everyone pays for their own lunch and dinner, but most people participate in the group meal for dinner, paying for food for everyone one night a week. I don’t, because I’m a vegetarian and they always have some sort of meat. I think the requirements are that there be a protein, a vegetable, and a starch. People tend to make the same few low-effort things over and over, like chicken nuggets or spaghetti with meat sauce. Vegetables are usually boiled. Staff may help people cook depending on their ability to handle it on their own.

There are three staff members, though on most days only one or two are there at a time. They’re usually quite young, with bachelor’s degrees only. I don’t know how much they make, but from discussions with my therapist (employed by the same non-profit) I know it’s basically peanuts. House staff don’t often stick around for more than a year in my experience. Of the three who worked here when I arrived, one left to take a supervisory position with another organization, one went back to school, and one finished additional schooling and switched to working for tech support, which apparently pays better. There’s also a supervisor, who is in charge of several different houses and comes by at least once a week to coordinate things with the house staff and check in with residents. One of the house staff is kind of in charge of the others, but not by much. This person also takes care of logistical stuff like office and cleaning supplies and doesn’t work weekends.

As part of the program, everyone is required to get out of the house and do a “meaningful activity” on at least three days every week. What that means may vary according to the person. For example, spending time at the library would count for most of my housemates, but not for me, since I’d be doing the exact same thing I would at home (reading, browsing and writing), only without the occasional video games. Most people make use of the classes and activities offered by the non-profit at the same building where the therapist’s and psychiatrist’s offices are.

Activities include cooking class (more focused on producing “dollar lunch” for people who are around that day than actual teaching), gardening in the greenhouse (plants are sometimes sold at the annual craft fair to raise money for the organization), yoga and a group that goes to various events and locations of interest in the community. We have several good museums nearby that they visit sometimes. Counselors in the “life skills” area that runs most of these classes have a lot of turnover too, though not as much as group home counselors, and the available classes sometimes change depending on the skills of the current batch. I’m very lucky that we have a guy with a creative writing background who runs a writing group. It’s just a prompt and then sharing and commenting at the end, but he gives good feedback. I just worry that he’s being gentle with me the way I know he does with other clients (not untruthful, mind you, just careful).

Of special note is the art program. This isn’t art therapy, as the woman who runs it makes very clear. It’s actual art classes. The teacher has a degree in (I think) fine arts. There’s a more basic class, where there are specific projects assigned, and a more self-directed studio class you have to be invited to. Even in the more basic one, you can pursue your own interests if the project isn’t doing it for you. Until recently, a small local gallery donated wall space for us to display and sell our art, but now that the owner is retiring the teacher is looking for someplace new. And people do sell art, and for amounts of money that really make a difference when you’re on disability. One of my pieces sold for $120, which was a very nice cushion for the grocery bill. I kept only about two thirds of that, because I used the studio’s materials. It would have been 85% if had used only my own materials.

Socially, the house is pretty dead. There’s no conversation over dinner, though there sometimes is in front of the TV.

Entertainment-wise, it’s pretty much just that TV. It has a very basic cable package, and is on nearly constantly. There are some books around, but I’ve never seen anyone else reading. I think the books may have been left behind by people who moved out. We still have VHS that no one has gotten rid of, too. There’s also a Wii, but I’ve never seen that used either. One other person says he has a laptop, but I’ve never actually seen it. An older woman has an iPad, which she likes to watch videos on. We have one person whose English is quite poor, so her main entertainment is music from her home region. The staff and both used to play youtube videos for her, but now she has an iPod. I gather that she had a lot of money left over after a year or so of not doing anything with it but buying groceries.

The house itself is pretty big, and I gather that it’s one of the newer ones the organization owns. It’s a coed arrangement, with the guys having three rooms upstairs and two of them having to share, while the women on the main floor and the basement all have their own rooms. I’ve got the basement room at the moment, having switched with someone who was having more difficulty that usual and who the staff wanted closer to them. Bathrooms are shared except for the basement one, which I have to myself. There are two other bathrooms on the main floor, one for two clients and one for the remaining female client and the staff. There’s also one upstairs for the guys. The guys aren’t supposed to use any of the women’s bathrooms on pain of cleaning the whole thing, but it happens anyway because it’s more convenient to the living room.

