[schnittke]

A puzzling episode of my life started around two years ago, and lasted for maybe 3 months. I called it "depression" for lack of a better word, but I'm not sure that's what it was. It happened around the time I started university. Background info: undiagnosed ADHD at the time.

Well, university started off GREAT. I met a load of people, and somehow managed to start off with enough energy to be ebullient. I was funny. This is all stuff I hadn't expected, because I'd drawn a picture of alienation in my mind before starting. So I grabbed it and was very much lifted from the ground into the wind. I looked at the sky constantly, admiring the trees, wondering at the complexity of the lives of passers by. Spending hundreds of pounds on homeless people (seeing one still makes me want to cry). I was going out a lot, drinking a lot, doing drugs, you name it - and all the while, I was pondering the philosophical questions that had worried me in the summer. And they started to take me over - I wouldn't be able to concentrate on my course (physics) because I'd think over and over about its subjectivity, and the fact that the course wasn't taught with any acknowledgement of its epistemological problems. Sitting in a tutorial, I wouldn't hear the tutor over the sound of my thoughts - wondering how the other students could be so interested, how they managed to be so consumed by it, how they overcame the pointlessness. My work deteriorated, but I still functioned to some extent. I got out of bed, showered (at least once every two days), did SOME homework. I never went to lectures though. Sometimes I just wandered around at night, in my thoughts.

I thought I'd catch up on work in the Christmas break. Nope. The metaphysical crisis, loneliness, whatever - it all built up. It suddenly felt strange to be at home - I longed for the independence of university. And there was a tangible gap between me and my parents - they could never understand my mental state. So I kept to my room for the most part. Drawing, painting, writing, crying, whatever. I went to London to see my boyfriend; while we were there, we visited a guy I'd met online and took shrooms with him. It was fun, though my head went to some messy places (both suicidal and grandiose). This is when I started to see myself (metaphorically) as split in two - a powerful spirit-being trapped in an ungainly earthly body. I was frustrated at myself, my inability to move forward. I felt nobody could understand me, and I was frustrated the world too, pressing in on me without mercy. I wanted to be free, so desperately. It built up inside of me as this indescribable and indirectable agitation. And I was obsessed with the stranger we'd met and done shrooms with. I knew it was wrong, but I broke up with my boyfriend and went back to his house - for pretty much a solid week of drug-taking. It wasn't good, and I was paranoid a fair bit of the time. But I stayed with him, term started, and I passed my "collections" (exams at the start of term). My emotional problems stayed. I was obsessed with similar metaphysical problems - the multiverse, randomness (what if causation isn't real), and also general feelings of helplessness and worthlessness. But my thoughts raced; they weren't sluggish at all, they kept spinning and spinning. And I got frustrated with anyone who couldn't keep up (most of them couldn't). I withdrew from the friends I had made in first term, for fear of alienating them (and myself). I would psychoanalyse people and myself - sometimes to a kind of paranoid degree. But I could still be chatty - the mood would just take over afterwards. There were moments when I felt intense anger, just anger, not towards anything in particular, but I did end up turning it on myself to make things "easier" (self harm).

Well, I broke up with the internet stranger and I started feeling better gradually - and since then, things have been broadly okay. I experienced derealisation last year (I'm not sure if it was involuntary or brought on by thinking about reality in a particular way - the fact that much of it is hidden from us by our prejudices, and the fact that we perceive much less than is there. I convinced myself that it was liberating - I can act how I want because I'm not real - but the crushing sense of isolation came out top, and suddenly everything around me was oppressive cardboard cutout scenery, leering in garish colours). But apart from that, there hasn't been much of note - only my periods of immense hyperactivity/frustration (which I think is linked to my ADHD or medication - I got diagnosed a couple of months ago).

Basically, I want to know if this was depression, or if I'm maybe dealing with something else. I didn't get diagnosed at the time because I was convinced that I had to think myself out of what I had thought myself into, and that a doctor wouldn't understand (they didn't). I wasn't really sure that it was depression at the time, but I did feel very fragile a month or so in.

[schnittke]

Just a quick bump. Would like some answers.

[Shazerac]

Welcome to psych central

[Sunflower123]

Hello. Welcome to PC. We can't diagnose here at PC but speaking as someone who experiences profound depressions, this sounds like something else although the drugs are clouding the issue. If it happens again, please be evaluated by a psychiatrist. I'm glad you are here.