
Married to someone with Anxiety - throwaway309
http://medium.com/@SteveWhyley/married-to-someone-with-anxiety-d5bab822ba2d
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Jaruzel
Her symptoms described in this article are _spot on_.

My anxiety attacks were exactly the same, right down to crippling fear, and
needing emergency medical help because I thought I was going to die. It
doesn't help that most first responders are ill equipped to deal with mental
illness (not their fault, they are trained in keeping physically damaged
people alive long enough to get them to hospital) so they strap on the ECGs
and tell you and people at the time that they suspect that you are having a
heart attack.

People with mental illness need all the support they can get. Contrary to
popular belief, it's not something we can 'snap out of'. It's very
destructive, not only to the person suffering, but for their relationships and
people close to them as well.

Back to the article though; If you get diagnosed with Cancer, your loved ones
are also offered counselling, but for mental illness there is no such
structure. The carers are left to work it out for themselves, often getting
incredibly frustrated as there are no physical symptoms to work with.

To this day I have no idea why my partner stayed with me during my worst times
- it was incredibly hard on them (and probably will be again), and I would
have not blamed them for leaving if they had.

~~~
hga
And to top it off, we have no drugs that are both effective _and effective for
the long term_ to treat anxiety per se (maybe an anti-depressant will help you
think more clearly and not think yourself into anxiety, and there are some
semi-wild off label avenues, but...). Also the case for personality disorders,
but they sound to me like problems that aren't amenable to medication.

(Whereas we have imperfect but often very effective, even miraculous as my
mother observed first hand in her nursing career drug treatments for the other
major mental illnesses, depression, bi-polar disorder, and schizophrenia.)

~~~
Jaruzel
Exactly. I'm on a beefy anti-depressant to treat my depression which also has
the added bonus of calming my anxiety - it's the only avenue long term. Short
term there's relaxant drugs to overcome the attack-in-progress but nothing
available to take as an ongoing management dose.

~~~
hga
I myself have a genetic disabling combination of anxiety and "depression of a
bi-polar nature", our best guess, it's not the normal unipolar and my engineer
uncle with this is frankly bi-polar, but e.g. self-administered cognitive
therapy in the '80s helped a lot, and at least for me there's one other
treatment, low dose (50-100mg) Seroquel taken before bed (and now very small
doses at 8 hour intervals in between to avoid withdrawal effects during the
day). Would not be able to sleep more than 4 hours a night without this....

~~~
tcj_phx
Seroquel is a tranquilizer (aka neuroleptic aka 'antipsychotic')...

Anxiety is partially a metabolic problem.

I have two friends whose stimulant use turned them into alcoholics. One quit
meth amphetamine, then the anxiety started. She discovered vodka after getting
hooked on benzodiazepines.

Alcohol is broken down into acetate, which is an energy-rich molecule that is
easy for the brain/nervous system to use as fuel, especially when those cells
are insulin resistant (and therefore have a hard time using sugar as fuel).

