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 nearly died in 2018 and had to give up my chance of having biological children in order to survive. Got myself back on my feet and then headed into 2019 with more hope. Had a nervous breakdown and cut off my abusive parents in 2019. Got myself back on my feet and then headed into 2020 with more hope. COVID. Massively, massively increased work hours due to over half the workforce reducing hours to 50% or less to look after kids but work still needing done. Did that for two years until I was pretty much a husk of a human being. And then when people finally started to come back to work and relieve the childless people, 2022 hit. Cost of living crisis. Ukraine crisis. Energy crisis. Climate change. Strikes. Talk of schools going to three days and parent colleagues disappearing again.

I do sometimes wonder what the point of me still being here is. I have no children, no parents, the world is literally on fire and the future looks increasingly dreadful. If there was a guaranteed painless way of ending my life, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

Yeah, sick of seeing "dog whistle", tbh. It just means "someone is thinking unauthorised thoughts" and thus proves LondonWolf's comment correct. I agree with LW, for what it's worth.

To respond to the thread, I'm OK. I realise I'm fortunate in that I already worked from home and I love it. Also feel very lucky to have moved house in 2019. If COVID had struck a few years earlier I'd have been a min-wage worker in the service industry living in a too-small rented house with a dickhead landlord. Instead we were able to spend lockdown in a house with plenty of room and a fixed mortgage. I really, really felt for those stuck in unsuitable homes or with horrible partners.

I would've agreed a couple of years ago but Covid gave me a kick up the arse to make better friendships and get married. My dad died on his own which was devastating though.

My mental health is bad. Covid lockdowns absolutely broke me and I've basically lost my marriage to it.
I believe I have undiagnosed adhd/asd and I managed quite well previously with a good routine and most importantly spending time alone every day. That keeps my mental health on an even keel.
Then all of a sudden I had 2 kids to home educate and my husband working from home. My son also has adhd and the homeschooling experience was quite frankly horrendous. I cried every day for months. I was never alone. We were together 24/7.
Since then my husband was able to continue working from home and now does so all the time. It's not his fault at all but it's contributed to the end of our marriage. He has become lazy, socially isolated, very overweight, never leaves the house, he's depressed but won't admit or acknowledge it.
I have lost all of my confidence, I'm also very overweight, my life is very small. Every day is a battle to get through and I'm counting down to bedtime. Our world has become very small.

@itsagranddayfordrying and @TheYearOfSmallThings I’m another one who grew up in 1980’s Dublin and my memories of my childhood are in black and white instead of colour. I really resonated with what you said. I’ve always tried to protect my dc and give them a carefree childhood but now I’m wondering if I’ve set them up for a rougher ride!

I think the Irish govt’s initial handling of the pandemic and the general good feeling of everyone pulling together had a protective effect. It went to shit after, and that bloody endless lockdown in 2021 was something else. Watching Brexit from the sidelines, so to speak, has been different to living in it. Obviously there’s huge anger about the damage done up North and the peace is hanging by a thread, but on a political level we’ve never before as a country had such powerful allies as the EU and the US against British interference. In the US at least that came about because of our emigrants who left because they were at rock bottom. I think that we expect hard times, but we expect to survive them - it’s embedded in the national psyche.

None of that is to say that my mh isn’t struggling - these are awful times to live through and I think it will get worse before it gets better. My memories of the Cold War are of the young people breaking the intransigence and insisting on seeing our common humanity. Sting singing about the Russians loving their children was genuinely a revolutionary notion against the idea. I remember watching Arafat and Rabin shaking hands and the sheer disbelief as the Good Friday Agreement grew from an unrealistic ideal to an actual peace. It’s unbelievable that all of that is just being thrown away. And so soon. The current generation of younger people are focused on climate change which is important but it’s leading to a dangerously puritanical and anti humanist mindset. I fully expect that we will see mass murders and genocides in the name of protecting the earth. There’s no sense of hope anymore and losing hope is the most dangerous thing.

Imagine what it did to children, treated like inherent disease-mongers. Isolated from family. told that they had to take medication to protect others. Not seeing faces properly. Being terrified purposely and "instilled with a sense of danger" on purpose.

Reading this thread has been heartbreaking and at the same time I feel less isolated as a result.

My life was pretty good pre March 2020 and I had every expectation it would improve. Single parenting through lockdown, school closures etc broke me. I feel like I've used up all my emotional resilience (and I continue to have to draw on those reserves to support my kids, who are in some ways unscathed and in other ways have tbh experienced a very unsettling 2.5 years and some seriously suboptimal parenting), and meanwhile the whole world is imploding around us. It feels absolutely like 'what next?', biblical flood and drought and war and plague, is this actually the collapse of our civilisation or is that a nonsense whipped up by the media to sell papers/clicks?

I am grateful for my children as they keep me tethered to this world.