There’s free internet but it’s not exactly great. The bandwidth on the guest network that clients have access to is terrible (250kps downloads per device, throttled) and about a year ago they started turning it off from 10pm to 6am. This is the same at every house, apparently, and apparently done because people somewhere were staying up all night online.

A few other tidbits:

[Thank you for sharing your personal experiences! -Shrink]

Personal experience - TBI

I had a stroke/CVA due to Traumatic Brain Injury as a child. This caused half my body to be temporarily paralyzed and me to have to relearn everything, including speaking, walking, moving the right side of my body, running, writing, using scissors, etc. I also had emotional difficulties because of it including an inability to control my emotions and tears when upset, migraine headaches as often as twice a week, aphasia (difficulty finding words), in addition to switching handedness, and potentially gender identity (as there was a sudden change in the gender I saw myself as between pre-stroke and post-stroke). i have also have depression, anxiety, ADHD, and executive dysfunction, all of which could potentially be exasperated by childhood stroke (and are recommended for screening of children who have had strokes in ongoing care, as they are more common in stroke cases). An Individualized Education Plan was also necessary, as it took me as long as four times as long to complete tests and homework and in-class activities. If anyone has any questions regarding strokes and their affect effects, I can help answer them as I experienced them.

Thank you for sharing your personal experiences! - Shrink

Personal Experience: Generalized Anxiety Disorder

I have been living with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) for quite some time and wanted to share my experiences here.

For me, it’s an almost constant worry about everything. It varies in intensity. Sometimes it is just a small thought at the back of your mind telling you “Things are going to go wrong”; but it is small and can be forgotten without much difficulty. Other times, it cannot be forgotten with ease; you keep thinking about it and it makes you feel tired and restless at the same time. And on the worst case, that thought telling you “things will go wrong” becomes an ocean of worst case scenarios, one worse than the other, consuming your mind and not disappearing, no matter how much you try to forget, to think positive things, to distract yourself. It stays there and makes you distressed, terrified, restless; makes you want to run away from everything. Sometimes, it isn’t even an ocean of worst case scenarios; your mind simply enters a fight or flee state because of a peak of adrenaline in your brain and you feel like something is deeply wrong and you’re in danger. That worst case tends to come in the form of anxiety/panic attacks and can be quite terrifying. For me it also makes it harder to trust people, to talk about feelings, because i fear i will say something wrong and create a disastrous situation. It makes me cautious of everything. If you want your characters with GAD to be more realistic, make them worry about little things. It doesn’t need to(and and probably shouldnt) be a full blown panic attack at every second. Make them hold their keys with an iron grip to make sure they dont lose them. Make them try to speak in the least offensive and clearest way they can (and make them fail at it and have someone misinterpret what they said for some conflict if you want :3 )

But most importantly; make your characters people. Don’t let their mental illness define them. Don’t make their entire identity revolve around GAD. And now i conclude my text. Goodbye.

[Thank you for sharing your personal experiences! -Shrink]

Personal Experience: Medication “Experiments”

Randomly thought of this because of recent events in my life, and if this has been said/is too much of a rant please delete and ignore, but I just remembered that doctors are weird about “experimenting”.

I took Zoloft for my bipolar for roughly five years. It gradually started to lessen in effect, even as we upped my dosage. So we switched to a different medication, can’t remember the name, that completely muffled my mania. It either made me depressed, or my depression finally had a chance to shine, but either way, it wasn’t right. I hated it, I wanted off, I wanted a different medication. My doctor decided to add an antidepressant instead, because I was a minor and had no say over what I took. The antidepressant helped a little, but it made me so “blah” that everyone noticed. Even the kids at school, who usually avoided me, started to notice something was different. And according to the doctor, that was what normal people felt like (yes, she said normal, which is a great thing to say to a depressed, suicidal child who feels alienated from his peers already). Normal was blah. Normal was empty. Normal was wanting to die but being too afraid to do it.

