Need your opinion

Hi Everyone,
I’m sorry if I ask this here. I’m a Student from a 3rd country and my budget is not enough for me to go see a psychiatrist. Besides, I know very well that US professionals are more reliable and serious than the ones over here, profoundly more worried about their finances than the health of the patient.
When I was younger I was a happy, content boy who had great grades in school and had a satisfying and successful social life. When I finished high school, I went away to a trip overseas, looking for freedom, awakening, renewal, and to know new things. And I did. I worked for the first time, I had to depend on myself to live, I learned to be independent, and I developed my social abilities further. I felt truly accomplished and complete as a person as I had never felt. I was really happy.
I came to my country to see my family and something terrible happened: the money I had saved to return overseas and continue my independent endeavours was gone. Stolen.
I thought hardly about it, but finally I decided to stay here and study a professional career. I started Psychology, and I was a great student there. I was really popular in my class as being a smart, resolved and intelligent person, and I still had a great life. My classmates valued greatly my advice, and I felt really like a complete and successful person.
I started going out with a girl, and decided to drop out of psychology. Maybe because of over confidence, or hotshot-ness, but I believed that the psychological studies were too much subjective. I found that the readings that we studied were nothing more than one guy’s personal opinion on matters of mind, religion and spirituality, and that that specific field of study had a dead end. Its end was subjective relativity.
At that time I was not sure where to go. I was thinking of studying Mathematics Engineering, which I thought was a spectacular art. And in the middle of my trials to enter that line of study, my girlfriend got pregnant.
We had a child, a girl, and I decided to study Business Administration, so I could provide my child with what she needed without being subject to work slavery or leading a stressful, overworked life.
We ended our relationship. Because I came out with other women I had been conceiving, and affairs I had I didn’t told her.
We started a family fight. Her family (and her) didn’t let me see my child for more than half an hour a week. I fought, tried hard to change, got really angry, tried to be comprehensive about it, tried everything, but I could achieve nothing. I still see (3 years later) my child just once a week for 1 hour or a little more.
Since then, my social abilities and my self-confidence have gone away. My ex’s family used to call me clinically crazy about the response I had to that situation. I desperately wanted to see my child. Once we started screaming and (nothing serious happened), but I slammed the table in anger, and I received a lawsuit and couldn’t see my child anymore for months.
I started actually feeling crazy. I honestly considered their accusations, and believed that I was actually crazy, and that all of my problems were my fault. (I just thought that It might be a possibility).
In time, I ended all my social relationships so I could change. I stopped doing pot like all my friends, because I could not stand the effect of it. It gave me profound paranoia, hallucinations, and persecution deliriums, where my friends would only feel relaxed and enjoy it.
I started to became awfully awkward in social environments. My ability to see the humour in my peers talk converted me in time into a strange, little crazy, slippery and shadow person.
I have now stopped all of my contact with almost everybody. I’m trying to work as hard as I can in my studies, which are not yet ended, and I have a girlfriend with who I have no absence of problems. Mostly due to me and my attitude, and my lying.
When I’m with other person, I become a jumpy, unconfident person and I usually spoil parties and meetings with strange behaviour that people don’t understand. I have lost all my credibility as a person, an I’m seen as a “little crazy person”.
I think all day long about how I don’t like my life and want to change it. Every minute of every hour of every day I feel uneasy with myself, not successful, mediocre, and sometimes embarrassed about this or that behaviour or response I had to certain situations.
I don’t like my career, as I feel it is superficial and pretentious, and I hate my current job, where I usually screw up and don’t help the company but I’m prejudicial to it.
I’m always trying to renew myself. I’m a compulsive cigarette smoker and I’ve quit more than 3 times for months, with the hope that It’ll turn me into a healthy, happy person, but it doesn’t.
I feel that I cannot leave this state. I have tried to renew myself countless times, but I’m very worried that I’ll keep feeling this way for the rest of my life, and maybe ending in suicide.
Time to time, I suffer personality changes that consternate my closest, and I’m continually feeling like if I wanted to change the way that I am.
I have never taken any medicine. I have only tried to stop this by recurring to sports and health. I had a 1 year stray of continuous boxing, working, swimming and studying. This led me to accomplish everything the way that I thought I needed to, but I still felt on the inside that the actual problem wasn’t fixed.
And that is what constantly happens. I can change or try, as hard as I can, but even if I manage to accomplish what ever material goal I set myself, I cannot stop feeling that I’m just hiding the problem.
I’m lost and I don’t know what is wrong with me. I’m under confident, sometimes paranoid, I have no friends left, I have issues with my girlfriend, and I don’t know my child, and she doesn’t know me.
I find no joy in reading or learning new things, contrary to my good years, and I just can’t say anything that is certain or adequate anytime. I just can’t hit the spot anymore. I have trouble looking people in the eye, and I’m not sure anymore of anything I say.
I sometimes act as other people, so I can be sure that by replicating their behaviour I can get good results, but I feel really bad about doing that. And I don’t feel the will or the motivation to act as myself, as I’ve gotten too many insults and bad results in a lot of time.
What is wrong with me? What can I do? Am I clinically depressed? Is my motivation affected by my smoking habits? Should I see a doctor here? Changing my diet would help me? Is this normal? How can I treat it?
Thank you very much for your time in reading this.

Not yet answered | No comments | Asked anonymously on May 6^th, 2011, 2:43 PM | Viewed 394 times