I am working harder than ever but earning in real terms much less than I did five years ago. My childcare arrangements are wholly inadequate in parts but I'm locked into high housing costs (no way to downsize) so I cant contemplate changing my priorities. All my friends are just as frazzled. I just want someone to come and make it all better!

May I say...I like you! 🤗

My life has changed beyond recognition.

I do go to work but I’m only just hanging in there. I sit with my door closed, don’t engage with anyone, wear a mask everywhere but my room.
I’ve developed crippling OCD, live in constant terror and am so utterly anxious about everything. I can’t even go to the pharmacy to pick up my medication because interacting with people causes me sleepless nights, rehashing every single syllable of the conversation.
The home shopping delivery gives me a panic attack. DH has to deal with the delivery.
I would be happier if I never had to leave the house again. In fact, on my recent 2 week break, I left the property twice only.
MH help after a referral by the GP consisted of 4 telephone calls giving instructions on meditation. Useless.

Thank you LondonWolf ❤️

I agree OP.

The last few years really fucked with me mentally. It's the closest I've ever really been to a mental breakdown, and make me deeply uphappy. I agree it's also not over yet (although for me it's much better). I do think it may have permanently changed things in myself and my relationship.

It’s unrecognisable to 2019 but not because of the obvious things.

I was very lucky during the pandemic work-wise and not knowing anyone who really suffered but I had a bit of a meltdown just as it was all starting here because I was worried for my parents - one of whom is seriously ill.

I think I would have bounced back after the first lockdown but I just had too much time to think. As it turns out, I really rely on momentum and keeping crazy busy to be high-functioning and ‘not sad’. Obviously, all that went out of the window and I’ve not (yet, hopefully) been able to get it back.

Now, I struggle to rein in my ADHD at work and I have dysthmia from the frustration of it all - which means I’m not interested in pretty much anything, even lovely things. I sit around a lot, feeling rubbish, and I have no motivation or energy to do anything about it. I hang onto my job through sheer luck and a bit of frustrated effort.

I’ve always know my ‘before’ was not a healthy, happy way to live but I was perfectly content with feeling very little and achieving loads.

May I say...I like you! 🤗

Right back at you!

Since COVID I've lost touch with the few former "friends" I thought I had, I've spent whole weeks in hospital anxious over suicidal teenagers, I've been stabbed by one of my own children. I've realised CAMHS is just an actual joke, even to the staff, they definitely dont take problems seriously. As a family we have attended one celebratory event since December 2019. Without any friends and being far from family I don't think we eill be invited to anything for a few years either. Our life is literally ours alone. We are entirely on our own, there's no support, no celebrations to share. Just work or school and holidays where its just the same but in a different place. As a family we are reflecting very hard on why we bother. Unfortunately when there are mental health problems friends and family all run for the hills and aren't interested.

Destroyed through years of infertility and 2 still born babies

I've always had poor mental health, so not much changed there.

My parents died of covid, very good friend of 25 years died.

Diagnosed with 2 chronic illnesses.

Reading back through my journals of 2018 until April 2020, I don't recognise that person anymore. I had a spark and enthusiasm for life which no longer exists. Hopefully it will return, but I'm not sure it will ever be as strong as it was before 2020.

I watched my mum die slowly and painfully over a year from 2017-2018. That stripped away much of the joy I had for life and left me contemplating suicide. The thought of my own kids losing their mum stopped me, but that's the only thing that did.

My mental health is shredded. It is starting to patch itself back together but I am a totally different person than I was in 2016. I'm much more jaded, anxious and unpleasant than I was.

Long term Tory rule will depress anyone, especially in conjunction with a global pandemic which has brought to the surface all the bad decisions made by government or chickens have just come home to roost.

The country feels like it's falling apart. Nothing works. Just getting a train (When they're not on strike) is fraught with all kinds of problems.

Everything has felt shit since the banking system collapsed in 2008. The economy has never really recovered and Tory ideological austerity (i.e. the poorest hard) led to a lost decade in the 2010's. Brexit was in the middle of that but we never left the EU till 2020 and 2020/2021 was dominated by a pandemic. Now we're getting the repercussions of austerity, a pandemic and Brexit with a bloody war on top in Ukraine which has created mass inflation.

My mental health is fine.

I'm a lot more concerned about the state of the country than I was 10 years ago, and decidedly more pissed off at the government even than I normally am; and obviously there's the whole World Comes To An End stuff, but you know, I grew up with that.

Absolutely. The state always exercises power disproportionately against those with the least of it, so making a public health matter a criminal one inevitably meant that people who are otherwise marginalised would be disproportionately affected.

To that end, this news story today didn't remotely surprise me

www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/17/black-people-in-england-and-wales-twice-as-likely-to-be-fined-for-breaking-lockdown-rules

I've been sectioned twice since 2020 for a month each time, so yeah..not great.

It's just taken me more than three hours to get home from work and I'm ashamed to say I rang my mum in tears at one point. It's like all my resilience vanished.

Thank you, love the username too!