wilko wrote:Phew! Thanks DeepShadow,
You're quite welcome.
I'm new to this forum. I didn't even think forums for this sort of thing existed, but when I stumbled across this I was so pleased and relieved to find somewhere where there are 'people like me' to talk to, identify with and learn from.
I'm pretty new myself, but I've been an advocate for invisible disabilities for a long time.
When you've suffered with what I feel is a crippling disorder for so long, and never met or talked to anyone with the same problem you feel incredibley alienated and so different from everyone else.
Very true. Perhaps especially in the case of social phobia, where the patient is often terrified of seeking help, for fear of appearing "different."
I know I may have sounded naive with my comment about buying medication over the internet, but when I saw the posts mentioning Nardil and Parnate (wich I have researched), I felt gutted after being refused these drugs by my doctor, to hear people saying that they actually work.
That must have been awful! I know how much of my life has been hampered by anxiety, and the "what ifs" as to how things might be different if I were diagnosed after my first attacks (second grade) instead of at the age of 22!
Don't let the "what ifs" get to you. This is the life you have, this is where you are now. You have the power to change these things.
After twenty years (I'm in my forties now) you start to feel your life is passing you by, and you do feel very sad at the thought that the rest of your life will probably be wasted.
I know, but it doesn't need to be like that! Time passed is not necessarily time wasted, if you learn from it now. Besides, with all the improvements in health care, who knows how long some of us might live?
I was taken aback by the comments from "somebody", particularly the "no more of that social phobia crap" which made me feel like crap.
Yeah, as you can see, I took that kinda personally as well.
As Lucidor has stated, Somebody seems to feel like what worked for him will work for us, and in that sense we have to give him credit for trying to help.
Unfortunately, some people who try to help are not qualified. It's kinda like a person with myopia (nearsightedness) giving their glasses to someone with astigmatism (totally different problem) and saying, "These worked for me." When the astigmatic starts to squint and says things are blurry, we myopics need to be careful not to blow that off as the same thing we went through.
It bears repeating that many mental conditions may actually be different conditions lumped together under a single diagnosis because of common symptoms. If that's confusing, consider blindness. There are hundreds of ways to go blind, and different types of blindness can be treated in different ways. There are surgeries that can remove cataracts on someone's eyes, but those won't help someone who has nerve damage, only cataracts.
As we understand the brain and mind better, we may divide different conditions under separate diagnoses, but until they they are lumped together by symptoms. We all have anxiety in public settings, therefore we all have social phobia.
This is especially relevant to your case because
the drugs that worked for some people may not work for you. Drugs are serious business, and you need to take them under the advice of a qualified physician.
I suppose I was expecting a level of sensitivity on a forum such as this, and was not going to respond to her/him or post on here again, but after reading your comments I'm glad to see that there are people here that are not so quick to judge and lecture someone they know very little about.
Of course, but then sometimes we think we know more than we do, because it just sounds do darn familiar.
Thanks for making me feel better.
You are very welcome!
Somebody,
Please do not imagine that you know more about my problem (social phobia) than I do myself.
I think that's good advice for all of us.
I wish the only thing I was lacking in was "self esteem".
Dont' we all.
Have you any experience of social phobia?
Apparently (s)he was diagnosed with it. Then again, I was originally diagnosed with panic disorder, so who knows? I've never heard of somone "curing" social phobia by improving their self esteem. Not to refute that Somebody has a changed life now, but exactly from what to what is hard for anybody to say.
We have a saying in psychology, "The map is not the territory." It bears thinking about.
We all have a set of instinctive fears: of falling, of the dark, of lobsters, of falling on lobsters in the dark, of speaking before a rotary club, and of the words, "some assembly required."--Dave Barry
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