To ask what the last 5 years has done to your mental health?

[Wouldloveanother]

Mines ruined to be honest.

I feel like a lot of my naivety about life has been stripped away and I’ve been left with a feeling of exhaustion and dread. My life is basically unrecognisable since March 2020.

I thought I would be ‘over it now’ but I’m not.

not looking for anything in particular, just a solidarity moan.

I’m sure it wasn’t great but COVID has been much worse.

Has it? Do you mind me asking if you have lost close family or relatives? You don't mention how COVID has directly affected you.

I can safely say a decade of recession affected my family and friends much more than a few lockdowns and doses of COVID.

Mine is actually better overall. Suffered an unimaginable, sudden loss which completely changed my life in 2018 and I struggled on without facing the grief until covid hit. I was furloughed and in lock down so finally had a chance to address my mental health. I took major strides in coming to term with my bereavement and finding inner peace.

I’ve always been a pessimist so none of it is particularly surprising to me.

That's the spirit

I consider myself to be one of the fortunate ones to be honest. Hybrid working as it now is saves me having to commute three days a week and it is a great improvement for me.

A combination of Brexit, covid and loss of a relative, lockdown, my DS's disabilities and needs and my DM being terminally ill has made this a really tough past 5 years. Feel like I am just going through the motions some days, but lucky to have good family, friends and DH to help me through.

Your hometown doesn’t have the monopoly on hard times. I’m not even sure why you’re bringing it up to be honest we’ve all lived through recession.

Hideous…
I lost my eldest son (aged 24) on Christmas Day 2019 to SADs.
We just about got a funeral in before the first lockdown, but had to ‘do’ the inquest via Skye.
I often think ‘you couldn’t write it’… It has all rocked my little family to the core.

Exactly how I feel too. I feel like a recluse.

Working on a covid ward throughout the pandemic and witnessing that amount of death (including that of a young 22yr old colleague) fucked me right up.
I'm from a rehab background, more used to getting people back on their feet. Nothing in my 30 years of NHS experience prepared me for what we dealt with.
I'm getting there now but honestly, that wanker of a politician saying that nurses were partying after work, made me feel murderous.

Crap especially in the last year. Lots of loss including my DF in March 2022. I cry most days now and more. Also quit my job in April. Lots of uncertainty and upheaval. Nothing looks like it did before.

God that is unimaginably awful. I’m so sorry.

I’m OK but I count myself fortunate for that. Having had mental health problems in the past I knew how things could spiral down so I was determined not to let that happen during Covid. I was lucky in that I could go out more than others (due to animal care) and I made the most of it. I very deliberately kept my life as normal as possible even if that meant bending the rules sometimes (e.g. finding somewhere secluded outside where I could sit and read alone) and doing as much as I could (e.g.animal care and going to the supermarket and going for walk with friends).

But I’ve seen others be absolutely broken by their fear, a fear from which they don’t seem to have recovered. I don’t know what will happen to them because mentally they’re still stuck in lockdown. I felt at the time that the covid rules were going to shred people’s sanity and sadly that looks like the case.

On the other issues like Ukraine, the government situation etc., I try to maintain a sense of perspective by reading a lot of history stuff. Bad things have always happened, but they pass.

Mine is totally fine but to explain why would be unfair and tactless. Suffice it to say that not everyone has been adversely affected.

NB: This does not mean I lack the capacity to care about the plight of others, or do nothing about it.

Austerity was an awful policy but at least had a perceivable logic. Brexit was something else entirely. It was scary to see politicians so divorced from reality, and then be rewarded for it. Even now the tories would rather die than admit it has any shortcomings. It's proper kool-aid stuff, and british politics will never recover until enough mps can get over that hysteria and/or fear of admitting the obvious.

