hello, i am 19, male
I have been stuck in my home for about a year now. I got really depressed last summer and spent the whole summer avoiding friends, snapping at people, being generally moody and mean. I went on long walks all day, stopped eating, started feeling sick all the time, having panic attacks.
Then i got sick on some perscribed pills i took for acne, they gave me gastritis, nothing serious, but i just never seemed to get well again. They later diagnosed me with panic disorder, said i was getting anxcious when i was going out of the house, which lead to panic attacks, then i was stressed the rest of the time which was causing stress symptoms - nausea and stomach pain. This all sounds very beliveable to me and i accept that, so they put me on anti-depressants (prozac) to help treat the panic disorder, but i have only just reached the 4 weeks line so i'm still waiting for it to kick in.
The thing is, when reading up about panic disorder i began to find out it can be a syptom of bi-polar and the more i read, the more i thought "i can relate to this". I go through stages where i am elevated, social, confident, my friends say i get really annoying because i get so playful in these stages and say things way out of line and laugh at inapropriate things. In these stages i laugh when i'm on my own, just at the smallest thing, an anything sometimes - i speak to myself, do impressions, all sorts of things. Then I get these times when i just can't stop wanting to be creative, i feel like the ideas are being poured into my head so fast and i have to write them down. I wrote a book, an entire novel, i take photos, write poems, draw on my walls. I read somewhere that when people get hypomania (i think thats what it was called) they find themselves ryhming when they write without meaning to, and i do this constantly when i'm in these patches. Then i beat myself up about things, i tell myself that my stomach pain and panic attacks are some terrible illness that will never go away, i can't stop thinking about it, i worry that i'm not sucessful enough, that i won't make anything of myself, and this all leads to suicidal thoughts, which have lead to me planning my suicide in detail at times.
I don't know what to think. I just feel very sick all the time at the moment. Sometimes i have friends here or something and i forget for a while and the tummy aches and nausea go away, but then they come back when i remember and then i can't work out if they never go away and i just forget they are there, or if they are never really there at all, and it is just stress.
I just don't know what is what, i don't know what to do or how to stop thinking.
I'm sorry this is so long i am just a very desperate guy.
thanks for reading.