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angstlessk (8,431 posts) Fri Apr 29, 2016, 03:54 AMCan we all post what we think might be the beginning of our mental illness? I posted some of my history...and you post, instead of how you are right now, how you got here? I think that might be helpful? Even if all you need is tea and sympathy...my mother said, as I was cutting my wrists in the bathroom...all Katherine wants is attention, as if attention was something to eschew...we ALL need attention at some time. And I want this forum to give us what we need...ATTENTION His/Herstory what brung you here?
hunter (24,032 posts) Sat Apr 30, 2016, 12:55 AM18. I've got a family history of major depression and autistic spectrum stuff. Three of my grandparents were alcoholics. None of my grandparents were fully functional in ordinary society, and some of their siblings were entirely dysfunctional. After she retired, my grandma lost it completely and had to be removed from her home as a danger to herself and others. She was impossible to live with and would get kicked out of nursing homes, and then live with my parents. There was a lot of mental illness kept in the closet, and I think my parent's generation was the first willing to talk about it. In previous generations even suicides were covered up. I had a tough time in middle and high school. I was a weird skinny, squeaky, clumsy, highly reactive kid who was always an easy target for bullies. I quit high school for college and it was wonderful. The physical violence against me ended. I was still a very strange kid. I was "asked" to take time out from college twice. The campus police knew me for my odd behaviors, things like obsessively running at two o'clock in the morning with bare bloody feet. I was always friendly toward the police and mostly harmless, an interesting diversion from their usual sordid graveyard shift duties. The first time I was asked to take time off from school was for fighting with a teaching assistant. I'd verbally provoked him into throwing things at me, including a textbook. He'd started with his chalk. An overhead projector got knocked to the floor and broken too. I used to live in the university computer lab when I wasn't running obsessively, or up to other mischief. Sometimes literally lived in the computer lab. There was also a time I was living in a church parking lot in my car, and another time I was squatting in an apartment after the people I was renting a room from disappeared one day, taking my share of the rent with them. I slept on the floor by the window always ready to leap out and run away if the landlord showed up. I finished out the school term that way. It took me nine years to graduate from college, and I have many stories. During that time I also enjoyed something like a David Lynch version of My Big Fat Greek wedding with a woman who was using me to prove to herself and her family that she wasn't a lesbian. Her girlfriend tried to kill herself in my bathtub. After that things got even worse. When I met my wife I was doing pretty well. But it's always a merry-go-round with meds. My darkest depressed state is entirely empty. All that's left is my OCD. I stop eating, I stop paying attention to various other health issues I have, until the OCD reminds me I can't do the stuff I need to do (some of it entirely irrational, like plucking certain hairs off my face) if I'm dead.
