I'm going to send myself insane by thinking about it

Post Reply New Topic

I seem to be obsessed with mental illness and I seem to have internalised some other people's convictions that I am mentally ill. That, plus I started getting that idea in my head years ago, when I was fairly young, I suppose because I felt different from everyone else.

Most of my free time I spend reading about mental illness (forums, articles, blogs; watching videos) and analysing my own feelings. And in my not-free-time, it's hard to stay focused, organised and sane-seeming because of my "symptoms" of mental illness which I am perhaps just making up. My mum thought I had bipolar disorder on and off since I was maybe 13. This is highly unlikely! but all the same some vague part of me seems to be convinced of its truth. Because I have had hallucinations a few times, and some pretty bad mood swings, I've convinced myself I'm sick, and now that's making it continue when I could maybe make it stop just by changing my thinking and my obsessions.

Then again, I've done that several times now, and it keeps on coming back to this stage

I can't talk to a therapist about this because they'll see me as a fabricator and that as the worst thing any human could possibly be. So I've realised that maybe I'm causing all my own mental health problems, but what now?

I'm sorry that you're caught in some sort of vicious cycle. It might keep spiraling out of control till you feel you could see a therapist. If you explain your fears that you think the therapist might think you're a fabricator, I really doubt they would call you one. A good therapist doesn't call their clients names for having the problem they came in with. Otherwise you might drive yourself crazy thinking about it. Also, therapists are easy to leave if you feel yours doesn't understand you or help you. It's not like you get stuck with one who you don't get along with. What have you got to lose by trying?

Thanks for the reply. I’m kind of scared of therapy because I’ve had…not harmful but rather useless experiences with therapy in the past, which were distressing because I saw therapy as some kind of last resort and because it went wrong once it seemed like there was no longer anything to fall back on. But I know that doesn’t really make sense, and one experience which didn’t much help because of bad timing doesn’t mean much…and I’m nevertheless around the stage where I am ready to see a therapist and planning to get an appointment as soon as I can get one (but that’s going to take a while, potentially months.)

This being mostly because everyone who was close to me has been freaked out by my behaviour and told me they think I have some kind of mental illness and need help. But now I’m thinking that maybe I’m totally fine and a great deal of my problems have been caused or at the very least amplified by thinking I’m not – I mean, I haven’t felt like I’ve been in control of the things that have been happening but if I look at it really hard, I realise that maybe I have been driving it in a weird sort of roundabout way after all.

I’m going to take an indefinite break from looking at or reading about mental health things, and try hard to direct my attention elsewhere and consider the ways in which I might be fine. Then I’ll see if my problems disappear or if this is still an issue. If this is the case, I’ll try the therapy. This is so confusing because the obsession might be the cause of the problems and yet there’s also at least some small possibility that the problems are the cause of the obsession; I can honestly no longer tell which came first.