EDIT: thank you all so very much for your support, you have no idea how much it means when you are totally alone struggling so badly with all of this. Seeing typed messages isn't quite the same as seeing and speaking to someone on cam which I prefer but I am very grateful to you all
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Rant time because I am so upset right now.
After years of trying, I saw a glimmer of hope last week when I had a video call with a Psychiatrist who was rather unique compared to other professionals I have seen over the years. A semi retired Dr from Baghdad whose approach was so different to any other I had experienced. He gave me hope and boy did I hold onto it thinking that it might finally be a turning point for me in helping me cope with a lifetime of anxiety and undealt with trauma. Alas that hope was taken away from me this afternoon when we had our consult. I was under the impression we would have weekly therapy consults which I desperately need and my GP knows I need long term therapy. He dropped the bombshell today in saying that he doesn't do therapy and even though he is MY Psychiatrist we would keep in touch every 6 weeks or so. All he could do was basically prescibe me more meds (like they do) and he ended up recommending a small dose of Quetiapine alongside my AD; which on reading does help a lot of people with their anxiety issues BUT knowing my thyroid issues he clearly didn't do any research to see that it interferes with thyroid function.
I am so beyond broken/upset right now at how many times I have been misled. The system is totally broken and they are full of shit; they tell you there is help out there and to reach out and when you do it doesn't really exist. I have worked so damn hard the last few years in trying to help myself and also reaching out for help just to be kicked in the teeth.
He still insisted I seek the professional help of an Endo again but I told him all they do is monitor thyroid levels and tweak meds which is what I am already doing. He seemed to think they could do more but I couldn't convince him otherwise.
There is absolutely no-one or anywhere for me to turn now. I just sit at the computer day in and day out trying to find distractions from all these awful symptoms and no energy or want to do anything
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Jefner
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Please don’t give up hope Jefner; there are plenty of professionals out there who can help with anxiety and trauma.
When I was (mis)diagnosed with ‘health anxiety’ by my GP (later finding here that my spike in anxiety was linked to thyroid medication not being optimal) I did receive help from a psychotherapist. Although CBT is not for everyone, it massively helped me. You may need to converse with a few professionals, before finding one whose approach benefits you. Perhaps have a look at this link:psychotherapy.org.uk/
believe me Buddy I have tried EVERYONE over the years, EVERYONE. I have researched a lot, approached a lot and unless you have a good bank balance you are left out in the cold. Back around 2017 I was assessed and informed CBT was no good for me, I needed a deeper one, then got shuffled into psycology and after 10 weeks of that, repeating myself and her not listening, that came to an end. Went private last year with a Counsellor using the small amount of money mum left me in her Will, and that was a waste of time and I couldn't afford the fees anymore. GP knows I need long term therapy but just gave me a list of numbers to phone and self refer when SHE should have done it as by law she has a duty of care. At the end of the day NO-ONE cares anymore, simple as that
I just want some support and help but it seems that I am just not worthy
I had a lot of issues years ago, early years trauma and lots of adult stuff too. I went to psychotherapy for many months via NHS and whilst I've got to be honest and say talking about all the crap I've been through actually made me feel worse ( I function and feel better if I just ignore it), I realise many people do benefit from it.
Anyway I reached out to IAPT last year be ause I was experiencing significant long term balance issues with no proper medical explanation. And it started to make me anxious, so I hoped I'd get the old talking therapy again. Only to find the NHS in my area no longer offers it. Its CBT or nothing. I was given the option of 6 weekly online sessions or 6 30 minute face to face.
I took the f2f and what a waste of 180 minutes of my life I'll never get back. I'm sure CBT can work well for some and in certain situations or with certain conditions, but it achieved the grand total of FA for me. I was actually pretty shocked that this was all that was offered and once again it highlights that mental health is truly the Cinderella of the health service.
CBT in my view is not appropriate for people dealing with trauma or severe mental health issues. Thinking your problems away can be helpful for less serious cases of anxiety or depression and changing negative patterns of thoughts is something we can probably all benefit from but it is not the be all and end all and other therapies should be available.
i agree, sometimes I don't want to talk about stuff, brings it all to the forefront of my mind but I do need help and have done for a long time but all doors are now closed to me. I have tried EVERYWHERE
I found CBT to be damaging too. Not appropriate in our circumstances I would say. Listening better. But ACTIVE listening. That is, concrete replies that counsellors have heard what you say and make every attempt to understand what you are communicating. Feeding it back to you in their own words to ensure best understanding between you.
I really feel your pain. Coincidentally, I had another knock back yesterday and really struggling today. It's been a decade of fighting to be taken seriously.
It's a battle and the medical professionals I've had contact with lately have been uncaring, brusque and utterly uninformed. Major medical gaslighting going on. I feel completely spent.
You're right, many of them truly don't care at all what happens and just want to tick boxes. Shame on them! BUT - people on here do care. Sharing on here and reading others' comments is keeping my head above water.
Please accept a big virtual hug and please make sure friends and family know how you're feeling right now.
One thing is clear: you prefer support from peers. Perhaps even online as supposed to offline (though i presume that will be determined by circumstances too).
