Mental illness paranoia – Understanding the impact of words.

***Trigger Warning*** this post discusses mental illness, anxiety, paranoia and also briefly mentions suicide. Please don’t read on if you feel unable. Instead, if you need a distraction then why not look at my stress hacks page, or for proper support my mental health and suicide prevention helpline page has places to go. Please engage with help if you need it.

This post was drafted in October 2022, when I was living with my second covid infection and feeling bloody awful.

I’ve made the decision to post it now for Mental Health Awareness Week 2023, because it shows how easy it is for paranoia to be inflated, even by someone you might trust.

Before you read on, it’s important to get support if you need it. Despite my experiences, i always advocate contacting the NHS for help. Whether you speak to your GP or call the 111 service, you’ll find plenty of support and understanding is available, along with critical treatment options. I also have a support page and mental health and suicide prevention support lines page on this website. Try looking there for places you can go for help.

Here’s the post…

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I’m writing this post in the middle of an upsetting, sad, frankly horrible morning. It’s 10.03am and my sleeve is still wet from wiping away tears. It’ll stay that way for hours.

This is the first time I’ve chosen to write something like this straight away. I normally hope that retrospect will make a post more balanced and less driven by weighty emotions, but I guess the time has come to experience the reality of extreme and dangerous levels of paranoia.

I know I’m laughed at, disbelieved and sometimes chided for my inability to live in a normal way, to be the outgoing and effervescent person people expect, but that’s not who I am any more, and making judgements about who I SHOULD be based on nothing more than my age shouldn’t happen, but it does.

My life quite often boils down to one question – do I want to go on? Obviously so far I’ve kept going, despite 2 attempts to end it all. But even though those attempts are in the past, the desire to implode is magnified when i tell myself that the few people I speak to would be happier if I was gone too. This happens often.

I want to live to watch my daughter grow into her bright future, to see my partner become even more successful, and to keep our treasured dog feeling loved and cared for in her older-years. I want to hold their hands (and paws) and congratulate them on their brilliance. Besides this website, those are the only jobs I have left in life and I value them hugely. Unsurprisingly I’m afraid of the day that the question of living becomes louder than my desire to stay. Days like today challenge me beyond anything I can articulate in a pathetic way on here, but the challenge is real nonetheless.

There is a distinct absence of dialogue in my life. As I’ve explained several times before, most days my only conversation is with my partner at the end of his long day at work. But, in part, that’s a choice I’ve made based on the dangerous consequences and negative impact unwelcome comments can have. Something said as a throwaway remark can leave a seared impression on my brain, where it would be forgotten for others. That seed of doubt from someone else grows like a beanstalk of paranoia that Jack and the giant would be proud of. Now, the unscarred real estate in my head is running low, so I have to choose very carefully who I speak to and why. It makes life quiet, lonely and insular, but somehow it feels necessary.

But we all know the best laid plans have to be torn apart at times. Trips backwards and forwards to the drawing board are a regular occurrence for me, especially when my health is challenging me more than usual. That means, now and then, I make the decision to ask for help from professionals, with the aim of finding a way to make my physical and mental pain more bearable.

I’ve been relatively vocal that the last year or so has been challenging, but while my mental distress is well documented, my physical decline isn’t. I talk openly about increased pain and aches, but rarely go in to any detail.

Bringing this post back to its source, the reason I’m so upset right now, is a negative and accusatory conversation that I had with a nurse at 9am, who chose to spend 10 minutes sharing her frustration that I’m not doing enough. She then threatened me with pain relief reductions, when I’ve made it clear my pain is worse, that I’m weak, that I’m tired and that I’m running on empty without ever leaving home.

Despite it being clear that I need my partner to help me with facts and figures, that he manages all my personal health affairs because I’m often unable to, that I’m very isolated and concerned about increasing pain and tiredness, and that I struggle to talk, get upset and am very nervous, she spoke to me like a child and made me feel stupid and small for living the way I do.

While I recognise these are all opinions I’ve picked out because she didn’t actually say these words, I’m still able to understand the facts and relive the way I was treated with annoying clarity.

I chose to end the call, politely I might add, by explaining that it’s clear scaring someone like me with threats to change medication they’ve been aware of for years when I’m clearly in a health slump, feeling so unwell and unable to remember things clearly, will have a negative impact on my already meagre mental health.

She immediately started saying the things you’d expect, that she didn’t mean to scare me, blah blah blah. Unfortunately it was too late. She didn’t care enough to understand my situation, my pain, my mental struggle, made assumptions that I should be able to manage her angry and accusatory remarks, and did all of this based on information in front of her. There was no empathy, interest or understanding and the damage was done.

By the time I’d ended the call I wanted to disappear, because I believed that’s what she wanted too. I’m useless for not being able to remember everything well, for being indoors and for not remembering to log in to their online system while I’ve been stuck under a blanket with fluid on my lungs thanks to another covid infection.

I don’t know this woman, but I can categorically confirm that when she called me this morning, she didn’t understand the impact words can have on someone with a mental illness. I’m weird, I know, but the same conversation with another MH warrior could have had an even deeper, more paranoid impact. My partner heard the conversation and sat with me while I cried, but what if I was alone? What if I lived alone, without a partner or even a pet? What would have stopped the paranoia from continuing to grow?

Frankly, the scenario frightens me, and that’s why I’ve chosen to post this experience.

I firmly believe we all have a responsibility to think about the language we use, opinions we share and paranoia we can cause – whether you’re talking to a healthcare professional, old friend, bank manager or your friendly postman shouldn’t make a difference. Everyone deserves respect and kindness until they’ve done something worthy of losing that trust. At that point surely silence is better than inflating any anxiety? And that’s why I politely ended this phone call.

Thanks for reading 💜