Had anyone else experienced a mental health experience like this?

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.

I once was convinced (for a long time) that I was being watched by the FBI

it got to the point where I would say things like, but what if the FBI come round and stop me watching voltron? (a cartoon). many people looked at me were like why would an american organisation stop you, a british person, from watching voltron?. what's wrong with the show

and I'd be like: nothing

and they would be like: well their we go then

my friend laura even tried to convince me I wasn't being watched by them by looking through the website and telling me that all the cases were american. I watched the news myself for ages, just to see if my name came up

but then: I am bipolar, and have been for many years

Hi, Rebecca1! I see soooo many possible answers to your question & maybe a combination of answers overlapping. For one thing, you are a movie fan like me. You probably have a fun imagination & a private world of your own within your mind (which can be a gift, & healthy most of the time.) Also, maybe you have a tendency to dissociate. So many other factors about you & your history could be at play here. I hope other people contribute to this thread. It's really interesting.

Hi, I can share some things from when I was about that age which I just attribute to fanciful thinking if you will. They helped me fight boredom, and just made the world more interesting. There were a lot of monsters or wild animals in my experiences. Generally it usually started off as a sort of game I played by myself, but over time, became more detailed and more compelling. There was the monster that lived under the house when I first stepped on the stairs up to the front door. He was a bit stupid and slow, but had malicious intentions for sure. It was okay though, as long as I kept moving up the stairs he wouldn't catch me. Monsters under the bed, lions an tigers at the edge of our property, but only in a specific spot they never left, and so sly that they were never seen. The monster in the toilet who took the stuff all away, but might bite you by mistake if you were foolish enough to flush the toilet while sitting on it. A weird Traditional arctic pullover top with a hood brimmed with fur that would let me turn into a polar bear, monsters in the attic, monsters walking just below the level of my windows who wouldn't see me as long as I couldn't see them. It goes on and on.

I'm not sure if it did any real harm. There was the time a feral cat was under the stairs and was started when I stepped on the stairs. I was absolutely terrified but found the whole thing rather amusing in retrospect. Then there was the time a particularly loud toilet scared me so badly that I ran for the door and accidentally bumped into someone, that was awkward.

I never got into conflicts with people, or tried to convince people of the reality of all these things. It was like they were real to me, but I had the insight that they were not likely real to other people. That's a critical difference there.

I'm nearly fifty now, I'm still afraid that something is under my bed. Even though I know it's not true, it still scares and worries me. I'm mindful of not letting my feet hang over the edge of the bed at night.

All these things were major distractions which often changed the way I interacted with the world a bit, and I suppose there is a cost to ignoring the world as it really is, and I'm sure I could have put the time I've spent thinking about those things to better use.

Most importantly, all thst stuff has never really affected my ability to function and do what I'd like to do in that life so despite the delusional and obsessive compulsive thinking going on I consider all of that just sort of quirky and harmless. That is to say, not pathological.

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