I've been seeing someone for a few months now, and they're the 4th therapist I've seen over the years. I'm beginning to doubt if they're a good fit for me or not, which is hard because I don't even want to think about having to find someone else, which was a difficult enough process to go through to find this one. My first therapist I had when I was 8 or 9 after writing in a journal about suicidal thoughts I'd had which were related to living in a verbally abusive and violent household under my mother's second husband. She got a divorce a few years after that.

My middle two therapists were not very good and so I didn't see them for very long.

Basically my problem is that I feel like there is something very wrong, but I've never done talk therapy that seems to want to go beyond the contextual. You know, "it seems like you're sad because your friend is treating you poorly", etc.

I have a number of symptoms from practically every mental illness under the sun, and my current therapist says its likely that I'm suffering from depression, anxiety, and possibly even PTSD, but seems disinterested in saying anything for sure, and it's beginning to make me doubt myself and my experiences. I feel like they're trying to avoid doing anything particularly in-depth or difficult in working with me too, and would rather just have me vent about the same things every session, and I'm getting frustrated because I feel like it's going nowhere. The validation stopped being rewarding a number of sessions ago, and I want something meatier to work on. I've tried telling them this, only to hear that they aren't sure that I actually have anything going on that's deeper than my reacting to my current bad situations and relationships.

I don't want to say that I'm craving a diagnosis, but I guess I just feel like there's much more going on than they're admitting/realizing, and it's making it difficult for me to give myself permission to frame my life and day-to-day in terms of any particular mental illness and it's stymieing. I realized this when I went to go post something more specific in these sub-forums... only to be left feeling like I couldn't because that would mean I was self-diagnosing and jumping to conclusions.

I have a lot of sensory-related anxieties and sensitivities that they seem content letting me cope with on my own even though they are some of the most disruptive of my issues. They're preventing me from getting my driver's license (I'm 24), I have a number of fears pertaining to music (live and recorded) and sound--sudden, loud noises have even triggered panic episodes--among other things. I've been suffering from abnormal fatigue that's affecting my quality of life and everything I've tried to cope with it usually leaves me more tired (de-stressing supplements, exercise, cooking, caffeine, more exposure to social situations, etc.). I'm beginning to self-medicate because I feel like I've exhausted all my non-medical options.

Basically I feel like I can't start really helping myself until I have a concrete idea of what's going on. I want my therapist to put me on some kind of productive trajectory and they are very hesitant to do so. Is this normal for people to experience during prolonged stressful periods of their life? Should I look for another therapist? Am I seeing a diagnosis as a way to escape my problems? If my environment is toxic and I can't change it in any way, is self-medicating unreasonable?

Halp