Thanks for the lovely welcome guys. You all seem very kind and supportive here, a healthy environment for healing! I'll wait for an official diagnosis but signs do seem to point to PTSD and that fills me with some hope because it appears to be treatable, and it proves I'm not just going insane!
Quote:
Originally Posted by anthony  The depression is why you sleep. Your depression that you say you've had as long as you can remember, that intrigues me though. Why have you suffered depression? There would be something within your life that has caused it, you just may not know it yet... hopefully you do though. |
With regards to depression, I do wonder if I am one of those people who are just born depressed due to a chemical imbalance, and just the traumatic events I have suffered just made things worse. It seems so petty now, but before the abuse I was seeing a psych as I'd suffered pretty badly with depression after a break-up with my boyfriend at the time.
Also as I said my brother has been ill for a long time... he had a cyst in his brain which has since been removed but he suffers some ill effects from it including some brain damage, difficulty learning new things, memory loss, epilepsy and OCD amongst others I've probably forgotten. He has two ventricular shunts (draining CSF from his brain to his abdominal cavity) and he's had a few complications due to tubes blocking or the shunt not functioning, and once it pierced his bowel and he got ventriculitis and peritnitis at once, which can both be fatal by themselves... he was very, very ill then and we honestly thought he wasn't coming home.
Nowadays, he is not at all independent and lives with my parents still despite being 25, This puts strain on everyone as obviously my parents are in their 50s now and were hoping life would be easier now and I feel sorry for them having to be carers, though obviously they'd do anything for him. I can imagine my brother's life is far from easy as well, with no career prospects to speak of, no obvious way of becoming independent, no friends or partners as well as having to suffer everyday with his health troubles... so yes. A lot of strain on everyone.
I do sometimes panic being around hospitals as it reminds me of when he was very ill... I hate the smell of the disinfectant and the beeping of machines... in a way my brother is lucky in that sense because he remembers nothing of his time in hospital, but the rest of my family can remember only too well all the times we sat at his bedside over the years fighting for his life...
Umm, I rambled again. Sorry! :dont-know