We switched psychiatrists. The new doctor took me straight off the meds I was on (no weaning, just told me to stop taking them) and said “we’ll have to experiment”. That’s also around the time I learned that I was always being put on new things. Nothing tried and true, just the newest drugs they could get their hands on. Stuff they didn’t know what the effects would be. And all adverse effects were met with “We’ll wait and see if it gets sorted out.”

This all came to the front of my mind because we changed my meds again just this month. My doctor is taking me off Abilify (finally a drug that didn’t give side effects, but still stopped working), which I’ve only been on for a few months, and putting me on Latuda. We’re also increasing my anxiety medication. He’s the only psychiatrist I’ve had who’s been careful about choosing my meds, but it’s still scary to hear the word “experiment” coming from a doctor.

So to anyone looking to write someone who’s been on and off a lot of meds, please remember that it’s just. So exhausting. So scary. So infuriating. And the words doctors choose affect the way you view medication your whole life.

[[It’s been a while since I got a submission! Thank you for sharing your personal experiences - Shrink]]

Personal Experience / Response: Bipolar disorder and meds

Hello! I wanted to react to this post about a shapeshifter with BP. While it’s definitely not the same to use your powers or to use meds to “stay in the neutral zone”, here are a few things to consider nonetheless. For a quick background : I started to develop the symptoms when I was around 15/16 yo even if I wasn’t diagnosed as Bipolar type II until I reached 22. It’s been five years since I began taking my medication (Lamictal) but I can’t talk for anybody else in a similar situation. That’s my experience and mine only. That being said… 1/ It doesn’t disappear. Even with your medication working, you can still feel the episodes. Sure, it’s a lot softer and sometimes you don’t realize what kind of episode you’re having if you don’t pay attention, but it’s still there. And honestly, it’s better this way because… 2/ … if she’s a bit heavy on her use of her powers, it might have the same effect on her than it had on me when my dose was too strong. Life. become. incredibly. flat. It almost “erased” my episodes, and sure in that state you still have normal moods (happy if someone does something that pleases you, pissed if your neighbor’s music is too loud to sleep, etc.) but it’s boring. I chose to go back to my old dose for that reason. Perhaps it’s how most people live, I don’t know, but if that’s the case I don’t envy them. 3/ While I’m at it, it took me a whole year to get used to the loss of intensity due to the meds and then some more months to realize that I can’t live decently without them. That’s how I understood that BP truly is a disability: not because of how it affected my life before but because I have to rely on meds to keep my mind on the right path. Even worse: unless somebody find a cure, I’m stuck with BP for the rest of my life. There is a good chance that your character will come to that realization too at some point (which is a good thing for character development though).

4/ She’ll be exhausted. I was so, so tired before I started taking my medication because I had to control myself all the time: don’t start drinking/smoking/getting addict to drugs, don’t kill yourself, don’t run away, don’t buy that very expensive (but useless) thing, etc. And I didn’t… at the cost of not doing anything instead except spending my days on the Internet. Then I started taking my meds and I felt a lot less tired because I didn’t need to maintain that level of self-control anymore. Your character doesn’t have that luxury: she’s her own medication.

Two other things worth taking in account:

- The asymptomatic episodes felt to me like I was slightly depressed because what seemed to be my “normal” state was my hypomanic phases. Obviously it wasn’t but still…

- Episodes mainly change the way you react to things happening, not who you are. For example: my parents were abusive and I wanted nothing more than living elsewhere. Hypomanic episodes: I wanted to run away. No money? I’ll find a job. Nowhere to go? I’ll find a place. No degree? I’m awesome, why people wouldn’t want to hire me? etc. Depressive episodes: I stayed in my room all day long except when I truly needed to get out (to eat, shower, etc.).

(I’ll stop there to stay on topic. I hope it’ll help some of my fellow writers! And thanks for the blog, it’s really helpful :D)

[Glad I could help! Thanks for sharing your experiences! - Shrink]

Borderline Personality Disorder: Intense/Fluctuating emotions, personal experience

Hey there. I have borderline personality disorder, depression and bulimia. Figured I’d put all that time I’ve spent analysing my emotions and thinking patterns to good use and write up how I experience BPD. This relates to how I experience the intense and fluctuating emotions.

