Hey everyone, made an account on here to see if anyone else had felt/experienced similar things to me and could convince me im not going nuts :S
Im a 17 year old guy living a very normal life: good childhood, enough friends, good social life, good relationship with parents. Despite these things I have been having issues with anxiety for about a year and a half after I began to feel anxious after smoking weed. For about a year I mainly felt anxiety symptoms such as:
- Fear of going crazy
- Fear of losing control
- Excess energy
- Racing heart
- Racing Thoughts
- Restlessness
And basically all the other stereotypical anxiety symptoms although at the same time I felt mild derealisation, as if colours had lost their 'quality' or things looked a bit fake
I went to my family doctor and he reassured me that what I was experiencing was anxiety as a result of a bad drug experience. My major concern at the time was sleep because the anxiety had been keeping me up to very late at night, my doctor prescribed me some anti anxiety drugs and told me to use them to relax myself before bed.
This worked well and the doctor also referred me to a counselor, after visiting a few people I found a person that seemed to understand things well and work well with me although after a few sessions I barely felt an issue with anxiety anymore and decided I did not really need to go anymore.
After my anxiety became less of an issue I started to feel more depersonalisation and derealisation, things didnt look as vivid and real, I started to feel quite numb emotionally, I often felt I was my body was on autopilot because I didnt feel like I was thinking about my movements or speech to the extent I used to.
I approached my doctor again and told him about these feelings, I also told him I was quite worried because I thought I had schizophrenia due to the emotional numbness and loss of control although he said he was sure I wasnt psychotic because I was explaining my feelings to him and I was concerned about them and that I was not experiencing hallucinations or delusions, there havent been any cases of schizophrenia in my family either.
Recently Ive gotten very concerned again after reading about the damn "Prodromal stage of pyschosis/schizophrenia" I feel like lots of the symptoms match how I feel right now. for example:
- Lack of emotions: find it very difficult to feel happy, exited, cry although I still come off as normal
- I feel ridiculously out of it, spaced out, high whatever you want to call it.
- I find it difficult to form thoughts (I know this sounds really weird ive only seen it mentioned a few times on here but I feel like I cant make thoughts in my mind very well and it takes more time)
- Whenever im alone I get very weird thoughts and feelings that are difficult to explain but I suppose they are very abstract In nature
- I get racing thoughts when im alone
- When alone I sometimes get really persuasive untrue thoughts like the other day I had missed school becuase I had the flu on my first day back I was sitting in the train and because I couldnt see any of my friends/people from my year group my brain tried to convince me that everyone had stayed off because I missed a day?!
I was aware that this was a ridiculous, non logical idea and I knew it was not true but my mind felt like it was persuading me strongly to believe it.
this makes me worried this is a precursor to full on delusions
- I feel like when I think about all these feelings I start to feel much worse and start to have weirder thoughts and feelings and feel more disconected from myself and when im alone and this happens I start to notice other stuff like something in the corner of my eye will look like its moving or shadows will look a bit intimidating and other things that im worried are precursors to hallucinations
I just feel like things have gotten incredibly shit recently and I feel like im going mad, but to make things worse I feel like im becoming okay with how im feeling which really does make me feel like im going crazy because its like im not resisting it anymore, the only things that counter the feeling im going crazy is that I prefer spending time with people now to being alone becuase talking and being around people distracts me and I stop caring/feeling wierd and can have great conversations and stuff. Also nobody has noticed anything wierd in how ive been behaving and Im getting on really well with friends and my parents and everything.
Thank you if you've read this I know it was loooooong but I just needed to get all that down
