Please help a struggling person This is going to be long and i apologize. Since about 11 I’ve been treated for bipolar disorder and no antipsychotics ever had any effect on me. All made me feel lucid or zombie like. Recently a psychiatrist diagnosed me with ocd and adhd and told me that the two illnesses together can present as bipolar disorder and that’s probably why i was misdiagnosed the majority of my life. I’ve come at a cross roads in my life. I desperately need help but only see my psychiatrist once a month which doesn’t really help. I’m not really a therapy person either. Can someone please help me out and tell me if I’m crazy or if they’ve had similar experiences?? My freshman year i had a 4.0 and was excited at the thought of becoming a med student in the future. Now that it’s summer I’m spiraling. I’m so angry all the time. I won’t let anyone see me or talk to anyone. Im so afraid I’m not good enough and my thoughts consume me. Im constantly worried about the future and have vivid day dreaming episodes of where I’ll end up and how I’m going to fail. I won’t go out and have gained weight and now i constant obsess about my weight and won’t let anyone see me because of what i look like. My thoughts are in patterns and repeat and repeat and won’t go away. I can’t even function anymore. All i do is lay in my bed and think. It’s like a bad movie that won’t turn off. I also won’t allow myself to experience any sort of love connection because I’m terrified of confirming or denying my sexuality. My brain is constant and i feel like there’s nothing that i can do to ever turn it off and feel normal. My intrusive thoughts and starting to become my only thoughts. This panic state has been my state for about 3 weeks now. Can someone give some advice?

I don’t normally make posts like this but if anyone can relate or has advice so I don’t feel so alone I would appreciate it! I feel like crying and I’m so anxious. So I’ve been dealing with an ocd flare up since February. It started out as contamination and harm after I had a really bad experience on a edible. The contamination mostly centered around the fear of someone accidentally giving me an edible to someone putting it in my food or water. Then it went from there to my Brian going you know what’s worse than edibles? LSD. So then I obsessed over that and it’s been like that on and off. I’ve had an extremely hard time with it it’s been one of the worst themes I ever had. I don’t eat certain things. Especially sweets. I avoid them. I avoid taking medication Bc I’m scared. I limit myself. I’m horrible about opening water bottles and if it doesn’t open just right I won’t drink out of it. I know it’s crazy I know it’s untrue but the panic I feel traces back to that night. I don’t ever want to feel that out of control again it scared me so bad I got diagnosed with ptsd (to be fair I had a lot of unresolved trauma that caused my glass to overfill) well, I’ve been going to EMDR therapy it’s got my ptsd under control but the ocd is louder. My ocd is clawing to stay alive. I’ve started to have intrusive thoughts now about my boyfriend might slip something into my water even though ITS NOT TRUE. So then I panic because the thoughts are so irrational that I get scared like why would I ever think that about him???? But the intrusive thoughts are so jarring and I don’t want my ocd to focus on him now! I need advice! I’ve been prescribed pristiq but haven’t taken it Bc you guessed it.,.. I’m scared to! I can’t go on like this! The thoughts are so irrational it scares me even though the rational side of me knows it’s not true but I guess that’s ocd. We get scared of the thoughts even though we know it’s not true and I know it’s my brain trying to keep the ocd going. I know therapy must be working otherwise my theme subjects wouldn’t have changed so fast. I’m so tired of this.

