Posted 4/21/2015 4:42 PM (GMT -5)
Hi IHL,
I've been seeing a psychiatrist for about five years, since the time I was first being examined for potential MS and long before Lyme ever surfaced as a potential concern.
When I first went to see her, I was in an absolute state of emergency. My neurological symptoms were about as intense as they have ever been, but on top of it, I was having mental visions of myself falling over the edge of my apartment building playing on a constant loop, and I had such intense anxiety that it reached a state of paranoia and I felt like everyone everywhere was looking at me with disdain. I had never experienced anything like it before, I knew it couldn't be real, but I couldn't deny what I was feeling, either. Interestingly, as the physical symptoms waned, so did the psychological ones. At the time, it seemed like all of it was an emotional/psychological issue, but now my psychiatrist thinks it was probably triggered by brain inflammation from the infection. My LLMD gave me copies of medical journal articles detailing how inflammation in the brain produces specific types of anxiety, which can include outright psychosis.
I've had social anxiety for much of my life, but the episode several years ago was something else entirely--I would call it "a different kind of anxiety" for sure. It was more like psychotic paranoia versus social panic or nervous anticipation. Terrifying.
It does help to know that there's a physiological basis for a dissociative sort of panic, and it's also helpful to have some kind of counselor or at least friends and family who understand that that sort of thing might happen at some point as a symptom, and that it will pass.