Heya there guys, I've posted a little bit here and there before but today I want to talk about my current < thing > I've got going on. This is a long post, so sorry, but I'm venting pretty hard today because if I don't then I think my brain is gonna cave in on itself or something. I'm writing this during said Panic Attack in the hopes it'll help or something.

TLDR: The NHS has made me fearful of therapy, so now I feel unable to get help for my issues. This is scary because I'm getting increasingly worried about my heartrate / blood pressure, which is getting fucky because of all the stress.

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Like many of you I've been very severely abused by therapeutic practices in the past. I've got ADHD and possible ASD (can't get an assessment atm due to the NHS having multiple year-long waiting lists, yay). I'm one of those people diagnosed later in life (35 / 36f) with a bunch of serious conditions that were mainly not spotted due to a mixture of (probably) misogyny and familial neglect / abuse. Fun times.

So earlier in my life I fully bought in on the whole "if you need help, go get therapy" thing that the world sends our way. Due to the NHS I got my therapy sessions for free, but the people I saw all started stacking on each other to become this huge abusive monolith. I'm Neurodivergent, and the standard CBT way of doing things (which is the primary thing the NHS spams at you, no matter your condition or it's severity), does not allow for someone who has disabilities / conditions like mine. They don't even look to see what could be going on, honestly. (Aside note: I'm going to be giving a talk on this subject soon to a bunch of Academics who teach CBT lol. They're going to hate me so much.)

Over time I've been subject to a lot of really awful things e.g. people telling me I'm "making things up" because "it can't be that you experienced all of that abuse", except I did, and yes, it's to pretty horrific levels actually.
It turns out being Neurodivergent makes you susceptible to abuse - that would have been GOOD TO KNOW at literally any point in my life, because it makes sense why I have so many fucked up stories, given that context.

I've had people not being able to understand my mind at all, leaving me feeling like an alien. I've been really severely gaslit, had my opinions on things completely disregarded e.g. "SSRI's don't work on me", so the NHS responds to this by saying: they're going to refuse to treat me further until I waste my life away on SSRI's for 8 months. Then, they get pissed off when said SSRI's do nothing as previously explained. I had a lot of random medical professionals take out their frustrations on me about this for some reason, and I never really got why. Treatment Resistance makes them mad I guess.
I've also had to argue with every professional I've ever seen as to if I'm Borderline or not. I'm actually not Borderline, but they go "your emotions are unregulated" and BOOM, they're now assuming I do this thing where I push people away out a fear of them hurting me first, or have fears of abandonment etc, and I literally have none of these things. They'll stick me through the BPD treatment meat-grinder then go like: "why is this not working, do you not want to get better?" as I tell them session after session about how I am not actually Borderline because of X (very good!) reasons, and we should probably try X approach instead, but then they think I'm "protesting too much" or that I'm "after something" (in like a nefarious way) - I literally can't win with these people, ever.

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When I got my ADHD diagnosis and the medication for that, it massively impacted my life in a positive way (thank fuck something actually helped for once, right?) and I got so much better, but the therapists / NHS act angry towards me about the fact I had to go private for that.
They feel like I "paid someone to get a diagnosis and then drugs" basically, and I've had a lot of weird reactions / questions about this from them as a collective, as well as a general distain from them that is blatantly connected to "paying to skip the queue" and shit like this.
I am sometimes given Diazepam by my GP in order to help me deal with my emotional breakdowns, but I then get pill-shamed by the people I am supposed to call in a crisis, about that fact, because the person at the crisis place I have to speak to every time really hates the medication I'm on, subscribing instead to certain 'progressive' mindsets e.g. "diagnosis is bad, we treat the symptoms and the person - not the disorder", which while nice sounding then leads to "can you stop your ADHD medication and just meditate / yoga for better focus?" lol. This person always gets shocked when I eventually lose my patience and tell them to "actually get fucked" lol, but they always say the same shit to me.

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The main reason I am writing this post though is that due to the PTSD-stuff I also have going on, I've been really really struggling to cope recently. I've had a series of really heavy blows, most of which would be quite a lot for anybody. In October I was the target of severe Narcissistic Abuse by a boss (he tried to destroy me - he nearly succeeded, it was brutal and I am surprised I survived in retrospect), and the NHS both couldn't and wouldn't help me with that. They don't seem to recognise Narcissistic Abuse as a thing, which is interesting. They're like "you can't just diagnose people like that", to which I retort "it's not like the guy is going to ever find himself in your therapy room for you diagnose properly, is it?", and they don't like that for some reason.

I developed a stress-based eating disorder as a result of that hell I went through, and the NHS couldn't and wouldn't help me with that either. They didn't even give me a reason for that, they just discharged me /shrug.
I managed to just about get that back under control via my own force-of-will after losing 10lbs very rapidly, then I got hit with "oh btw, you might have Autism, but we can't assess you for that for 5 years, so good luck". That wasn't stressful at all or anything, nah. They kicked me off said 5 year waiting list because I am not stereotypical enough I.E. "I don't give a fuck about trains or numbers actually", so now I get to just not know I guess. It'd be approx 3k to get a private assessment, but that's just stupid money to gamble on if I have ASD or not honestly - it's not like there's much they can do if I did have it.

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At the moment, I am stuck in a place where I am having constant panic attacks that are threatening my heart-health, I think. I instinctively think to myself: "I should go and get some help", and every time that stray thought enters my head I have emotional breakdowns that no shitty self-help website can help with, because I don't respond to normal treatment, and the treatment is in itself very triggering at this point. My brain does not work like they expect it to, so no, the things they say to do literally don't work on me. This is why I need medication (that I then get shit for taking).

Today I thought: "I am over my limit on what I can cope with in my life right now, my heartrate and blood pressure are way too high from 2 weeks of constant panic attacks, I should get help", and just the thought of trying to engage with these people in any way set me off so badly, that not even my Diazepam is able to calm me down today. I'm sat at my computer, struggling to breathe from a lung condition (asthma) mixed with a panic attack, listening to calming music from Valheim, with a heartrate of 120BPM-ish, because just the idea of getting "help" is too much.

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That's about everything really. I'm just sad that therapy has apparently broken my brain this hard.

I've started feeling very hopeless, and that feeling scares me. That's how I start going down a depression-death-spiral, and I just don't want to go through that again. I barely survived the last one I had :/

So yes: Fuck PTSD, fuck Therapy Abuse. Fuck people who don't believe us about these things.