Question
I am a twenty six year old female college graduate with a five year old and married. I am in emotional disrepair. I am increasingly violent. Slamming around, and throwing things when mad. Easily agitated. I am nauseous, tired, and cry all the time. I am anxious and feel out of control. I know I am on the verge of a nervous breakdown and feel hopeless. What do I do? We have no insurance and I can’t afford to see a doctor. I feel my life will always be in despair. Help. I do have a lot of stresses in all areas of my life right now which are out of my control. But how do I deal with it all.
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Answer
As a college student you are likely eligible to receive mental health care through your college health service for free or at a very reduced cost. Such care might include access to individual and/or group counseling and access to a Psychiatrist and psychiatric medication if needed. Another possibility to consider is that some universities (those with graduate programs in counseling or clinical psychology) make psychotherapy available to the public at very low prices as part of a university-sponsored psychology clinic. The counselors at such a clinic are likely to be graduate student therapists under the supervision of a licensed therapist, but for your purposes this is just fine. Still a third option is to locate the public community mental health service for your region and see if you can be evaluated and cared for in that environment. Community mental health services are generally government-sponsored clinics where psychologists, social workers and psychiatrists offer low cost mental health services to the uninsured general public. Still a forth option is to get a hold of a good self-help reference book and see what following the recommendations in such a book can do for you. An excellent and completely free online resource of this type is Dr. Clay Tucker-Ladd’s, “Psychological Self-Help” which is available at as part of Mental Help Net.
I do recommend that you seek out professional mental health help, and a general medical exam as well. It is possible that your physical health needs some attention and that will solve things. It is also possible that you are experiencing a serious depression or some related disorder that will benefit from medical or psychological attention.
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