Reminder that this is all my personal experiences. They’re not universal amongst people with BPD. 

TW for cutting, suicidal thoughts, violent thoughts, violence, eating disorder, depression.

Hellgarite: Personal Experience with ASD

Okay okay so you were asking about lived experiences of people with ASD? I can totally do that, as an autistic creative writing psych student lol Hopefully this makes sense but I’ve had a touch too much caffeine

First thing to keep in mind when writing an autistic character is that autism is a spectrum. Not just a spectrum going from MILD to SEVERE but a spectrum of abilities that are different for everyone. ie someone considered “low functioning” could have better social skills than a “high functioning” autistic person, so there is no such thing as a universal Low or High functioning autistic, everyone is affected differently and its not a binary thing. Basically autistic people = unique individuals

Secondly, a person’s skills and abilities can vary wildly from day to day, or even within the moment. A good example is that when I go into sensory overload, that doesn’t just affect my sensory integration, but also my verbal skills (I can go nonverbal), my cognition, my motor skills… Literally anything.

[Continued after the jump]

What I'd like to see in an autistic character

The main thing that gets me about the way ASD is portrayed is that it’s always boys and always younger characters. The kid who likes trains or planes too much and has outbursts that no one seems to understand. As a 23 year old woman living with ASD, that just doesn’t cut it for me. Not all ASD individuals are emotionless. In fact, I experience emotions at a much stronger level than most people. Not all of our special interests are related to bugs or transportation. Sure, some of them are, but I’ve seen that so many times that I want more. Show me the autistic adult whose special interest is a tv show or a historical period. Show me an autistic individual whose meltdowns are explained. Hell, for that matter, show me a self-aware autistic individual, who knows they’re having a meltdown, like I do, but they can’t stop it. Give me casual stimming, gentle swaying back and forth rather than violently rocking back and forth in a corner. Show me fidget toys being used and the shaking of the leg. But mostly, and above all else, show me an autistic character who isn’t ostracised. I know that happens a lot in real life, I know it, but that doesn’t mean autistic people have no friends. Most of my friends are others with aspergers. We form groups. The narrative that this autistic person has no friends because they’re “weird” while it may be true in some cases, it quite harmful for two reasons: 1. It paints a false narrative and 2. For those who really don’t have friends, it shows that this is what life is going to be like forever when that’s just not the case. 

[Thank you for your contribution! -Shrink]

My experience with psychosis

Hello, I’ve been diagnosed with Bipolar Type I with psychotic features and rapid cycling and I’m willing to share my experiences with psychosis in regards to your post, hope it helps! I experience psychotic breaks in both manic and depressive episodes. When manic, I generally overestimate my abilities and for instance, I’d be convinced I cannot die. For example, once I was sure of my immortality and I wanted to prove it to my friend who I felt didn’t believe me (you don’t say, but I felt so hurt by this) by driving my car against a wall. Usually I don’t remember most of these kind of blackouts.

It’s even more dangerous when I’m depressed though, since I get very paranoid and I’d feel like everyone and everything is against me, I always push people away and blame them but mostly myself. Sometimes I hear voices telling me this (well, not exactly voices but rather noises that I somehow perceive as words… they don’t sound like real voices, but I know what they mean. It’s difficult to explain). It’s very hard to convince me I’m not in the right mind. Often I have this urge to do something (even trivial things) to prevent something terrible from happening. For example, I lost some unimportant piece of paper one day and I was distraught, because I felt that if I don’t find it, something will happen. I don’t even know what would happen, I was simply so scared. I didn’t find it of course, and I felt like the biggest freaking failure, it just destroyed me. Psychosis is one of the scariest parts of bipolar.. at least for me. It scares me so much that it can literally take over your mind and you believe the most insane things, but it’s even scarier when you snap out of it and realize you’ve lost it once again, the defenselessness is terrifying. Thankfully I’m undergoing therapy and taking medication and I’ve been rather stable for quite a long time.