Hi I’m Matt. I’m new. I’m struggling a lot even to write this, my mind feels confused, uncertain, tired, I can’t line up my thoughts, I’m not even sure I know how or what to think anymore, I feel dizzy, anxious, short of breath, cold, frightened, empty, and I just want to sleep. That’s how I’m feeling right now and every second of my life in general. It didn’t use to be that way, it just happened over the past few years and became unbearable during the last. I’m not very good at being concise, but I’ll try. I’ve had OCD since I was a kid, it started out when I was around 8 as what looked like a contamination fear. I would wash my hands several times a day until they bled. Then a couple of years later it morphed in some sort of mystical/ethical/moral OCD. I’m agnostic but I was brought up catholic, and that education really messed with my head. Religion terrified me. I would always feel dirty, guilty, a sinner and I would do the sign of the cross hundreds of times a day. My parents saw all this, they thought it was a quirk, a phase. And did absolutely nothing about it. Growing up, in my early teens I started to have verbal intrusive thoughts (horrible insults directed at dead people kept coming up and I would do mental compulsion to chase them away). I was also scared of hurting people. When I was around 14/15 I started fearing of beating a pedophile and that I would end up murdering the people I loved the most, as well as hurting people in general. It was very distressing to me and I did not talk about to anyone. I felt so guilty towards my parents too, because I tried to avoid any family situation that involved younger children (bear in mind I was a child too, 14-15) and when I was forced I would behave weirdly and try to avoid those children as much as possible. That showed and my mother hated me for that. I saw a couple of therapists and even though I talked about my fear of arming people and the fact that I was uncomfortable around children (I didn’t specifically say that I was afraid of being a pedophile at the time, because to me that was way worse than being a murderer). No of them figured out I had ocd. I discovered I had it via my own research when I was 24. I was a textbook case. All check boxes ticked. I was living all over Europe so I did not see a therapist for a few years (also because my previous experiences were so discouraging). At the age of 28 the intrusive thoughts were giving me a really hard time. So I sought for help. I was broke and I didn’t want to ask my parents for money (also because the general idea there was: psychologists are just for nutjobs and weak people. Buckle up) so I called the Italian NHS and ask for therapy, they said the waitlist was at least a year… but hey, if you wanna take drugs no problem, the psychiatrist can see next week). I have always been against psychiatric drugs but I was so desperate at that point and I thought that my ailment was so incurable that I caved in. During a 20 minutes visit the doctor confirmed that I had OCD and gave 20mg of paroxetine which was soon replaced by lexapro 20mg. Ten years have passed since then. I’ve been on and off medications and therapy until I got tinnitus right before the first lockdown and that was devastating. I started doing therapy again and they gave me a mix of ssris, antipsychotic drugs and benzos. Those drugs destroyed me and I felt so numb and pathetic and I lost interest in everything. There was also some cannabis use going on (which before the meds was good for me. I started smoking THC very late in life, Whalen I was about 33, to come off the benzos I was prescribed and I hated. Before tinnitus and meds, I would smoke weed and watch history documentaries for hours, after that I would solely smoke for the purpose of numbing myself). Tinnitus with OCD is an explosive mix, because it’s a sound that works exactly like an intrusive thought, if you engage with it, it gets worse). I was completely destroyed end not functional at all. I started obsessing over my tinnitus, the fact that I would never hear silence again, the fact that I couldn’t sleep, make music, read, focus, work, even think anymore. I would check my IQ to see if tinnitus was causing neurological damage. I thought that I had become completely stupid and I couldn’t recall anything anymore. The therapist I was seeing was well aware that I had severe ocd, I was very specific about that, but she would just “treat” the distress, my episodes and the subsequent depression. She did nothing for ocd. The kept medicating me and finally they gave me venlafaxine which made me suicidal. What did my therapists do when I told them that such meds were giving me those thoughts? They recommended hospitalisation telling me a fairy tale about this wonderful place that did individual and group therapy, group work and exercise, walks, talks, even a gym! It turns out it was the kind of 1950s sanitarium you see in scary movies. Worse than a prison, I’m not kidding. All they did was pumping people full of sedatives and drugs and there was no therapy whatsoever. I went there voluntarily with the specific purpose of coming off meds in a protected environment and so I did, even though they made me stop cold turkey and they kept insisting on giving me other drugs, which I refused. That was last October. I haven’t taken any meds since them and I don’t want to take any anymore, I’m still suffering from withdrawals and I still don’t feel like myself. Well it comes to recent days and my last therapist who I tried to be as accurate as I could with and after while she told me that I had to choose what problems I wanted to work on, and eventually when I was talking about my financial issues (never saying I couldn’t pay her fee) she told me to “come back when you have the money”. Obviously she did not even address my ocd. Now I’m all alone and hopeless. I’ve got maybe two friends and my best friend basically told me she does not have the time and the mind for this and she’s very busy. So I’m basically living with my mother who has a ton of issues too and even though she’s great and loves me dearly does not really know how to help me. What I have now is completely all-encompassing. I can’t work, I can’t watch a movie, read a book, be around people, nothing… my inner monologue is always there and has taken over every aspect of my life, my ocd is everywhere and makes me doubt everything about myself, my choices, my life, even my own thoughts. I don’t trust anyone and especially I don’t trust myself. Every second of my life is pain, mental torture, dizziness, tiredness, anxiety. I don’t enjoy anything anymore. Nothing. I loved music, IT, languages, history, politics, diy, so many things… now? Nothing. I just wanna lie in bed and go through my paranoias for the millionth time all over again. Hoping I would soon fall asleep but at the same time fearing it because then I’ll have to wake up an live. I don’t wanna die, but I can’t live anymore. I thought my OCD would just stay the way it was (I had kinda learned how to cope with it a little bit) but now it has morphed into this life consuming thing that never goes away. On top of that in the past 3 years I went to a fair share of trauma: tinnitus, a very heavy breakup that I’m still obsessing about, met a very abusive and manipulative person that completely destroyed what was left of me and my life. Those are the most notable ones. I also have major depression, autistic traits and probably narcissistic traits. Ok I guess that’s it, sorry for the very long post.

Hi, so I’ve been dealing with OCD for the past four years intrusive thoughts and all. At first it started with being scared of panic attacks then the thoughts went to being scared I’d harm myself and now they’re associated around harming other people especially my family which is very very scary. It feels like I’m deeply rooted a bad person. I can’t even tell anyone my thoughts. It also makes me confused on if I want these thoughts. I’m not even sure if I have any compulsions bc I try to just ignore the thoughts and distract myself. Lately I’ve noticed my anxiety getting a lot worse Notjhing seems to calm it down anymore and I just want to stay alone in my bed and make it all go away. I’m scared I’m scared of myself and I’m scared these thoughts could happen one day and I’m scared I want them. Sometimes my thoughts can make me feel like that… does anyone have any good resources im doing ERP but it’s so expensive. I haven’t tried medication but I want to I’m just scared it will make me worse or make me gain weight. But I’m at the point where I’m desperate and something needs to change bc I can’t live like this. I feel like I’m fighting my thoughts all day. And one second I feel confident I’m ok and the next my whole body gets hot and I feel like it’s all possible and I want these thoughts. Someone please give me advice?