Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)

I am 42 years old and have suffered with my mental health since I was in my late teens, and have been on and off medication ever since. I live in the UK, so mental health services are patchy at best.

It got extremely bad during COVID, and I was put on antipsychotics.

The past two years, everything has gotten so much worse, where before it was mostly anxiety and when I had mood changes, they were short-lived, and I could hide it from people, now it's not like that.

When my mood changes now, it's so much more intense, for about a day I feel great and almost excited, then I literally stop sleeping sometimes for days, I just sit there all night with my thoughts racing, some nights I can’t even sit as I feel so edgy. People at work will complain about my behaviour because, despite feeling like I'm full of energy, I can’t focus, and I become snappy and angry. In the past year, I have lost friendships I have had for decades because of my thoughts and behaviours, which at the time feel like I'm the victim. By the time I realise what an idiot I'm being, it's too late, I can’t change the past, and I end up getting so depressed and hating myself.

Last year, when I had a turn, I was convinced my best friend's husband was being abusive to her. I had no proof, but in my head it was so real and I felt I had to tell everyone to help her. We had been friends for over 20 years, and I destroyed it in a couple of days.

I have tried to talk to my Doctor, who refers me to my local mental health service, who each time up my doses and discharge me. In fact, at the last appointment, they told me they couldn’t increase them anymore as I was at the maximum.

The last time I had a bad turn I felt I had to do something quick before I lose my job so I used my savings and saw a private psychiatrist and I took all the medical history my family doctor could provide, He didn’t say much about what he thought was wrong when I was there but in the report he sent to my doctor and myself it stated “history indicates a diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder given his episodes of hypomania poor response to antidepressants and family history” he advised my doctor to slowly reduce and discontinue my antidepressants and transition onto a more appropriate antipsychotic. He also advised monthly check-ups, but all of this was just ignored.

Again, I was sent back to my local mental health services, who just reduced some of the dosages of my current medication and said they don’t think it's Bipolar but gave no indication of what it could be.

I told them I felt I would be better off dead, but they truly didn’t seem that bothered and told me to come back in two months if I was still having issues.

I feel like I have reached the end. I have daily anxiety that makes it hard just to leave the house for work. I live in fear every time I feel slightly happy or sad that I'm about to lose my job and my last few friends.

I don’t see any future for myself, my emotions are mixed, is it Bipolar and I'm going to be like this for life most probably on medication that's making it worse or are my local mental health service right and its not and I just carry on living a lonely miserable existence on a path of self destruction.

Hi

I am 45 years old, I like to read, and trying out all things in the arts and crafts area.

I live DID and C-PTSD as a result of highly organised and transgenerational severe abuse throughout childhood and adolesence.

Also diabetes 1 since I was a kid, fibromyalgia for as long as I can remember but diagnosed when I was 35, osteoarthritis in knees and hips diagnosed at the same time, and a few years after I developed psoriatic arthritis (no, that did not make either the diagnosis or the symptoms of fibro go away, and you're not the first to ask as this can just be confusing)

So I am used to living with fatigue, pain, nausea, thd fun package of 'self-regulation' that comes with diabetes type 1. And chaos, hypervigilence, etcetera in the mental department. I've long made my peace with that and try to make tomorrow a little better by coping well today (and then there's those days...)

But last Autumn I got a covid-19 infection and developed post covid/long corona. I have been told by thd medics that my autonomous nerve system has been affected by the virus during the acute infection state. That leads to different symptoms for everyone, fatigue being the most prevalent.

In my case the symptoms are that mild exercise or stress can cause severe illness that may last from hours to days (pem), palpitations when I stand for more than 10 seconds (oi/pots, shortness of breath, nausea and digestive problems, muscle tension and spasms, problems expressing myself, problems with concentration, coordination, memory, focus, language processing and reading. And of course the fatigue which is FAR worse than I am used to.

I feel powerless and lost.

I hope to find some peers here who know what I'm going through.

#Diabetes #Fibromyalgia #PsoriaticArthritis #DissociativeIdentityDisorder #DID #PTSD #PTS #CPTSD #postcovid #long_corona #Fatigue #PEM #post_exertational_malaise #POTS #BrainInjury #pais #post_acute_infection_syndromes

Hi, my name is thundercat. I am here to seek and give support to everyone experiencing inexplicable life changes of chronic illnesses with long covid and find some hope and learnings

#MightyTogether

In discussions about the politics surrounding the care of disabled people, I see repeated references to the national debt and to the large numbers of undocumented people who are supposedly receiving Medicaid benefits through fraud. I hope to dispel some common misunderstandings surrounding these topics.

Chris Bucholz wrote an article for Cracked entitled “5 Things Everyone Gets Wrong About Government Spending.” The first misconception that he corrects is the notion that governments are required to pay off their debts. Bucholz points out that when a private citizen retires, they are living off of their savings, investments, and whatever else they did to prepare. It is much harder to do that if the citizen owes money, so it behooves a person to retire debt free. Since governments in stable nations don’t retire, they can continue to accumulate debt indefinitely as long as the interest is paid. Bucholz says that most of the debt the American government accumulated in World War II is still there. If that debt was as serious a problem as politicians are fond of claiming, they would have fixed it in the eighty years that have passed since then. The reason they haven’t is that the misunderstanding creates a useful boogeyman when conservative politicians need to justify cutting programs they do not like. If you want more detailed information on this topic, Bucholz does an excellent job of laying it out in his article. For our purposes, the takeaway is that no one needs to be kicked off of any government program because the national debt is a problem. It isn’t.

Regarding Medicaid, I examined the eligibility requirements and the paperwork necessary to apply for benefits in my state. Those safeguards alone make it incredibly unlikely that we have massive numbers of undocumented people receiving unjustified benefits. By definition, undocumented people don’t have the documents needed to apply. Additionally, benefit systems in the United States are adversarial, in that the assumption is that the applicant is NOT eligible for benefits. The burden of proving otherwise lies with the applicant. While the specific requirements vary by state, my state requires the applicant to submit documentation proving that they are eligible for any one of the following reasons: low income; over 65 years of age; blind; otherwise disabled; have a dependent or family member in a care facility; pregnant. On top of all this, the applicant must supply a social security number. Undocumented folk don’t have those. In my state, it is virtually impossible for an undocumented person to obtain Medicaid benefits.

Medicaid is a complicated issue, because it is both state and federally funded, and some states offer benefits to eligible people regardless of immigration status. Snopes says that undocumented people in states that allow them to access healthcare benefits are not committing fraud. This tends to deflate the federal government’s argument that they are defeating “waste and abuse” by cutting funding to states that offer healthcare to undocumented people. Even if they were, it isn’t federal money that is being misappropriated. According to factcheck.org, states that cover undocumented people do so using state money only, as federal law prohibits disbursement of Medicaid funds to undocumented folk. The undocumented won’t be affected by these cuts; the President can’t withhold federal money from people who weren’t receiving it to begin with. Contrary to the Trump Administration’s claims that they are protecting Medicaid for deserving citizens, it is those citizens who will lose coverage when the cuts take effect.

When Donald Trump was banned from Twitter during the pandemic, COVID misinformation declined thirty six percent. Coupled with the more than fifty thousand lies he told during his first administration and the false assertions he has made regarding his cuts to Medicaid, it would be wise for those of us in the disabled community to take what the President says with a grain of salt regarding the “help” he is giving us. #Disability #MentalHealth #Depression #PTSD #Suicide #Trauma