Can anyone advise me? I am so sick of feeling this way!

[CrabbyPatti]

I'll try to keep it brief.

I am suffering from some sort of depression or other mental illness, but nobody - not even my husband of 11 years - really knows how bad it is. It has been going on for years now and I have times when I feel OK-ish (blocks of a few weeks or even months) and then periods when I am on the verge of a breakdown inside, although nobody would know it.

My main problems are: terrible anxiety and a general inability to cope emotionally with stress - particularly work-related; social anxiety - I am OK when I am with people but I dread meeting up with people beforehand, even friends, and rarely answer my phone; and feeling in a really bad mood, just down and grumpy, very snappy and hostile.

I am so sick of feeling like this. I have had counselling in the past for PND (which felt very different to my 'normal' state of being - I was genuinely very down, tearful, classically depressed) which didn't help much, I'll be honest. I also took prozac for a few months but absolutely hated the spaced out feeling it gave me, so discontinued it.

I explained to my doctor how I felt about 8 months ago and she took blood tests to rule out illness and then recommended relaxation techniques, exercise and a better diet. None of that works.

WTF can I do? This is ruining my life. It affects everything - my relationships, my career, my kids. I just want to wake up feeling positive and able to take on anything, not dreading the day ahead

How honest were you with your doctor?

I wasn't this brutally honest, to be fair. I said I felt very low, tired, anxious, depressed. I didn't tell her it had been going on for years.

Seeing that it is 8 months ago anyway - it's time you go back to your GP and be really honest this time. She really shoudl do a depression questionnaire with you which you would do yourself a favour answering honestly.

this is a PND questionnaire so the one GPs use in 'ordinary' depression are slightly different, but not a lot. A score over 10 indicates you need to talk to your doc.

The thing is, those tests are phrased in a way that implies there was a good time before the depression. I can;'t even remember when I last felt not like this. This is normal for me. I really worry that maybe I am a bit mental

Still it seems you need to see your doc again and tell her how bad it is and that you feel something needs to be done about it.

Why will you not let your dh know how bad you are feeling?