Has anyone recovered from mental illness?

I have anxiety, also get chest pains and tight feeling in my chest which I believe is linked to it in some way. Really need to get to the docs about it as trying to deal with it myself isn't working :(.
 
Very interesting thread BTW...

I suffered from severe anxiety,mild depression,severe depersonalisation,etc a few years ago ..

Fortunately through self belief and determination i decided to fight it without any meds,and eventually won the battle :D

To sum it up ... I changed my diet and my thinking patterns and did lots of excersise,tai chi,yoga,new hobbies to distract me from the hell i was in.

I will post a link which helped me so much in managing and overcoming this hell and im sure this article will help many of you:

http://www.dpselfhelp.com/forum/index.php?/topic/20892-the-holy-grail-of-curing-dpdr/

A big thanks to copeful who originally wrote this thread in 2007.

To sum up the key points of his article he wrote:

I've analyzed and experienced this f*$king life consuming blackhole disorder for a longtime since I got it and have found the 10 most important steps in recovery:

1) Acceptance
2) Letting go
3) Distraction
4) Tuning focus back on external world(reality) and interact with it
5) Socializing
6) Facing your fears&burried surrows
7) Eating right
8) Sleeping/Exercising
9) Changing your thinking pattern
10) Re-enter reality & Never looking back

Trust me this really educated me and was a key factor in helping me get out of this hole i was in;)

Please read this article!!!

I will also leave you with a quote i recently read:

"If you knew how powerful your mind was, you would never have a negative thought again"

Peace...
 
Nix said:
Has anyone here ever experienced any form of anhedonia after a long (several years) period of depression or as part of the 'recovery' process, or indeed anhedonia at all?
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The person I have much of my knowledge/experience on claimed to feel 'nothing' about pretty much everything, either before, during or after various medications - long term 'clinical depression' as it was diagnosed led her to become more and more isolated from anything she decided was a problem. The casual outsider might have just seen it as mere selfishness. She was quite capable of stepping outside of her comfort zone when it was something she wanted to do or achieve, but if it wasn't then nothing could persuade her otherwise. Looking at her past in more detail there was a common cyclic pattern of normalcy, followed by periods, increasing in frequency, leading to a breakdown where she would remove anything from her life she could no longer cope with in a normal way... ie work, relationships, family etc.
I never could reason if it was the ever increasing level of medication (when I last saw her 380mg daily of Venlafaxine) or just her own personality that felt nothing for anything or anyone. She never seemed to be like that when we first met, but it was not until a long time afterwards that I understood that she had kept a lot of her past and her present hidden from me and her family.

I can only speak for myself when I say it is my sincerest regret that I had any involvement with her from the start. That sounds harsh and not a little uncaring, I know, but the cost to myself and her family has been enormously destructive, for all the effort and support over the years is the most draining and painful thing I have ever had to endure and though it was given freely the price was too high in the end.
I think part of my feelings towards the treatment she should have received are almost certainly coloured by this fact and the consequences of long term medication without any real help/therapy are all too clear to me now.

In direct answer to your question... who knows? Certainly the wiki entries for anhedonia and clinical depression both describe symptoms I could identify and have discussed elsewhere many times before.
 
jumpy said:
I never could reason if it was the ever increasing level of medication (when I last saw her 380mg daily of Venlafaxine) or just her own personality that felt nothing for anything or anyone. She never seemed to be like that when we first met, but it was not until a long time afterwards that I understood that she had kept a lot of her past and her present hidden from me and her family.
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Just to pick up on that point. Personality is fluid throughout life. We experience the world through our emotions and by consequence those emotions help shape the person we are, have been and will become. It will also effect incredibly important areas of personality such as self-determination and choice, as the emotions - as subtle as they can be - will often be a contributing factor to the decision making process. Someone sad will make a different decision based on circumstances than someone happy or in love, for example, and this is due I believe to the way perspective is shaped.

Someone without the ability to tune into their emotions will in effect lose touch with who they are, and this is where the selfishness aspect will come in. Past personality such as moral code, etc. will no longer hold such a strong bind over an individual as they no longer feel when responding to variables within their life. They will, by consequence make uncharacteristic choices and do and say odd things. A person suffering from anhedonia I believe, will not wish to hurt people with things they say. They just no longer care if they do because they get no reward or punishment in the brain either way; they are lost, with only shadows of what they were to guide them.

N.B. I am not a doctor nor an expert on the matter. This is just a perspective.
 
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^TANK^ said:
Venlafaxine is used for depression and anxiety and has had a great effect on me, reducing symptoms of both anxiety as well as depression.
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Glad it's had a good effect on you mate, seems to be working pretty well on me too after a long time on citalopram.

May seem strange to say it but it's actually nice to read everyones stories here, the one thing i hated most was feeling like no one understands what you are going through and thinking you are 'abnormal' in some way.
 
ljt said:
I've been told I have anxiety by the GP, it sets all sorts of secondary symptoms off such as IBS and acid reflux which I have to take tablets for to control stomach acid.
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Your secondary symptoms are probably your primary problem.

Look, most people view mental health separately from the body. What most of your experiences show is infact the prescribed medications don't work or not in the long term. The medical industry has the wrong approach.

The root of many peoples hormonal depression lays, quite obviously, in their hormonal glands which aren't functioning correctly. For example, if you're an avid coffee drinker, sugar consumer and had intense periods of stress, it's quite possible your adrenal glands are fatigued, which could lead to anxiety, low blood sugars and subsequent insomnia. Maybe you've not had deficient iodine in your diet for years? Then it could lead to hypothyroid lending poor energy creation and metabolism. 2+ 2 = 4, as they say.