Perhaps forget the traditional channels of help, and look into ‘peer support’. You are not alone. You’re not the first, and you will not be the last to be so let down by the health industry. Hence, it’s your peers that get it and will be there for you and one day you will for them.
Hang in there! Meanwhile, you own we are all here.
I really hope you can get the help you need as I had to watch my daughter go through this. She was about as low as she could get and was prescribed Quetiapine which messed with her head so much that it ended up pushing her over the edge 12 months ago. Only after she’d tried to commit suicide, by taking handfuls of drugs she’d been prescribed over the months as she descended into depression, did she finally get the psychiatric help she so desperately needed from the NHS.
Thankfully, she did survive and has fought back from that place… it’s taken a year so far, but she is getting stronger by the day and her “triggers” are becoming less significant and easier to ignore.
You will get there, even if you come here and vent on a regular basis, you’ll get at least the moral support you need. I wish you all the best from the bottom of my heart. ❤️
I find these are my most painful times. Hope and then hope dashed. This is the roller coaster we seem to be on.
It’s little comfort but rather than this illness being mistaken for who we are, in moments of true awfulness, I find that I can better now differentiate between the two. It helps me hold on.
You can help yourself with a minimal doctors input. Things that helped me; Gingko biloba , vitamins and supplements , mindfulness. I found an excellent mindfulness coach and after a few sessions regained a belief in myself, started meditating and reading an excellent book by Eckhart Tolle ‘The power of Now’. I read over and over again and find it very calming. If also means you need to slow down , keep bringing yourself to the present moment. With all that plus Gingko Biloba and supplements I am fine now; it is possible to bring yourself from absolute despair to wellness. Prior to taking control I was threatened by specialists that I will have further strokes (had two ) unless I continue taking their blood thinners that were giving me very bad side effects: not sleeping , high anxiety, nausea and despair. Coming back to nature is the key: natural supplements, walks in the country, natural foods, meditation, taking time for yourself. You will need to find just one person to help you with this and it should not be a doctor - they are mostly servants of pharmaceutical industry. We have a lot of power to heal ourselves . Take care. All the best x
I had to respond to you. I completely understand how desperate you can feel on this medical emotional rollercoaster. I've been there, done that, more than once, over the last 30 years.
Hope is what you need, and support.
I found that talking to family/friends was not an option. So many were ignorant, unable or unwilling to offer support. Many friends simply disappeared off the radar. 'A friend in need is a bl**dy nuisance.'
I found talking to mental health professionals was equally a waste of time for me, because they either think that something bad happened to you in your childhood, or, that you need to pull yourself together.
I did talking therapy for 12 weeks x 1 hour sessions. It takes time to relax with someone new. I was disappointed when it finished, although the pace was impossible to attain, at that time.
I knew someone, a man, who was a psychiatric nurse, who ended up in a mental health hospital following a personal trauma.
He was previously a person who could not understand what and how a person with mental health problems can suffer and why they couldn't help themselves.
Once it happened to him, it became crystal clear that some people need more help.
After recovering, he was not allowed to return to work as a mental health nurse, due to his own mental health journey.
Whilst part of me understands this, his own personal experience would have been priceless to other people suffering that there is hope.
CBT didn't help me at all.
Cut a very long story short, my first recovery, about 25 years ago, from depression and anxiety, came about because of my knowledge of my own body and persistence to prove a premature menopause. I was repeatedly told that I was too young.
Following treatment with HRT, also being on antidepressants, I got my life back.
Now, for the last few years, I am struggling with Hashimoto's Hypothyroidism and adequate treatment, which has plummeted me to new depths.
Hope, or a route forwards, keeps me going, although Dr says NO, has been a contributing factor to my mental health decline, no doubt about it.
Why, oh why, cannot doctors recognise that patients know when something is wrong with their body/mind. AND body and mind are linked.
Hormone imbalances can play havoc with the brain and body.
Little is done, in my opinion, to diagnose hormonal imbalances. It is mostly ignored.
Mental health issues are automatically treated with antidepressants and those phrases.....'you need to get out more' or 'go for a walk'.
No acknowledgement that there may be a medical cause.
Do you supplement with Vitamin D + K2?
Low Vitamin D can contribute to depression and anxiety.
I want you to know that you are NOT alone.
I, like you, have found the mental health service totally lacking in regards to long waiting lists and insufficient resources. Any on-line resources provided initially required money to sign up. Absurd.
Like you, my GP prescribed propranolol for me, for anxiety, which also affects T4 conversion to T3. I was on it for over a year before I became aware of that fact. Naturally I stopped it.
It is a shame there is not an online community for people with depression and anxiety to share their experiences with peers. Friendships can materialise.
I hope you can have some hope that things can and will get better.
Keep asking questions, keep searching for answers. Sometimes, things can turn up to inspire hope.
I send my best wishes to you.
A hug helps, significantly, I know, so I'm sending a big box of hugs to you.
Please don’t give up seek someone who knows more about therapy a psychologist - psychotherapist etc There are other psychological techniques and therapies out there not just CBT if that hasn’t helped…I know there’s way more to help as my daughter is a psychologist.
