To all, thank you for your replies. Yesterday was kind of a bad day for me, and I am prone to ... Excess might be a good word. Or perhaps obsessing might be even better. I know it is very unhealthy.

Eskielover, you nailed it, my situation is exactly as you say - the fear of the hypothetical has become so strong that it takes over. It was really bad last year and into the winter of this year, I had some days when I was very low and I was sure that it was obvious to everyone, such as when I went into a store, that I stood out as someone who had been in a psychiatric ward. Like I was wearing a sign or something. Which if course made me tense, nervous, withdrawn, which became a self-perpetuating feedback loop. Yup, nothing says "Houston, we have a problem" quite like a grown man crying while he walks through a store or stands in line at the bank.p. Not good.

I have gone around and around and around about this with my therapist. A couple of weeks go, she got fed up with me, I think, and just looked at me and said something to the effect of bottom line, people have their own problems, no one cares. Intellectually, I think she is probably right. Emotionally, I feel like people would just either hate me for not telling them or, worse yet, fear me because "he's mentally ill". I know some people are like that, others are not. But my own fear and paranoia about other people's reactions is the big issue.

My father had very serious mental health problems that went untreated for decades, and my mom and I really paid a price for it. I always strived to be the opposite of him in every way - he was volatile, unstable, I tried to be low-key and calm, he was cruel and harsh, I tried to be kind and supportive and giving, he was extremely abusive to my mom, I always tried to go out of my way to be very respectful to women. And then, wham, really fast, I fell apart, and I found myself in a place where I felt like people who knew me would think I had become him. Even though how I acted was not at all like him, save perhaps for a bit of a road rage thing for a short while, and being extremely irritable, I just needed to be left alone. And it felt, it still feels, all so unfair to me, because I have always tried to be a nice guy and just bring whatever bit of light I could into the world. And all of that seemed to vanish in an instant - I would always be "that crazy guy".

And honestly, I think I am far harder on myself than others probably would be. It is such a complex mix of emotions, fear, shame, self-hatred, very poor self esteem, guilt, and then all of that got put through a meat grinder and come out as a virtually un recognizable whole.

It has been a year now, and I still feel so raw, and angry, and ashamed, and weak. I knew that there were problems with how this went down, my therapist, her supervising psychologist, and the new psychiatrist all pointed out some pretty big ethical errors the original md made. Such as, if she believed I was an imminent danger to myself, she hound have called 9/11 on me on the spot. But, failing that, given my refusal to go voluntarily to an ER, then she said she would allow me to do one of two psych day programs, as long as I started it immediately. And, she gave me an ultimatum of letting her know the next dy which one. She told me I was "in crisis" (her term) and that I needed immediate intense drug therapy that could only be administered in a hospital setting - that was her rational for saying I was beyond outpatient treatment. Except there was a big ethical problem with what she did - after I told her I would do the one hospital program, I found out it would take 4 weeks almost to gt in to it. So, I told her that, and her reponse was "ok, I want to see you once a week until you start". So, either I was such an imminent threat of suicide that I needed to be hauled off, OR I was ok to wander freely for almost 4 weeks completely untreated save for a 20 minute appointment with her every Friday during that period. Can't be both. When this was pointed out to me by my therapist it really hit me like a ton of bricks just how really negligent this was. In that time, I really should have been on anxiety and depression meds, because all of these events ramped up the anxiety from a 10 to about an 87, and all I did was cry, puke, no sleep at all, and I walked so much I turned the botom of my feet bloody raw and had to have a podiatrist stitch fascia back to muscke in my riht heel. She diagnosed all of this as mania - I failed to get the memo telling me that mania was one enormous high, because for me it was weeks of pure terror. I should have been medicated during that period, but she gave me nothing, even when I asked for it. They started me on lamictal at the hospital, and I was pretty upset about that when they told me it took 2 months to get up to a therapeutic dose. Never was given any other meds save a sleeping pill that did nothing.

It was all such a fiasco. I want to feel good about myself, and at times I do, but the tape in my head that tells me I am damaged goods, flawed merchandise, inferior, defective just always comes back. And I just want that to stop, but I don't know how apparently to stop it. It has GOT to stop.