Hi @Molly942
You will get very different opinions on this forum from different people but no one, no matter what they claim, has all the answers.
I am going to offer you a different view and it is much the same one I offered my now 19 year old granddaughter a couple of years ago when she got caught up in what I will call the mental health game.
It sounds like you are quite young and you seem to be having some pretty serious difficulties with your life.
I understand your concerns and anxieties and you probably do need some help but in my opinion you also need to be extremely careful about how and where you go about trying to find it. It is all too easy to get caught up in a mental health game run by medical professionals and government departments. Not only will many of these people not help you but they can make your life very much worse.
One well respected, long time member of this forum said recently that the mental health authorities seem to be more about control than cure and recovery. You can find stories on this forum about the ways that they have taken over peoples lives and turned them into utter misery.
If you have done your research you should have discovered that there are many highly qualified and reputable people around who believe that the mental health diagnostic system is hopelessly flawed and unreliable. Simply getting a medical label for your life problems may not mean much even though I can fully appreciate that you want to understand why your life is in such turmoil and want to know what you can do about it.
The treatment that almost inevitably follows a mental health diagnosis these days is some form of pharmaceutical (drug) treatment. In my experience, psychiatric drugs can be very helpful in some circumstances but not always. They can, and often do, create more problems than they solve and there is considerable concern that they are over prescribed.
Again, if you have done your research well, you will have discovered that there are proven non drug based treatments that are available. These are definitely a viable option and are at least as effective as drug based ones. You don't need a diagnosis to go down this path because they attempt to deal with the underlying thoughts, feelings and behaviour, not some abstract medical condition. Many of us believe that the popular idea that people with mental health problems have a “brain disease” that requires diagnosis and medical treatment is nonsense.
Unfortunately in Australia non drug based psychological treatments can be a bit more difficult to access but this situation appears to be slowly changing. If you want to investigate this approach you may need to be a bit more persistent.
You probably won’t like me saying this but your parents advice may actually be quite sound. Your next step is probably to talk to some trusted person who has experience of the mental health system but please continue to do your own research, You need to be able to intelligently discuss your options with people and perhaps more importantly know what you might be getting yourself into.
The next trusted person you talk to may well be your general practitioner but it doesn’t necessarily need to be a medical practitioner. In my experience many, but not all, general practitioners are quite naïve about mental health and best mental health practices. They receive very little formal training in this increasingly important area.
So just rushing off and getting a mental health diagnosis may very well be just jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Please be careful.
Good luck and take care
Willy
