Depression, Anxiety, or other Mental Health Conditions

What they said. Don’t just mix drop us out of the mix False, keep us updated on how you’re getting on.

Been really struggling this weekend, my mind has been racing and almost crashed at 130R (F1 in-joke) yesterday, and am constantly worried about how and when i will be able to travel again (and whether the companies i use will survive).

Travel is my life, and not being able to do it for so long now is gradually eating away at me bit by bit. The isolation is not helping either, i've not had a decent discussion with anyone outside my own home now for nearly 3 months, and it is completely doing my head in.

My week of virus was hell, but i'm finding this extended lockdown even worse.

The lack of things to do has also led me to consume too much news (which i know i warned others not to do recently), and i think Charlie Brooker put it best on newsnight a few weeks back when he compared the news to eating fruit, as eating too much of it gives you the gooseberry fools.

So, has anyone heard from falsey

Curls wrote:So, has anyone heard from falsey

I saw him post something on Twitter last night

@False: If you read this mate, keep on posting, no-one wants you to cut yourself off from here.

I'll never forgive you if you don't run that Pokemon tournament you hyped up to me a while back.

Seriously though dude, for real, stick around.

My girlfriend's really struggling of late. She's gone onto pregabalin (which I use to buy illegally and massively abuse in my youth, lol) and duloxetine. I'm hoping it helps, she's at the point where her anxiety and depression is so bad she can barely leave the house. She's suffered from both for a very long time but went downhill extremely quickly after we got back from a mini holiday.

Hope she improves mate, the combo of anxiety and depression is a really shitty deal

What is pregabalin? Anti-depression/anxiety med?

Corazon de Leon wrote:Hope she improves mate, the combo of anxiety and depression is a really shitty deal

What is pregabalin? Anti-depression/anxiety med?

Thanks man. It is tough, I'm used to being depressed but even with that understanding it's hard to see someone else go through it.

Anti anxiety mainly. I think it's something like 10-20% of the population, IIRC, that gets the 'side effect' of euphoria which I used to use it for. I know tolerance can rise fast and it can be difficult to come off so I'm quite worried about that a little down the line but obviously haven't expressed those fears to her.

Not sure if this is the right thread for it but my dad's been an alcoholic all of his life and I'm worrying that being furloughed and at home all the time is doing the same to my mum. Had a phone conversation with my dad early morning at the weekend and my mum could be heard in the background and she sounded "merry". My dad also said they're finding furlough difficult because they've been buying booze every day on top of having the lower income. I don't feel close to my parents because of my dad's problems but I don't want my mum to go down the same route.

Zilnad wrote:Not sure if this is the right thread for it but my dad's been an alcoholic all of his life and I'm worrying that being furloughed and at home all the time is doing the same to my mum. Had a phone conversation with my dad early morning at the weekend and my mum could be heard in the background and she sounded "merry". My dad also said they're finding furlough difficult because they've been buying booze every day on top of having the lower income. I don't feel close to my parents because of my dad's problems but I don't want my mum to go down the same route.

My dad was an alcoholic for a long time and its strawberry floating awful dealing with that as it is. Can you speak to her without him around before it becomes too much of an issue?

I don't think I want to, honestly. I don't think I could handle it. I'm just hoping it's nothing and she'll be fine when she's back at work.

Speaking to someone a out a drink problem is hard on both parties, because the drinker gets called out on something thst they don't see is an issue. My dad thought nobody knew he drank, when he was clearly half cut most of the time, and strawberry floating hammered the rest of it. When I tried bringing it up with him, he'd go strawberry floating wild. Maybe rather than flat out calling her on it, try to steer a conversation that way and see if she brings it up herself first.

Rocsteady wrote:My girlfriend's really struggling of late. She's gone onto pregabalin (which I use to buy illegally and massively abuse in my youth, lol) and duloxetine. I'm hoping it helps, she's at the point where her anxiety and depression is so bad she can barely leave the house. She's suffered from both for a very long time but went downhill extremely quickly after we got back from a mini holiday.

Sorry to hear that, Roc. I'm in the same boat with my girlfriend, who's been living with both for all of our 12 years together, and plenty before. It really is a case of peaks and troughs, with very little warning either way.

My girlfriend hasn't tried pregabalin afaik, but duloxetine sounds familiar. As far back as I can remember, she's been on Citalopram in fluctuating doses, with varying degrees of success. She just recently finished a course of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy too, which I think has helped quite a bit. Her lows, while still frequent, haven't been anywhere near as severe as they used to be.

Helping keep someone else's head above water, it's so easy to be pulled under. Don't forget to look after yourself. We're here for you!

