How has mental illness affected your life?

Huge I can't even begin to imagine how scary that must have been

Am I right in thinking your firm is Cambridge? Oxbridge has very good welfare support generally

Sadly not. She spends her whole time telling everyone we know about how I forced her into it, and how I'm a rapist (fun fact: it really ****s you up to have someone who raped you accuse you of rape) and how she is massively depressed because of 'what I did to her'. I realise that she's mentally ill and I imagine that she's built some sort of fantasy world in which she is the victim; she is very much the sort of person who constructs elaborate lies and fantasies and things. Which is also valid as a form of mental illness, but she isn't trying to reform into a sane member of society, rather trying to 'get over' what I apparently did to her. It doesn't help that I have lessons with just me and her in too.



I did last week, and my GP told me that it's probably my period. This was a woman too! So I think I'm just waiting until I go to uni



Don't start self-harming. It is insanely addictive, which they don't tell you; I was actually addicted to it at one point, and had to do it several times a day, smuggle implements into school etc. It's never worth developing more conspicuous symptoms to get treatment. But equally, I understand the urge to have something where you can say 'here, I need help, look at this!' as opposed to just 'I feel really awful'.

I wish you luck with this new psychiatrist But £300? Wow. You'd better get a diagnosis for that!

I used to suspect I might be mentally unwell, but I don't think so anymore, I think it's purely circumstantial.

I have no friends because I'm shy, I'm depressed because I have no friends, I feel like **** because I'm depressed, I feel anxious because I'm depressed, I took "meds" because the shrink said I was depressed, I hallucinate because of the "meds" ****ing up my brain, because of them ****ing up my brain I can't concentrate on uni and come across as even more weird, because I give stupid answers in class everyone thinks I'm a retard and won't be my friend hence I have no friends.

Vicious cycle.

1) How do you refrain yourself from wanting to kill/beat/strangle that girl every time you see her?

3) It took me a year to finally seek help when it came to a point that it had to be done, because you have a history of self harm and stuff are you sure you'll be okay til you go to Uni? As you probably experienced these things go down hill pretty rapidly.

4) Did it not hurt when you self harmed? I know yeah it can be addictive, but surely it hurt? no?

Why thankyou

That's actually one of my motivating factors in working as hard as I can to meet my offer. (I know; I'm so cool. Everyone else is going there because it's the best university in the world, and I'm going there because I think I might feel an awful lot better and happier there ) With the intense terms and things, I've heard that they have a lot of help even for people who don't have diagnosed mental health problems or whatever. The disability people also seem lovely, so I'm hoping that I can get a diagnosis of depression/bipolar/whatever it is that's wrong with me as soon as I get there, and start to work through it with someone.

Trouble is, I'm not entirely sure if I want to pursue counselling; I spent a couple of years in counselling between the ages of about 13 and 15, and I just found that nobody there took me seriously (mainly because all my issues were sex-related, and as I was a pretty unattractive and autistic early teenager, I got the general impression that nobody understood why someone would want to force me into sex.) But optimism triumphs, and I'm hoping to at least try the support services at uni and see if I can get anything positive from them

Well, today I was conclusively told that I had early onset bipolar disorder! ...

One question: would you rather be treated by a completely mentally sound Psychiatrist, or one that has experienced mental illness (but is in remission, of course)?

I used to suspect I might be mentally unwell, but I don't think so anymore, I think it's purely circumstantial.

I have no friends because I'm shy, I'm depressed because I have no friends, I feel like **** because I'm depressed, I feel anxious because I'm depressed, I took "meds" because the shrink said I was depressed, I hallucinate because of the "meds" ****ing up my brain, because of them ****ing up my brain I can't concentrate on uni and come across as even more weird, because I give stupid answers in class everyone thinks I'm a retard and won't be my friend hence I have no friends.

Vicious cycle.

In my opinion (so don't get cross), I think that the term depression is thrown around too lightly these days, say, compared to fifty years ago. I think that the bar for depression should be raised considerably to account for the added stresses and pressures of life in 2000, so that way people can stop saying they're depressed and can understand that even though they feel down, they are NORMAL.

In some ways I agree with this, because if someone actually is depressed and says "I am depressed", people often don't take them seriously and it's very easy to just say "oh cheer up" without fully understanding the severity of the situation!

i've had mild anorexia for months and i only found out the other day
how has this affected me??
i don't show the physical signs which revolve around being underweight and whatever (i'm average) so no one can spot any proper signs and i can't talk about it to anyone so while everyone's [in my family] eating nice and healthily...or atleast healthy for asians! i'm not.
i've also developed trust issues with the very few of my friends who found out the day i did coz the look on my face seemed to scream ''there's something wrong with me''

on the plus side, i found out i'm a really good actress!

I'm not sure if it's even appropriate to post here, but I'll give it a go anyway, what's the worst that can happen?