I agree with @TheYearOfSmallThings , I grew up in Dublin in the 80's and it was bleak . Even as a child I was aware of the high unemployment levels , emigration , bombings in Northern Ireland , the hold the catholic church had over society is unimaginable unless you've lived in that situation . Of course we don't have the monopoly on hard times but we are allowed our opinion and I find it interesting that I've the same view as @TheYearOfSmallThings .
Overall my mental health is much better than was 5 years ago .

Lockdown helped myself in my husband in a way because we realised what was important in life. I was on mat leave from my demanding teaching job with an extremely high needs baby (suspected ASD but not yet diagnosed) and PND. We have many properties, so DH left his full time job and that became our income. We travelled a lot through covid despite only 'necessary' travel being allowed. It helped massively to escape lockdown and 'real life'. I left my job following mat leave and was so relieved. DC2 arrived in September last year and things have been good. The support from DH has been amazing.

However, with everything rising I am shitting myself in truth. Bank of England has raised base rates for mortgages and landlords are being hammered in every way in terms of costs. Scotland totally favours tenants and their rights and we have had major problems with that and lots of non-payments of rent. But mortgages still have to be paid. There are always horror stories about landlords but we are just a normal family and this is our means of living.

So in that way, I am most definitely worried for how we will be in the future. My mental health has definitely worsened in that respect - I was hopeful to come off antidepressants but alas the dosage has increased. Again, like lots of the PPs, I am also gutted about life in general, government responses, societal changes and cost of living. It's a lot for us all to accept.

Your hometown doesn’t have the monopoly on hard times. I’m not even sure why you’re bringing it up to be honest we’ve all lived through recession.

Well you asked how people's mental health was, and I said fine because I don't think things are worse than when I was a (happy) child, so you asked what was going on then, so I told you, and you said "COVID is worse than that", and I now realise this is not really about how anyone is feeling but just about COVID being the worst thing ever.

I will leave you to it!

About 1000% better - diagnosed with adhd in 2020 - life changing magic.

@TheYearOfSmallThings I just find it bizarre that you think recession per se is worse than recession caused by a global pandemic that also killed 180,000 people in the U.K. and crippled the health service but OK

Same but autism.

The diagnosis was a life changer in every way.

5 years ago I felt like a fraud for even daring to think I could be autistic. The GP told me I couldn't be. I had no idea how to make sense of myself, my life, my past.

My diagnosis gave me all of that and more.

Fucked it. I work front line NHS, returned from maternity leave the actual day we went into lockdown, and have a partner who already suffered with MH problems and is self employed, so yeah it’s been great.

It made me regress again. I piled on the weight after working so hard to lose it, my anxiety worsened to the point I was having panic attacks whenever I dragged myself to the shop, and I've not quite regained the confidence and self-assurance I had pre-pandemic. I'm overly-concious of my breathing and movements whenever I leave the house, to the point that even walking past someone on the street is agonising.

On the bright side, I did discover that I had been living with undiagnosed ADHD for the past 23 years. Although since that's coincided with a heightened awareness of ADHD in women, and higher rates of diagnosis (clinical and self-diagnosed) now I worry that people think I'm trying to be trendy when it comes up in conversation 😅

Absolute shit.. i thought once we got through Covid some notion of 'normality' would return, how fucking idiotic i was.
Ukraine hit, followed by a kick from climate change, followed by the energy shit coming.
All ive done this year is work and try to get some sleep, i've not socialised or even had a coffee in a cafe as im trying to save enough to get me through the Winter, but i know im not going to make financially.
I lost my best friend in December, then DS2 (23) lost 2 best friends to suicide in 3 months, DS1 lost one last year, all such lovely sweet young men..
I'm 59 in 2 weeks, another day spent by myself.. I have no fight left in me..

Much better actually. For me and my DH wfh has been a game changer for our quality of life.

Sorry, misread the question and thought this was about the last two years in particular! 😅I hit a definite peak in 2019, but the years before it weren't exactly my best. My physical and mental health both seem to wax and wane, but the past two years have definitely been some of my worst.