(Hope this helped somehow… feel free to message me in case you have any questions :) Love your blog!)

[Thanks! And thank you for submitting your experiences. - Shrink]

personal experience with bpd

it lies mostly in the constant underlying guilt i have for purely being alive, being born, taking up space, making me feel undeserving of anything including basic things like people’s time, money, love, and anything or anyone healthy or positive. Including the belief that i deserve pain, hurt, to be abused physically and emotionally, etc. because of this i have a subconscious desire to self destruct, which isn’t only self harm but also purposely ruining friendships and relationships, shoplifting, doing hard drugs, risky sex, etcetc. My thought process always resorts back to suicide. For example: i fucked up the thing. i fuck up everything. everyone hates me because i cant stop fucking up. no one will ever love me. im a horrible human. i need to get high/get drunk/cut/lash out at a loved one/kill myself. i have an extremely hard time maintaining any friendships due mainly to the fact that after being called clingy and annoying for so long i’ve become incredibly distant in order to not seem clingy even tho i so desperately wanna be!! if that makes sense. Like ill want so badly to message someone 500 times but instead ill ignore their text because “they probably wont respond anyway”. I also fall in love incredibly fast and can also lose feelings just as fast. Black and white thinking is the only way i think. Example: in 2nd grade i stopped drawing because my friends picture was better. in elementary school and 5+6 grade i was in all the gifted and talented programs and got straight A’s, in 7th grade i was put in a lower math class and decided to completely give up on school and from then on my grades were shit. if i cannot be the best then i will be the worst. in every sense. My moods are rapid and fast but that doesn’t mean they aren’t intense. compare it to someone dumping a bucket of water on your head randomly. no its not raining but wtf man?! Mood swings are typically triggered by feeling abandoned/rejected or guilty. It also feels like there are two people in my brain, one desperately trying to smash everything with a hammer and another trying to glue everything back together. Most times the hammer smasher is much bigger and faster and stronger than the glue dude. Example: acting as glue dude and making a long list of coping skills and framing it. triggered, and im hammer smasher and burn the list. back to glue dude i sit over the ashes and cry.

[Thank you for sharing your experiences. -Shrink]

General Anxiety Disorder and Anxiety Attacks: What They Feel Like and How I Deal

So, I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder at the age of 17. I won’t go into how that happened, because it’s a story that probably violates the submission rules, and it’s not really important to the content of the submission, anyway. What this submission is about is what an anxiety attack associated with my GAD feels like, and how I handle one when it happens.

It’s important to note that no two people are the same when it comes to anxiety. What sets me off or triggers an anxiety attack may be just another Tuesday to someone else, and vice versa. For me, major anxiety triggers are clutter, small spaces, crowded/noisy rooms, unclear directions or lack of directions in a task with some amount of pressure (like schoolwork), and multiple tasks at once with limited time to complete all of them. Basically, I don’t like having my space or my free time compromised. It makes me feel powerless. To try to avoid an attack, I do plenty of things; I organize my space, I politely decline to be squeezed into tiny areas, I avoid rooms full of loud people packed closely together, and I prioritize tasks in order of most to least important and get them done one at a time. I make it sound simple, I know, but bear in mind that I’m 20 years old now and this is a system that’s taken three years of hard work to build.

Sometimes, though, my safeguards don’t work. Sometimes, I still have anxiety attacks. This is just what it feels like for me, but I’m sure a few people have similar experiences.

I can feel an attack coming on when the room I’m in starts to feel suddenly smaller. I’m not talking a walls-closing-in feeling, not exactly, just a shift in perception. It literally feels as though the room shrunk by about two feet on every side, even though I can see with my own two eyes that the walls are in exactly the same place they were before. I don’t lose awareness of my surroundings entirely, but my mind goes into a kind of white noise mode. If you could see inside my head during an anxiety attack, you’d see nothing but empty space for miles. Sound starts to blur by, like it’s on fast-forward. I’ll know you’re talking to me, I’ll understand and respond, but later, I may not remember what you said. Then comes the hyperventilation, which…is admittedly scary because I’m also asthmatic. This makes me feel rather lightheaded and faint and a little dizzy. Occasionally, not always, my hands shake.