I'm not even sure what I'm going through can be deemed as a mental illness and I'm not sure where to start. My parents always suffered from a turbulent relationship - lots of shouting and such which I guess at a young age isn't pleasant. But as time went on, I realised that it wasn't just shouting, there was physical abuse too. I witnessed my father hitting my mother with a belt, attempting to push her down the stairs... so many things I couldn't even go on with. Many times my mother packed a bag for the two of us and drove around all night so we wouldn't have to go home. I'd cry for hours and hours but the next day, my father would apologise and I wanted the happy family I saw "everyone else" having and I wanted that too. The police became regular fixtures in my household but I guess I always maintained that I was fine, and so everything ticked on accordingly. I never told anyone at school, as my father had an amazingly squeaky clean image (he was a police officer himself) and I just assumed that anyone I told would think I was lying. All the violence and blood and the tears carried on until I turned 17 and my mother finally had the courage to leave. At the same time, my uncle (on my dad's side) died, and due to me being "on my mother's side", I wasn't allowed to the funeral, and so, I guess, I was never allowed to grieve.

I managed to keep up with school and work but things were changing in my head. I started going through obsessive phases of panicking about where my mother was even if she was 2 or 3 minutes late from work. I'd always think she'd been in a car accident or she would never come back home for whatever reason. If I saw a car outside our house that I didn't recognise, I'd assume the person inside the car was watching us, and that something really bad would happen to me if I left the house. All these weird overwhelming feelings took over everything I did, and I became suspicious of everyone's motives... mainly irrational looking back on it all now. Feeling out of sync with all of my friends and bursting into tears at crazy times became part and parcel of daily life. Suicidal thoughts would creep in and I'd lie in bed wondering how easy it would be if life just had some sort of switch, and I could flick it to the off position. Naturally, I didn't want my friends to know so I kept going with the happy-go-lucky me that I seemed to be able to act out really well. I'm in my first year of university now and I guess the feelings of losing control are still scaring me. The feelings of loneliness and alienation seem to be growing, I think I may have been to 2 or 3 lectures this year so far and I'm not sure how I've managed to get away with only having one disciplinary meeting so far. Sleeping all day and staying awake all night just thinking seems to be much more appealing even though I want to go and learn. I get scared of myself, thinking that no one will like me or I'll say something stupid. I mean, this itself written down seems really stupid but the thoughts manifest in my brain to a degree where I just don't go in to university, I stay in my own bubble. But this gives my mind time to wander and the amount of times I've considered doing something really stupid to myself is crazy.

It was really nice to write all of that down and (hopefully) not get judged by anyone. It's a scary time for me right now as I'm away from my support network, and even then I've never really spoken to my mother at length about things as I feel that she may feel some guilt for the situation although of course, nothing was her fault. The knock on effects of whatever I'm experiencing has been massive - crazy mood swings, amazingly low self esteem... to the point where I've never had any sort of relationship as I get scared of letting men in too close and I'd probably get paranoid of their whereabouts. I always suspect everyone's lying to me even when they aren't. Whatever this is is just taking over everything I do and I have no idea what's going on or who to turn to. So... how it's affecting me? I'm not sure because I know at some point previously I was a happy carefree child. But all this has been going on for so long that I don't quite know what to do or who to turn to. Or... what's even wrong with me... It's just frightening.

In my opinion (so don't get cross), I think that the term depression is thrown around too lightly these days, say, compared to fifty years ago. I think that the bar for depression should be raised considerably to account for the added stresses and pressures of life in 2000, so that way people can stop saying they're depressed and can understand that even though they feel down, they are NORMAL.

How will that help them? What added stresses and pressures?

I can appreciate that environmental pressures can make 'depression' more common and even an understandable / expected reaction or state, all things considered; but the right reaction to this wouldn't seem to be to say that depression is just "normal" and not something that it would be right to help people with.

I think pretty much all professionals are agreed that talking therapy is the best treatment for mild-moderate depression, and what that says to me is that social, cultural and economic conditions are a big problem if it takes an institutionalised profession to provide the kind of support that should (ideally?) be provided by more or less informal social groups (in the same way that social services provide services to patch up or deal with problems caused by social, economic and cultural conditions).

It doesn't make those problems any less real (or indeed, any less physical - we shouldn't make the mistake of thinking that just because something is a reaction to social conditions, that it isn't a physical reaction), and while I agree that our attitude to mental illness and treating it has become very individualised, that doesn't mean treating it on an individual level should be sidelined. - The problem isn't just with overmedicalising normality, it's with overindividualising mental illness as such, and giving it a sharp distinction from "social illness".

I'd also add that very serious major depression can be triggered by all the same stressors that trigger milder depressions in others. There's not necessarily a sharp difference qualitatively such that you can raise the bar and say that depressions worse than level x are "real" depressions and others are environmental. There's always a complex interaction between biology, genetics, personality disposition, events and environment.

But, to be honest, I don't understand why this thread is attracting so many posts like these. Whenever people talk about their problems like this there's always someone who has to pop up and juuuuuust say that people should man up, basically. Like, why? OK, you think depression is overdiagnosed but why do you have to come to a thread for people talking about how their mental health problems have affected them to say that?