Posted by King Vultan on July 13, 2004, at 8:19:24
In reply to Help for my son, posted by theDad on July 12, 2004, at 21:28:32
My own story has some resemblances to your son's except that it is displaced 20 years backwards in time, beginning in a time period where there was more of a stigma about mental illness than there is now. I also suffered from OCD and severe anxiety in my teens and 20's but unfortunately did not ever see a psychiatrist until I was 30. By then, a chronic depression had set in, which has still not completely abated (I'm now 40 and taking an MAOI after trying about 10 other drugs).
I'd be interested to know what drugs your son has been on and which worked better and which worked worse. Also, how much talk therapy has he had? A great deal of the progress I made in dealing with my own anxiety was identifying behaviors that played a role in increasing or decreasing it. For instance, I found that becoming more honest and objective while simultaneously decreasing the strong tendency I had to rationalize had a significant effect in reducing my anxiety levels. Certainly, drugs such as Zoloft and Effexor were a great aid to me in helping create a calmer mental envionment where I could get more of a handle on my problems (severe anxiety can be extremely distracting and crippling), but in the end, the real key to lowering anxiety is figuring out why one is anxious to begin with and then making behavioral changes to gradually lower one's anxiety levels.
At one point in my college years, my stress and anxiety levels were about a 12 on a scale of 1-10, so high that I was a bit mystified as to how my body could even go on functioning. Today, when I'm in an unmedicated state, I am not particularly functional because of my depression, but my anxiety levels, at least, are not drastically higher than what they are when I'm taking an antidepressant. So I seem to have gotten a fairly good handle on the anxiety problem, anyway, and if I can come to terms with a problem that was so deeply ingrained in my personality, I would be hopeful that others can, too.
Todd
poster:King Vultan
thread:365502
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20040712/msgs/365588.html