scared to go outside

i do not like to leave my house, and i only do when absolutely necessary. i don't even like going out to get something i left in the car.

i'm scared of people watching me. i don't know how to explain it.

i can't understand why my partner gets so angry with me about it. he says it's not normal, and i know it's not, but i'm not hurting anybody in any way.

i go to the doctor, therapy,visitation, the grocery store. i have to struggle just to go to those places.

i do have paranoia but i hate hate hate anti-psychotics. that's what the doctor says to take to make it go away. i take all my other meds, cymbalta, ativan, adderall, restoril. i am supposed to take zyprexa, before that it was seroquel, but they make me gain so much weight and my brain gets foggy, and don't really help anyway. i prefer the paranoia.

i know to keep my thoughts to myself, my partner gets angry when i talk about it so i just keep them to myself. but sometimes i'm not sure exactly which thoughts are not considered normal. like with the whole bin laden thing - i told my partner that the government is lying about throwing the body into the sea, and he got mad and told me i better not tell anybody that. i pretty much just don't say much about anything just to be safe. nobody even notices, they concentrate on themselves.

my partner tries to make me go places. i will go along sometimes so he doesn't get angry, and he says getting me out of the house will help my depression. well, it doesn't. it makes me scared and upset and i only feel better once i get inside.

if my behavior is not hurting anybody, is it okay to leave it untreated?

Hey,

I think that you should be asking yourself this instead: Does your behaviour make you unhappy? If it does, then you ought to do something about it. I'm guessing that the only way in which you feel in any way upset is because you feel 'different' from others, right? The majority of us don't like the feeling of being left-out/different. The problem that you have is one that really does require 'baby steps'. I used to be so scared of going outside that I locked myself in the toilet one day when my mother asked me to go to the shop.

What is your official diagnosis? The medications that you're taken seem 'excessive' to me. Anti-psychotics on top of all of those might not be necessary if your only problem is a bit of social anxiety. Were you always a person who favoured being solitary as opposed to being in a group? if so, then you'd have missed out on many chances to develop your social skills. In addition, i want to say that living a solitary lifestyle can result in 'abnormal' ideas such as your one about Bin Laden and people watching you. Of course, I don't know if you're actually correct in your assumptions, but neither do you [know].

Kevin