YOU ARE NOT ALONE - A companion online community discussion board for The Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast with Paul Gilmartin

So when you're mental health symptoms keep you up at night, that seems like the perfect time to finally visit that forum you've been meaning to visit!

I probably should've been read other intros to get a feel for what people share huh?

I will say my "issues" we're more than 80 characters so they were considered too long for the registration process.

I'm 39, FTM, married to my wife for two years, and living in SW Virginia, USA. I work in the mental health field. I was hospitalized a month ago for suicidal ideation, escalating self-injury, and Conversion Disorder (CD). Depression is much better. The CD is still really difficult to deal with. It'd been better all this week and now it's keeping me up tonight.

I guess that's it. Thanks for reading and I look forward to meeting all of y'all in the other forums!

Welcome to the forum! What has kept you up? The CD? Do you mediate at all? I started doing it recently and have noticed that it has helped me with stress and controlling my inner negative critic. I use Headspace. They have a free 10 day trial. I do it when I wake up, but find that my negative inner critic is strongest while I am laying in bed, so I am going to try to do it before bed to calm my mind. Hope things get better for you!

Yeah, the CD has kept me up on certain nights. I've been having a hard time being able to settle down at night because of the movements.

I don't have a regular meditation practice but I use the techniques a lot with my counselor or alone. It doesn't help for reducing the CD symptoms. It actually makes them worse. I "joke" that I look like Linda Blair in _The Exorcist_.

I am using mindfulness practices to do body awareness work and EMDR. The body awareness work is currently very disturbing. If I'm completely honest, the body work is either uncovering repressed childhood sexual trauma or a new level of gender dysphoria that is centered on my genitals.

I'm sorry I didn't reply earlier. I didn't see someone had to respond to me. I hope you're well and look forward to talking to you more!