Hi Has anyone experienced an overall mental experience like this? I’m confused.

When I was 12 I started to believe I was in the Truman Show. It was like a fixed belief that I had a bit of insight into, it wasn’t playing pretend or the paranoia you get when you’ve seen a scary movie. It was like a delusion but I had some awareness it wasn’t real. I was able to go about my day and not believe it for a majority of the day. I can’t remember how long the “delusion” lasted but I remember having weird behaviour and believing the delusion for about a year or two. I was also quite unhappy during this time: I would get stretches of ennui and sadness/emptiness. Nothing really brought on those feelings, I just felt like a walking Albert Camus novel or like Catcher In The Rye in human form. Basically, the angst 😱

I posted a post 8 years ago on another site as a different user, and got some responses.

The three psychiatrists I’ve brought it up to have said that it’s anxiety, possibly bipolar or nothing serious. My relatives have said that it’s normal and probably more common than I think. I think they all could be right, but I want to make sure I’m getting treated if I have a chronic condition.

Since then I’ve had depressive episodes and periods of anxiety/fast-talking and weird behaviour here and there. I sought a bipolar diagnosis and got a preliminary one, but I’m not sure it’s bipolar.

The reason why I’m not sure it’s bipolar is because during my high episodes I don’t feel high consistently or lose contact with reality.

During them I just felt like I couldn’t concentrate, feel like I wasn’t myself, and like I was stressed. I would talk a lot out loud to myself but be able to stop, and I’d just feel aimless and a bit depressed, with moments of excitement or optimism. I’d talk out loud to myself around people, aware that it would be perceived as weird, but needing to talk to organise my thoughts which had gotten jumbled, and to motivate myself. Also, I wasn’t taking substances to alter my behaviour.

I’ve had depressive episodes where I’ve been able to cheer up a bit, but have also experienced chronic hopelessness and emptiness the majority of the time. Antidepressants tend to be 100% effective at treating those episodes.

I have months where I feel perfectly normal. For instance, since my last episode I’ve been feeling normal, without any medication.

Does anyone have any ideas what it could be? I won’t take them as concrete, I’ll just use them to get ideas to discuss with my psychiatrist.

Here’s my post from 2013:

Hi, I'm an eighteen year old female. When I was thirteen I had a crush on a guy a few years older than me and started obsessing about him. I started to think weird things - I thought he was the member if the Norwegian royal family, I thought a magic eight ball had consciousness and was like an oracle that could predict my future, I can remember closing the curtains in my room and hiding under the sheets because I thought I was being watched. When I was thirteen, I began to believe that inanimate objects were watching me (e.g iPod, stuffed toys) and that I was somehow famous. I thought they were watching me, and saw them having confused or friendly facial expressions I thought advertisements were copying me because I was being filmed and watched by everyone (like in the Truman show) it's gone now. Has anyone else experienced that?
* I also heard a voice, saw a woman in the sun and couldn’t see her face for a few seconds, and saw fleas that weren’t there while sitting in a corridor outside a class, when I swatted them away they disappeared.