Your gut flora produces 80 of your bodies serotonin, whilst I can make no claim what affect this has on internal serotonin, from living with a person with bipolar, it was usually triggered by drugs that affected his intestinal tract. As once the gut flora goes bad (standard western diets, antibiotics, stress), it can start producing nasty or strange chemicals in the body. From my own experience with depression, healing the gut and adrenals have been my lifesaver.

I dont expect you to take my word for it, its a huge paradigm shift after all, but thankfully some enlightened doctors agree that most mental illness starts in the gut and you can read what they have written. I implore you to have a look at Dr Natasha McBride's books on GAPS, or look around the internet to find out about the brain-gut connection, it could really help those ready to help themselves.
 
Nix said:
Just to pick up on that point.

they are lost, with only shadows of what they were to guide them.

N.B. I am not a doctor nor an expert on the matter. This is just a perspective.
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Hah, you have no idea how scary accurate that is.
'Perspective' as you put it is something I have always strived to maintain, but that distance and sense of proportion (as I sometimes choose to see it) can be awfully hard to keep at times. I think you understand that?

twentyone said:
^

I can relate to the girl you are talking about. I was diagnosed with depression when I was 12 and have never really recovered although it feels like I now have a better understand how to make it better as I'm older. I can also see how badly it affected my family growing up with me..

My main issue is that I remove everything I can't cope with. I shut down and just don't deal with it any more.

I was kind of going to write loads here but I don't really know what to say. Meh
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Contrary to some of what I have said above (which suffers from my particular, and unique to me, perspective) it's all good, fella. Perhaps in some ways that's all you can ever ask of anyone, 'sane' or otherwise, to say what they think or feel, even if they change their mind or feel differently at some other point in time.

Most often people as individuals share more understanding than we give them credit for: the irony of 'isolation' or feeling different/abnormal is that it really is terribly 'normal' to feel that way for much of the time, even for those of us who are not sufferers of a 'mental health disorder'. Perspective is the key that is shared through talking to other people, or at least those others who are prepared to engage in context, as with any social intercourse, I guess.

@ AdamSee
healthy mind/healthy body/healthy mind ? I'd go with that for myself; look after one and the other will take care of itself and vice versa is a very good place to start for anyone, not just for those with problems.
 
AdamSee said:
The root of many peoples hormonal depression lays, quite obviously, in their hormonal glands which aren't functioning correctly. For example, if you're an avid coffee drinker, sugar consumer and had intense periods of stress, it's quite possible your adrenal glands are fatigued, which could lead to anxiety, low blood sugars and subsequent insomnia. Maybe you've not had deficient iodine in your diet for years? Then it could lead to hypothyroid lending poor energy creation and metabolism. 2+ 2 = 4, as they say.
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Quite obviously it doesn't because the first thing a competent doctor does is check thyroid hormone levels in anxious/depressed patients. Secondly adrenal fatigue doesn't exist.

Your gut flora produces 80 of your bodies serotonin, whilst I can make no claim what affect this has on internal serotonin,
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Serotonin doesn't cross the blood brain barrier, so it doesn't effect brain levels.

I dont expect you to take my word for it, its a huge paradigm shift after all, but thankfully some enlightened doctors agree that most mental illness starts in the gut and you can read what they have written. I implore you to have a look at Dr Natasha McBride's books on GAPS, or look around the internet to find out about the brain-gut connection, it could really help those ready to help themselves.
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Enlightened? People wrongly believed that 50 years ago and anti psychotic drugs were advertised as calming the gut.
 
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Loving this thread...its nice to see some knowledgeable folks here:cool:

I agree with the healing the gut bit, as i suffered from ibs and acid reflux when suffering from bad anxiety, the minute the anxiety went.. the ibs and acid reflux literally dissapeared:eek:

You would be suprised how the mind can affect the body:eek:

Personally i never took meds cause these only temporarily mask the problem (although some need that assistance) but ultimately only you can face your demons and i know its the hard route but the only way to success in my opinion..

Peace..
 
Energize said:
Quite obviously it doesn't because the first thing a competent doctor does is check thyroid hormone levels in anxious/depressed patients. Secondly adrenal fatigue doesn't exist.
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If you're levels are above the bottom 2% of people and below the top 98%, your thyroid levels are considered normal (at least in America).

I'm not here to convince everyone, but to open doors to those who are seeking different approaches. Kind of paying forward my gratitude from another poster who unknowingly changed my life by a message written years ago, which started me down the right path.

From my crash in late 2009, which included depression, inability to concentrate, always tired, insomnia, brain-fog, bi-polar-like mood swings. My life has radically changed. It's like I've been given a new chance. I'm not at 100% health, it has after all taken years to do the damage and I'm sure it'll take years to undo, but my progress has been great.

The choice comes down to personal responsibility or not. It is either believing your body can heal itself from it's ailments naturally if given the right nutrition combined with right knowledge & action. Or you the path of medication, maintaining a similar lifestyle to what caused the problems and likely gradual worsening of symptoms over the years.
 
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This is a very good thread and has made me feel a bit better.
I recognise a lot of the symptoms on here.
I guess i feel or have become selfish, very intolerant, harsh. quite unemotional in most cases except for my anger/frustration.
Which leads to severe feelings of guilt.
Doc wants too see me for a review next week
 
Wow, when I read threads like this I realise how lucky I am or how grateful I should be for what I have (or haven't) got.

I think those of you who have been brave enough to post your stories and experiences deserve a huge amount of respect and credit. I have found reading this thread fascinating. Thank you all. I hope that those of you worse affected manage to carry on striving forwards and moving towards a better quality of life.
 
All I can say is: time is a healer.

Progress can happen very, very slowly but it doesn't mean it's not happening. It can seem hopeless at times, but then much later you look back and see the improvement you've made.

Often it has to get worse before it can get better.
 
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