[slab_happy]

So yeah. It's pretty obvious that the pandemic is having a bad effect on many of us who have existing mental health issues; it also looks like there are a bunch of "new" folk joining us:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/16/uk-lockdown-causing-serious-mental-illness-in-first-time-patients

(N.B. The headline's a bit misleading because the article makes it clear that lockdown is one major stressor associated with the pandemic, but so is bereavement, job loss, illness in the family, being in intensive care oneself, worry that the company you work for is going to go under, etc..)

Thought I'd start a thread to see how we're all doing and provide some mutual support, especially for anyone who's not had to deal with this shit before.

[Wil]

I've had issues with anxiety for a few years now and I've struggled to get an intervention which will actually work for me. This has been confounded with living in a rural area and near a county line, meaning that any therapy or workshop assistance I was offered was an hour and a half away, 2 hours from work. I was medicated for 6 months, which took the edge off but presented other problems.

In my case there were specific triggers which caused the deeper sense of anxiety. IMO I'd suffered intermittently to a minor extent without acknowledging it for most of my adult life. Work stress (a bullying line manager in particular) and then an ongoing family crisis (now resolved) were the big factors, but they pushed me to a point where I had very little reserve and very minor things would see me redlining. It also left me with a framework for viewing the world which was very negative, and made it hard for me to recognise when things were going well. Much like the pandemic the climb up to the peak was steep, the climb down has been long and steady and not without problems.

Lockdown has been interesting for me in understanding how external factors affect my anxiety. I lost some work initially, but I'm fortunate to be in a position where I wasn't going to be destitute either way. I eventually (9 or 10 weeks in) got furloughed from part time agency work and I also got another job which is low paid, but useful and very low stress for my triggers.

The main thing it's made me realise is how much of my anxiety is attached to social expectations. I've had times where I've been to a shop and returned shaking. I hadn't had this experience in other shops and I realised it was because they had clearly communicated the expectations (and were policing them to some extent). I'm very conflict averse. I had a minor disagreement with someone online with the same result (also resulting in me taking 24 hours off social media, rarely a bad thing!). I think lockdown has given me a higher baseline anxiety, but the key part is how it upset normal social rules and negotiating that has been surprisingly hard for me.

[slab_happy]

Yeah, I've also been surprised by which things have affected me. Lifelong anxiety and depression, so it was pretty predictable that stuff would flare up and I've been braced to manage it.

But I've been surprised by how badly the isolation's started to affect me. I live on my own and am both introverted and on the autistic spectrum, so I find social interaction quite tiring even when I enjoy it, and often prefer e-mail and online chat to in-person interaction.

But apparently the small dose of interaction and physical proximity I get from exchanging idle chat with people at crags and climbing walls has been more essential to me than I knew, and at this point I've definitely started pining for it.

[DAVETHOMAS90]

Thought I'd post up this insightful article on the role of pills in mental health:

https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/the-role-of-pills-in-mental-health/

Some years ago, I decided to eschew pharmacological intervention, very much because it prevented me from experiencing the very things I needed to face, to put in their rightful place, so that I could start to understand that they weren't going to bite me now.

We might want to feel as though we're "living in the present", but without being able to review how and why we're doing that - our behaviour "now".

Very often, living "now" is a strategy for blocking out what's to come, or to forget about what's happened. Other times we look to put distance between past and future, and we think of "now" as something that separates the two, differentiates between them.

Neither past nor future exist of course - which is not the same thing as saying x didn't happen, or that y won't.

Sometimes, feeling crap, is the very thing we need to sit with - rather than get out of, and understand that it's not a predictor of what's to come. I think this is very much what happens when we put ourselves in difficult situations in climbing; we're forced to accept the difficulty and work with it. In a great article I once read - but can't find, sorry - this was referred to as "a desire for meditation". It's why I used to put myself in scary places on the rock. Difficult terrain.

I went through a tough time, struggling tremendously with anxiety, and was attending my GP practice very regularly, looking for something to "take it away". I tried to get hospitalised, but they wouldn't take me  It was desperate.

I spent a few weeks with Dave Pegg over in the States, and decided to come off anti-depressants. (Thank you Dave x)

I still take things to help me sleep - and need to look at this - some prescribed, some not, some abused in a self-medicating way, but I'm trying to get to a point where both a "Desire for Medication" and "Desire for Meditation" are perhaps replaced by something more deliberate.