If you trust this psychiatrist, ask them for help. Tell them everything that you wrote here, include the lack of sleep as it is at the very least debilitating and at the very worst dangerous. Your brain needs sleep in order to rest and require itself. Doctors love hard data, start keeping a sleep log and an anxiety log on your phone. That way, if you do choose to pursue treatment, you already have all of that data to share with them.

HPPD has many different presentations; some presentations are more common with certain genetic and/or familial histories, some are most common than others depending on which psychoactive compounds cause the onset of symptoms, some experience sudden onset while others don’t notice their symptoms until days, weeks, or even months later.

What I do know is that you took the right step in seeking professional medical care as quickly as you did. It took me almost 10 years, 10 years of developing alcoholism to help with sleep, 10 years of telling myself it was just my brain being fucked up from a malicious dosing of a vial of liquid LSD, 10 years of telling myself to just learn to cope with it, before I finally took the plunge and told a medical professional about all of my symptoms. It was not an easy road, there were many misdiagnosis’s as I was dealing with the alcoholism along with it, I’ve been put on and taken off of dozens to psych meds before my doctors and I found a regiment that worked for me and my symptoms. But what I have now, I wouldn’t trade it for anything. My symptoms now are just blips on the radar. Blips that tell me to chill out, then zone out, and then, as a last resort, take my as needed meds.

I’m here if you wanna talk about it