Welcome Sduck! I hope you find it safe to post here

I can really relate to this feeling. I've always had low self esteem so I never appreciated how good (academic, kind, patient, hard working, capable, sociable etc) I was in my late teens, but I look back at the things I used to do then vs now and I feel like a completely alien person. And even though I never appreciated her back then, I long for a magic wand to go back to how things were...but that's never going to happen.

That really sucks! I'm sorry that you've had to endure such bullying. I've had people make fun of my experiences in the last few years and it really, really hurts because it takes a lot to open up to people about these experiences because of fear of not being believed or rejected, and then it happens and it's awful. But you won't be made fun of here Sduck because we all know what it feels like to believe something that others don't.

I'm sorry that your doctor dismissed you Was this a psychiatrist? What treatment were you wanting?

I know that you think that you don't need therapy, but I think that therapy might help you deal with the things you wrote in the last 2 quotations and the cyber bullying you experienced. Therapy is not just to deal with abuse or stuff like that in the past: experiencing psychosis can be traumatic in itself and, even if you had a positive experience of voices or delusions at the time, getting your head around the idea that you might be sick and that your mind made up those experiences yet was so convincing is a very difficult thing to come to terms with, in my experience anyway.

That is why I am in therapy at the moment, though I've only just started. I doubt so much of what I've experienced from years of my thoughts and experiences being dismissed as symptoms and then more recently as made up, that I've lost touch with my sense of self - am I sick? Am I lying? How do I reconcile myself to the fact that these experiences are real for me, but not real for others? How do I work out when my mind is lying to me? And my therapist wants me to learn to like and accept the person that I am now, even though I despise her for being so pathetic compared to the 17-year-old me who was so capable and showed so much promise.

I hope that you will consider therapy anyway. Even though your doctor was a jerk about it, maybe they truly believe that therapy would help you? Maybe you can't relate to my feelings, but I believe that, if I had had access to therapy back when the voices and thoughts were starting and I was diagnosed as having various psychosis-something-or-other, maybe I wouldn't be in the mess that I currently am doubting my self and whether I could have made everything up? And I wouldn't want to inflict this on anyone, so would advise everyone to find someone competent to talk to. You need to nip the depression and feeling of loss of control in the bud while you still can - you are worth it and there isn't a 'trivial' reason to go to therapy.

Regardless of what you decide to do treatment-wise, I wish you all the best and hope that you continue posting here

*Willow*