Married to someone with Anxiety | Hacker News Reader

Married to someone with Anxiety

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10 pointsthrowaway3096 comments

Her symptoms described in this article are spot on.

My anxiety attacks were exactly the same, right down to crippling fear, and needing emergency medical help because I thought I was going to die. It doesn't help that most first responders are ill equipped to deal with mental illness (not their fault, they are trained in keeping physically damaged people alive long enough to get them to hospital) so they strap on the ECGs and tell you and people at the time that they suspect that you are having a heart attack.

People with mental illness need all the support they can get. Contrary to popular belief, it's not something we can 'snap out of'. It's very destructive, not only to the person suffering, but for their relationships and people close to them as well.

Back to the article though; If you get diagnosed with Cancer, your loved ones are also offered counselling, but for mental illness there is no such structure. The carers are left to work it out for themselves, often getting incredibly frustrated as there are no physical symptoms to work with.

To this day I have no idea why my partner stayed with me during my worst times - it was incredibly hard on them (and probably will be again), and I would have not blamed them for leaving if they had.

And to top it off, we have no drugs that are both effective and effective for the long term to treat anxiety per se (maybe an anti-depressant will help you think more clearly and not think yourself into anxiety, and there are some semi-wild off label avenues, but...). Also the case for personality disorders, but they sound to me like problems that aren't amenable to medication.

(Whereas we have imperfect but often very effective, even miraculous as my mother observed first hand in her nursing career drug treatments for the other major mental illnesses, depression, bi-polar disorder, and schizophrenia.)

Exactly. I'm on a beefy anti-depressant to treat my depression which also has the added bonus of calming my anxiety - it's the only avenue long term. Short term there's relaxant drugs to overcome the attack-in-progress but nothing available to take as an ongoing management dose.

I myself have a genetic disabling combination of anxiety and "depression of a bi-polar nature", our best guess, it's not the normal unipolar and my engineer uncle with this is frankly bi-polar, but e.g. self-administered cognitive therapy in the '80s helped a lot, and at least for me there's one other treatment, low dose (50-100mg) Seroquel taken before bed (and now very small doses at 8 hour intervals in between to avoid withdrawal effects during the day). Would not be able to sleep more than 4 hours a night without this....

Seroquel is a tranquilizer (aka neuroleptic aka 'antipsychotic')...

Anxiety is partially a metabolic problem.

I have two friends whose stimulant use turned them into alcoholics. One quit meth amphetamine, then the anxiety started. She discovered vodka after getting hooked on benzodiazepines.

Alcohol is broken down into acetate, which is an energy-rich molecule that is easy for the brain/nervous system to use as fuel, especially when those cells are insulin resistant (and therefore have a hard time using sugar as fuel).

> it's the only avenue long term.

fixing the metabolism, and reprogramming the 'fight or flight' response, is an option too.

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