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Mental health

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Unsure how to proceed forwards with current mental health situation, more below:

1 reply

Eviestar17 · 20/01/2026 12:20

For about the past three months I would say I've progressively been working myself into an anxiety fuelled nervous breakdown. At the moment one of my parents has late stage lung cancer, and as a knock on effect, it's now making me paranoid about my mum's health. I got queried as having OCD often as a child but it never got formally diagnosed, and in adulthood, it comes out as me feeling like I need to obsessively check and press my breasts every single day to look for lumps, being hyper-reactive and overly analytical of people's facial expressions, with the health anxiety, it literally gets to the point where I feel like people can look at me when I'm out in public and that they will be able to tell that something is wrong with my health just by looking at me. Literally all my time in the day is spent by hyperfixating on the fact that I probably have a genetic disposition to getting breast cancer, I don't have the will to want to do anything that is a form of commitment because it seems futile if I'm going to get diagnosed with, or already have breast cancer. I often feel like moving out would be a helpful thing to do as it could put some detachment between the anxiety, but then I would be constantly paranoid about what would be happening at home after I left. When I've spoken to people about this, their attitude has felt insensitive as I've been told that if I did get diagnosed with breast cancer, what would be so bad about it, and it doesn't seem to take into account the fact that most young women won't have to mentally prepare for potentially having to have a mastectomy, and i already have

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Eviestar17 · 20/01/2026 12:35

Last Friday I got so anxious and distressed that my mum ended up phoning the crisis team. They gave the advice of making sure that anything harmful is locked away etc(my anxiety does tend to come out as self harm as a large part of my health anxiety surrounds the belief that my body has allowed a physical illness to be inside it, and so I feel like I don't have any interest in being kind to or taking care of a body that is going against me) and they tried to be helpful, but the reality is that all they generally say is that if you are in a complete mental health or anxiety crisis, then to call the police or dial 999, both of which I feel like are not completely constructive or appropriate responses for someone who is already experiencing high psychological or emotional distress. I'm not choosing to have the level of anxiety I have. This has happened as a knock on effect of my dad being unwell, and feeling like now it's me and my mum's turn to get cancer(breast cancer) and die from it, it might sound pessimistic but I don't live a life around focusing on just going out and doing things day to day, I have a life that circulates around building my timetable around

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