Best Path Forward?

euripides · May 07, 2018, 09:53 PM

Greetings, All.

This is my first post on this forum. I am seeking your advice on how best to deal with some challenges that I have been facing for roughly a decade. Until this moment, I have kept this matter almost entirely to myself. My story is below.

Ten years ago, when I was in college, I was diagnosed with depression. I had stopped going to classes, I shut myself away from others, and I began drinking too much. I eventually visited a psychiatrist on campus, who prescribed me antidepressants. I took these for a while, but I did not notice any substantial improvement in my mood. In fact, they may have made me overly emotional. My parents ultimately discovered this medicine a couple months later and, following an argument, persuaded me to stop taking it. For the remaining years of my college life, I lived alone in a messy single-bedroom apartment. I still shut myself away from others, and I still drank too much. I was desperately alone and quite sad. But I made sure to attend all of my classes, in order to pull up my GPA to a respectable level.

Following my graduation, I moved back home for work. When living under the same roof, my parents and I have always had a rocky relationship. And this time was no different. This was also the first time that I began having (always non-violent) paranoid thoughts and panic attacks. But I was largely able to keep these to myself. I did not discuss the issue with my parents, and I managed to be successful at work. A year later, I attended another academic program in a different state. I no longer felt significantly depressed, and I was able to make friends. But my paranoid thoughts and heavy drinking continued. Again, however, I managed to keep these things almost totally segregated from my public life. I found success in my program and even had a couple relationships. But, in my time alone, I was tossing and turning. It is difficult to express in writing the degrees of stress that I felt, and still feel, at times. My heart pounds, my extremities get weak, and my mind races through every possible angle of whatever scenario burdens me.

Since then, I have had a fairly decent career. I have worked in several states for my employer, and I travel quite a bit (which I always enjoy, despite my sporadic fear of flying). But, for the past couple of years now, I have slowly been reverting back to the habits of my college days. I often shut myself away from others in my messy single-bedroom apartment. I feel very alone in these new environments, despite the support of my coworkers. I still drink too much. And, lastly, my paranoid thoughts persist. Unlike before, however, I am older. And I feel that my ability to keep things so well internalized is losing its strength. Furthermore, it is daunting to not even be sure of what exactly ails me. Symptoms often overlap so much in the textbooks, it is difficult for me to pinpoint anything in particular.

All I know right now is that I am tired of seeing the abnormal in what are very likely normal events -- specifically in trying to analyze the uncertainty of it all. And, perhaps most importantly, after my last relationship ended about one year ago, I am tired of feeling so alone. My increasingly reclusive and anxious nature, however, keeps me from doing the most logical thing: Seeking therapy and/or social gatherings in my current location. Could you please help me come up with ideas on how to best shed the weight that I have carried in private for so long? At this point, I have decided that my chance for happiness should take priority over almost any other factors in my life. I apologize for the long-winded message and thank you in advance for your input.

Euripides

Skeezyks · May 09, 2018, 04:37 PM

Hello Euripides: Since this is your first post, here on PC, welcome to PsychCentral!

Thanks for sharing your concerns.

Hopefully there will be some other members, here on PC, who will have some useful suggestions for you. What I can tell you is that I'm an old man now.

But I have spent pretty-much my whole life dealing with my own mental health issues in secret. I know, from personal experience, that it can be exhausting. Plus, just as you wrote, it wears you down. And, over time, it does indeed become increasingly difficult to keep it all under wraps, so to speak.

The thing is though, at least from my pespective, there aren't any magic answers to this... no secret remedies you just haven't heard about that will begin to make everything better once you find out about them. The answer is one of those things you've already mentioned... therapy. From my perspective, you need to find a therapist you feel comfortable with & delve into all of this in depth & over time. It can take a few tries to find the right therapist for you. Not every therapist works well with every client. But mental health therapy is, at least from my perspective, the way to go for the majority of people... & most probably for you too.

Of course that is not to say that there aren't things you can do to help yourself too.

Sunflower123 · May 09, 2018, 04:40 PM

I wanted to say hello and welcome you to PC. Skeezyks always has great responses.

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