Post by sip15 on May 15, 2015 15:17:08 GMT
I wish I had *known* I was struggling with PTSD for the last 16 years. I simply thought the night terrors, paranoia, inability to trust others and constant depressive anxiety was simply because life was hard and everyone else was just handling it better. I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety, NOS, as a teenager and prescribed medication. No one explained to me the difference between a psychologist and a psychiatrist. The drugs did blunt the depression - and everything else, including the ability to feel much of anything (my breed of depression was and is the seething, toothed minute-by-minute agony abyss) - but they heightened my anxiety about screwing with brain chemistry. Then, my favorite writer died by suicide after trying to withdraw from 20 years of antidepressants combined with ECT and I started to see this happen over and over again so I started looking for alternatives to medicating our most sensitive, gifted and hurting members of society into oblivion. Any institution that does not catch that someone has ASD until they are 28 years old despite being in The System for over half their life deserves more scrutiny than we're currently giving it.