So I have my first NHS counselling session in eight minutes . I wrote a long post in here quite a while ago detailing a few things going on and the situation has got slightly worse. One of the things a few of my close friends have tried to get me to do over the past few years has been to do this and I've always stalled it. I research mental health as part of my living and from time to time I look at the forms I'm using with participants (PHQ9/GAD7/Beck Depression Inventory etc.) and occasionally realise how I would be utterly tanking it if I was filling it out as a participant. Wish me luck and all that

Good luck mate, let us know how it went.

My Anxiety was always held at bay and my PTSD held down just enough to work part time, at least after lots of theraphy and working on myself, sure id have little panics and flair ups but id manage to push through, but im starting to think my issues are starting to get a bit harder to manage, when I had a trip to a super market to get food and everyone was walking around maskless coughing and pushing at each other I just wanted to get out of there, I cant imagine being stuck in that kind of shop enviroment for shifts without telling someone to do one or just grabbing my gear and leaving so cant say I am looking forward to when I am taken off of furlough.

Curls wrote:So, has anyone heard from falsey

I've been harassing him on the reg, so he's still about.

Glad to hear it.

Mini E wrote:So I have my first NHS counselling session in eight minutes

Hope it goes okay, i know it'll be daunting, but counsellors are trained to make you feel at ease, and the one i had to see back in 2004/05 was very good and helped a great deal.

Mini E wrote:So I have my first NHS counselling session in eight minutes . I wrote a long post in here quite a while ago detailing a few things going on and the situation has got slightly worse. One of the things a few of my close friends have tried to get me to do over the past few years has been to do this and I've always stalled it. I research mental health as part of my living and from time to time I look at the forms I'm using with participants (PHQ9/GAD7/Beck Depression Inventory etc.) and occasionally realise how I would be utterly tanking it if I was filling it out as a participant. Wish me luck and all that

I've been answering a bunch of them during online CBT via NHS (no counselling, actually barely any form of psychotherapy at all if even once for at least 14 years in the system, most of that time on anti-depressants and anti-psychotics) where I have 1 left out of 2 clinical reviews. I've seen a mild improvement but this got drowned yesterday speaking with my father who's a massive trigger point for me as I got confused speaking to him almost like I might with my counsellor (paying for that privately at the moment). It's pretty depressing on it's own looking at long sustained periods without getting the help & support I need and thinking, I can't even honestly answer the question "lol what is joy do you feel it" the vast majority of the time, I'm just "OK" which really means "coping with symptoms". This is a side affect of SSRIs, they level you out but they don't make it any easier to feel content or happy even when you are doing things that would normally make you very happy. That's why for some people they make things worse as you just get fed up of feeling numb all the time and never really experiencing the highs as well as the lows, this has big implications for creative people too as work can just slow to a crawl and you can't be bothered with it anymore.

The thing is the moment an improvement is seen via those questionnaires, even if it's slight, you start getting earmarked for an end date to your therapy to move onto someone else who's constantly trying to kill themselves, so I'd bare that in mind if I were you, unfortunately this is just the state of our mental health treatment in the NHS which is severely limited, please think very carefully and soul search regarding your feelings and in relation to perhaps some (possibly rare) moments you were truly happy just speaking from experience. There are much more subtle forms of self harm like neglect, not eating or sleeping properly, not washing or bathing or shaving, self care etc or just generally not giving a strawberry float about how you present or perform (i.e. what some people perhaps more vain might say giving up). Myself when I was younger I used to not eat or sleep and I also simulated drowning and suffocating myself. I still remember doing this but not really being able to explain to myself why I was doing it. Truth was I was deeply unhappy about my family, suffering from bullying at home and at school, stress with work at school getting no help despite having significant learning difficulties (I didn't know about them until I was 20) and constantly worrying about my mum's deteriorating health (she's physically disabled via car/horse accident) and alcoholism and smoking 40 a day. Some people have terrible gooseberry fool going on in their lives and they STILL feel happy or they say, "I've never been depressed, I can't relate to you". Try not to focus on those people but, yeah, being OK and being "content" are quite different things. Unfortunately if you are "content" and depressive there's a good chance you will feel pretty awful again at some point down the line, could be a few weeks, months, a year, or even 1 day, it's horribly unpredictable and that's the main reason most people can't understand that it is so debilitating. It's like one day your brain just snaps and is like, nope, I'll strawberry float up this basic task like making tea, getting the result I need from a productive phone conversation that should have lasted 5 minutes but ended up being my life story, dropping gooseberry fool, tripping up, falling down the stairs etc etc (I fractured my spine feeling dizzy one day, that was fun).