Yes, particularly when my symptoms are most active, which ironically is when I most need to ask for help. With the help of my Pdoc I'm getting a lot better at learning to ask for help when I need it, but my instinct is to still put on that mask of wellness and try and hide behind it to cover my problems up.

For me personally the issue of hiding behind a mask of 'I'm okay, really', when I'm anything but, stems from a sort of learned protection response due to an aspect of abuse that happened when I was a child, and also from the fact that my Mum tended towards histrionics with her own issues and I swore I'd never behave that way myself just out of sheer embarrassment. For example, my Mum suffered from bad panic attacks for a number of years when I was growing up. Except she couldn't just have a panic attack, there needed to be this entire dramatic production around it as well. Like if she had an attack at the local shopping centre instead of doing what she'd been instructed to by her Doctor, which was to find as quiet a spot as possible, sit down, and slowly breathe into a paper bag, she would literally go and stand in the middle of the walkway and start clutching her chest, and audibly gasping for air, as she huffed and puffed into her paper bag all the while looking around to see how much of an audience she had. Watching her do that, and seeing how the majority of people responded (negatively with a large amount of unspoken stigma attached), I told myself over and over that would never ever act like that myself, not matter what. Only trouble is I kind of went too far in the opposite direction, and it's ended up being a hurdle for me being able to seek and accept proper treatment when I really need it. But like I said, me and my Pdoc are working on that and now I'm starting to feel a lot more able to ask for what I need and not hide things so much.