Hello, My name is Sam, and I am 18 years old.
I am here because I was recommended by my psychologist to give it a shot, but pretty much for the past month or so I've been struggling really badly. It all started when my GP and I decided we should change up my anti-depression/anxiety medication to see if something else could work even better, because I was still having panic attacks I guess I just thought it wasn't working as much as it should... guess I was wrong about that. Anyway, I start taking a new medication and I felt so awful and developed nausea, vomiting, fatigue and drowsiness. Couple weeks later I wean myself off it and I start a new medication, well, similar things started happening again. Now I should state that due to my fathers passing when I was 9 years old, I'd developed this fear of not being alive, so I started to fear things like terminal illness [cancer etc], dying, sleeping, and things like surgeries. All of it terrified me, It's a bit better now but yeah. Anyhow because I was getting these side effects I could never shake the thought of the fact that maybe I had some terminal illness that was slowly but surely killing me. Obviously there's a 99.9% of that not being the case, but I catastrophize everything. Blowing things so far out of proportion that I'd ended up working myself to the point where for 3 or so days I would be shaking uncontrollably and even ended up going to the emergency department. Everything has cooled down since and my anxiety is certainly not as bad, but as of the past 2 weeks or so my Somniphobia has re-emerged stronger than ever. It quite literally is a war with my head when I have to go to sleep, Because of this my anxiety has arisen, mainly from sleep deprivation and the worry that I'll never be able to sleep soundly anymore. As well as my anxiety coming back, my depression has been immense to the point I do sometimes think that my life isn't worth it anymore. I'm having breakdowns where I just listen to sad music and cry for hours because nothing in life feels like it is going right anymore. I dropped out of school, I lost all my friends, my sleeping shifted from 12-8am to 6am to 3pm, I constantly was having panic attacks and strong anxiety. It was so severely overwhelming. But I'd never find the courage to end my own life because of my fear of death, so you can rest easy about that. In saying that, I do definitely question my existence and belonging in this world still, I feel so incredibly isolated and lonely to the point where everything I used to love and enjoy has just become a bothersome task. I find myself endlessly bored of life, never able to find something to smile about. I keep questioning whether I'm once again just over-reacting and that my thoughts and emotions aren't justified which makes me feel selfish, and useless. But yeah, my depression has been absolutely devouring me as of late. They always say there's light at the end of the rainbow... but I've never found that light, and it's becoming really hard to keep traversing down this rainbow to reach my so called "light". Does anyone have any advice or literally anything I could do to ease this suffering and despair? It's plaguing my life and has control over it and I can't seem to get it back. If you did read this, I appreciate it immensely, I don't know where or who else to turn to anymore.
Thank You.