So you’re probably wondering, “Cr1m, how do you deal with that? It sounds awful!” Well, it is awful. And the way that I deal with it depends partly on me and partly on someone I trust.

If I feel an attack coming on and I’m safe and clear to do so, the first thing I do is remove myself from whatever situation I’m in. Excuse myself from class, go to the back room at work, run to the bathroom at home–anything to get out. Once I’m out of the immediate situation causing the attack, I can work to clear my head. I can do it alone, with deep breathing and repeated reassuring phrases like “I can do this” or “I’m okay, everything’s okay”, but it’s even better if there’s someone with me whom I trust and rely on. Now, I personally don’t like to be touched when I’m having an anxiety attack, so I like to have someone there to just help me count out my breathing and assure me that I can stay where I’m at as long as I need to, and to talk out the reasons behind the attack after it’s over.

Immediately after an anxiety attack, I’m really exhausted. But I still make an effort to try and talk out why the attack happened, or why I think it happened, because then I can work on possible solutions to the root problem. Say, for instance, we’re moving to a new house and I’m struggling to stay calm while packing because I don’t have clear directions from my mom on what she wants packed up and how she wants it packed. Once I know that much, I know that I can solve that by asking my mom to clarify her instructions.

Anyway, this got long, but I just wanted to contribute to your lovely work!

A Day in The Life of My ADHD Brain

LOL. J/K Let me tell you one thing about having a non-linear neuro-type. Every day is different. Some days, you’re on top of the world, ma! You have superpowers! Legit. And other days those same functions that made you feel so AMAZING yesterday, have turned on you and you feel so incapacitated you might as well be hooked up to a ventilator. My brain moves hella fast so sometimes I seem like I’m rambling, but truth is I’ve skipped a few steps in the physical world, so bear with me. You’ll probably notice this post jumps around- and I’ve left it a bit like that to show you what my brain is like. Enjoy. (I have edited it to make it slightly more readable.)

Hello, and thanks so much for this blog and offering such help!

A bit of basic background on me - 35 years old, bisexual biracial cis female, married to a straight cis man. I was diagnosed with clinical depression about 15 years ago in college; I was diagnosed with GAD and panic disorder with agoraphobia about 3 years ago, though the symptoms were there for many years before that.

My father died suddenly of a heart attack when I was 17. I, and the rest of my family (mother and older brother), did not handle it well - no grief counseling, never asking for help, and focusing on “being strong” for each other. Unsurprisingly, I had what I called a nervous breakdown, and attempted suicide.

In college, the combination of changing environments, stress, and nascent physical illnesses led to my initial panic attacks, which scared the life out of me. Everything piled on, and my depression came crashing down again. I had a plan, but I did not attempt suicide again.

I’ve found myself cycling through times of deep depression and anxiety over the years, though lately I’ve been doing a lot better due to some better therapy and medication. I have a career that I love, and a manager who is extremely understanding of my issues. I’m happy to help out with any questions anyone may have!

Living with BPD

For me, it manifests itself in never trusting when anyone says anything positive about me. I hear them and I’ll believe it then, but I will soon begin to doubt it. Emotional permanece is not a thing I fully have. I get very envious when I’m not included and I tend to get paranoid that everyone is going to leave me. This stems from being the victim of child abuse. When you can’t trust your parental figures, it’s a lot harder to trust anyone at all.

[Thank you for submitting your experience. -Shrink]

Medical emergency-caused PTSD

Okay, so, I read the other person’s account of their PTSD, and it made me want to talk about my own experiences with it. My PTSD wasn’t caused by anything another person did to me - it was a fuck up of my own body, which has made it really hard to get over and live with. Given that, I’ll be talking in some detail about the medical aspects of what happened, because I think if you want to write about PTSD from some medical emergency it’s important to know how the emergency influences the symptoms.