A psychiatrist (in most cases) in my opinion isn’t as well trained in this area, again it’s med school pharmacology based …it has its place and they unfortunately have hierarchy in this area… and other than those that have taken extra courses the ones that prescribe pharmaceutical products.
The worse thing these medical professionals can do is dismiss and not listen to patients and begs belief why they can’t see their actions cause more or bring on health anxiety and why many end up taking their own health into their own hands and challenge these people as not being heard and understood.
Anxiety does exacerbate many conditions and causes conditions and only being able to speak and try to resolve any problems or traumas we go around in circles.
Sometimes in therapy you have to go to dark places to find the light and being uncomfortable is something which may happen but hopefully you’ll come out better in the end.
Part of feeling awful is how we explain bad events. If our 'explanatory style' for bad events is pessimistic, we're going to feel worse, even hopeless. As thyroid patients, we often experience the worst medicine has to offer and have to endure the long wait between treatment adjustments, which may not give us back our health for some time. For us, it's essential to develop a method to manufacture hope as we research our condition.
As your post is about psychiatry (which primarily deals with providing medication as a solution, rather than talking through things), I'd like to focus on what you can do non-medicinally and suggest some resources that I've personally used and have been extremely helpful to me. I realize that you've probably been given dozens of titles of books to read and that my book suggestion will only add to that number, but here goes anyway. Sorry if it offends you.
Learned Optimism - Martin Seligman - this book has a 48 point questionnaire that you fill out prior to reading about the process. This is a scientific method of becoming more optimistic. Optimism is tied to wellness, just like pessimism is linked to disease.
The Option Institute - They teach people how to question their 'unhappy' beliefs. They've helped thousands of people, including their own son, who was severely autistic but is now a fully functional person with a near genius IQ.
I've been to this institute a number of times. What they teach (they offer books and tapes as well) is phenomenal. They call it "The Gift Of a Question" and it's based on a nonjudgmental Socratic dialogue method. They also offer personal coaching.
I don't get paid to mention these resources; they are part of my own library of emotional wellness.
Regarding anxiety specifically, getting the right amount of both T4 and T3 was crucial for me, with the final step being that I changed my nutrition...I drastically reduced simple sugars.
I totally agree to everything you have said I'm afraid the NHS are definitely not fit for purpose it took my GP over 18 months to finally diagnose me with a very overactive thyroid.
Now with hyperthyroidism you get anxious I was having so many problems, shaking, lost a lot of weight had really bad insomnia I was also jittery , my gp took these symptoms to first be menopause and put me on antidepressants ( I couldn't take HRT) he sighted my symptoms to depression and I attended CBT which did absolutely nothing for me , in fact it made me more angry no one was actually listening to my concerns ..which was the way my health was heading DOWNHILL ..
I struggled on until in 2018 when after several collapses at home I was taken to our surgery where a new gp diagnosed me, the words from her mouth were like a wave of .. I knew something was very wrong and it needed medical treatment not sitting in meetings ot taking antidepressants.
But I must state that in 2014 my gp sent me to a specialist and she did bloods ,in her report she stated ...this lady as 2 short suppressed TSH with episodes of thyroiditis ( subclinical hyperthyroidism) would you please keep an eye on her thyroid function.
I was never told about this report and found it in 2020 in my records ( gp never did follow-up thyroid function).
This as scared me for life, as I went into thyroid storm and ultimately lost my thyroid in 2019 and since thyroidectomy I've struggled tremendously ( thyroid medication not working for me) but the old NHS have referred back to there old ways ,ignoring my pleas that the thyroid hormone is not working and just repeating what they did all those years ago....Will this ever change?
I have no faith it ever will!!! , I have also been diagnosed with primary hyperparathyroidism and at certain points in my life since 2020 have contemplated taking my life, in A&E in 2021 I blurted this out and were seen at home by NHS councillors in suicide, I'm afraid they were pretty useless and determined I was of no harm to myself after only 2 sessions 😡 the person who pulled me out of it was my son.
My faith in the NHS is zero I no longer trust anything they say or do, but I will still fight on as they are here for the patient not the other way round👍
I hope to god you can get some help with what your going through ❤️ because I know everyday is a struggle ❤️❤️❤️
Are ther equine or canine therapy groups available. For years, my horses and dogs were my go-to therapists - they are totally non-judgemental, totally forgiving and ask only that you be open and honest with them. Finding myself living in a situation where I no longer had my horses and dogs drove home how important they can be. So I now have a silly little puppy who is a bundle of work but she makes me smile even when I’m feeling down or angry and reminds me of what’s important in life.
It can be really hard to put the past away in a box, whether it’s trauma, negative things we’d rather not share or something which was done to us or we did to someone else, but — and this is only my own personal opinion — it’s made us who we are today and each of us is the best person we can be. Just ask any Labrador retriever or dog pound puppy.
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Am I a poor converter?
how often do i need to have TSH tests done if i am not on a therapeutic level of medication yet
Am I on the right track?
am I taking enough levothyroxine?
so I am very confused. 
