In 1994 when I "fell apart "& "really lost it" I had my career as an aerospace engineer going on but ended up with the career not going in the direction I was comfortable with. I hated the department I was working in & hated the work I was doing for the first time in 15 year career. I was forcing myself to perform above average because I didn't want anyone to know how much I hated what I was doing which must have added to the stress. I tried hard to find another position at the company, but the director had this opinion that once you were working for him, he owned you. By Thanksgiving, all I could do was sit in my office with the door closed & cry when I wasn't BS'ing my way through the work. The strange thing was that during that time, we all were forced to put presentations together for a national convention. I took the manual & started putting all the buzz words together into a presentation without really knowing what I was talking about.....wouldn't you know it....my presentation was chosen to be presented at the convention. That just topped off my loosing it....I knew I couldn't present something i didn't know anything about.

By Christmas, I was in even worse shape & luckily, we had the time off between Christmas & New Years. I was hoping that I could settle down a bit.....but the first of the year came & I felt so sick I couldn't go back to work. Every time I even thought of going to work, I would start shaking inside & getting sick to my stomach. I kept calling in sick. This continued for over a week. Then the Northridge Earthquake hit & destroyed the freeway that I had to take to work. A great excuse to not have to go to work. It took over a week for them to set up any alternate route that we could use to get around the destroyed freeway. Then they expected me to go back to work. It took me 6 hours each way to drive to & from work....12 hours of driving for 9 hours of work....& then wouldn't let me not take lunch....so i had to stay the whole 9 hours. That gave me 4 hours to sleep. So for the 9 hours at work, all I could do was sit in my office & cry. I honestly didn't know what was going on with me....I had heard about nervous break downs & thought that might have been what was going on, but I had no knowledge about mental illnesses so I thought I might be having a heart problem so I ended up going to my GP. She told me to take a months leave of absense from work which I did. They would call me from work to see how I was doing & I would totally freak out....heart pounding, sweating & getting sick to my stomach everytime they called. They put on a heart monitor to check my heart out & found nothing. My medical insurance from work decided that I should go to a pdoc & have them analyze what what happening to me.

It just got worse & worse & they finally came up with the fact that it was panic attacks that I couldn't control.....the company wouldn't let me transfer to another department & that only kept the panic feelings going even worse. The worse part was that I kept getting worse & as I got worse, more horrible feelings kept coming up & I kept feeling more & more sick which turned into depression & then into suicidal feelings which landed me in the mental hospitals & pdocs trying to put a label on what my problem was.....I don't know how many different labels i went through during that time while they were trying to identify what was going on with me. Don't think they ever came up with a label for it until several years down the road after I lost the workman's comp case & had completely given up on life with several close suicide attempts. That was when I became major depression reoccurant along along with the major anxiety Dx.

Looking back, I realized that at the time, even the mental health professionals didn't have the words to know what to call it....& me who had never had any experience with mental health issues at all was so lost & confused that it made matters even worse. If the professionals didn't know what to call it, how in the world could I?

Debbie