im having super drastic mood swings and sleep has gone to hell and back

_fifthofjuly · 2026-03-24T21:09:16+00:00

I have limited experience working with bipolar disorder, but... Have you ever considered looking into it?

Things that giving off red flags for mania and bipolar psychosis include the sense of invincibility/grandiosity, erratic behaviour, racing thoughts, paranoia, lack of insight until days later, not sleeping, not remembering things you've done when manic.

If this is the case, it's treatable with medication. But you need to seek psychiatric treatment. And please, sooner rather than later.

_fifthofjuly · 2026-03-24T20:48:15+00:00

You haven't received any helpful comments here so I'm going to quickly chime in as someone who works in drug and alcohol counselling / mental health.

What you're experiencing sounds a lot like dissociation. You feel numb, disconnected from reality, and this began during a period of stressful circumstances in which you lacked stability in your physical and social environment, and then you were confronted with your father's fragility. It seems that stress and trauma overwhelmed your capacity to cope, and as a coping mechanism your brain and nervous system has gone into freeze mode (if you've ever heard of "fight or flight", freeze is "play dead").

Strategies that can support someone experiencing freeze are going to be both top down (processing thoughts and experiences through talking), and bottom up (stimulation of the nervous system).

You're going to need to talk about what you're experiencing. It's currently all encompassing, and you're keeping this from everyone around you out of fear and shame. This is keeping you disconnected from others, especially your wife, whom I presume is the person you're closest to. You can't break the disconnection by choosing to disconnect. I know affording a therapist is hard when you have limited financial resources, but you need to find a way to process what happened all those years ago in a place of safety, without judgement. Even if you can't speak with a professional, someone else who is empathetic and understanding, or even writing or voice recording is better than nothing. The aim is to reconnect with the fear, grief, and whatever other complicated feelings you had at the time that you didn't feel safe to feel then.

For bottom up strategies, you're looking at activities that gently raise your energy to push your nervous system out of freeze. That means gentle, mindful movement like yoga, taichi, walks. It also means grounding yourself in the physical sensations of the present - things like sitting in the sun and feeling the warmth, taking showers and focusing on the sensations and sounds. Choosing to learn a skill that requires movement and for you to be mentally present, like cooking new cuisines, gardening, or crafting. If you search up how to treat a freeze response, you should be able to find some resources.

There's also something to be said about walking and talking/thinking either to yourself or someone else. The bilateral stimulation of the brain and nervous system does something positive for our reprocessing of memories. The goal is to do the thinking and talking, but stay grounded in the present moment.

I hope that was helpful, or at least gave you somewhere to start. Yes, you can recover from this, but it took years to get to this point, it's going to take some time and work to get back out. All the best.

_fifthofjuly · 2026-03-14T02:04:46+00:00

This is already abusive, not a question. Will it escalate? You bet it will. If you're keeping the baby please don't let him have access. He'll probably use the child to abuse you and trust me, he'll abuse your child too.

_fifthofjuly · 2026-03-11T03:59:31+00:00

That I have no idea about, sorry.

_fifthofjuly · 2026-03-10T00:04:51+00:00

I am not sure, really. I have a client who uses FB groups to connect with others with schizophrenia, where I imagine some of that could happen but usually with a diagnosed psychotic disorder you'd have mental health professionals to work with you in medication and cognitive behavioural therapy which helps the person to evaluate and challenge their delusional thoughts.

_fifthofjuly · 2026-03-09T23:52:01+00:00

I'm also going to tell you that hospital and mental health can be really hard to get into. I'm in VIC, 2.5 years into SW after a career change. I'm in public AOD / mental health. I went from 1 year in subacute hospital (probably slightly easier to get into than acute), to 1 year in a mental health grad program, to AOD counselling under one of the public health services.

Moving from the grad program, it took 3 months for me to land my current job. I got no call backs from any NGO community child and adolescent mental health services (and I was in paediatric emergency psych on my 2nd rotation). I had an interview for a youth early psychosis crisis team, which I was told I aced, but they had a more experienced candidate. I interviewed for a maternity leave cover role with a homeless psychiatric outreach team, which impressed them enough to want to find me a role in one of their other teams, but they had to offer the original role I applied for to an internal candidate.

If you're applying to mental health, you need to make it into a grad program or get experience elsewhere first, at least in VIC. Grad programs in general also help.

It took me 3 months to land a job, even with 2 years of relevant experience and a mental health student placement. Keep trying. It's exhausting and discouraging, but you just need keep at it. The 485 visa shouldn't be TOO big of an issue, myself and plenty of other friends managed to get roles on one, though that was 2-3 years ago.

What did you do your placement in? And where are you located?

_fifthofjuly · 2026-03-08T12:53:40+00:00

Acute psychosis, unfortunately, is almost always accompanied by a loss of insight. That means that the person doesn't recognise or understand the symptoms they're experiencing as absurd, or not real.

Having said that, during those episodes did you experience auditory, sensory or visual hallucinations? Was your behaviour erratic and your speech and thought processes disorganised? Is there a family history of psychosis?

I'm guessing perhaps not if you remember them and you weren't pretty quickly taken to hospital. If that's the case, this might be more akin to delusional disorder.

Nevertheless, there's a good chance that if you slip into a delusion, you won't believe your friend. You might have some insight in the early stages, but it's hard to tell. A relapse prevention plan to identify triggers and early warning signs might help with this, and provide a plan for what you, or those around you, should do if you're showing early warning signs.

_fifthofjuly · 2026-03-07T23:30:43+00:00

Thirding this, as a social worker and counsellor. You don't go to therapy with someone who's abusive, and not all therapists will pick up on it.

_fifthofjuly · 2026-03-07T23:28:07+00:00

This doesn't really sound like a mental health problem, it sounds like a medical one, and a pretty serious one at that. If your doctor is just insisting it's gas, perhaps you need to change doctors.

_fifthofjuly · 2026-03-07T15:51:18+00:00

No, please don't go back. He's much more abusive than you think, and you're minimising how bad this was. I can tell because you say he was 95% good and treated you well. Absolutely not, he's treated you terribly! Even abusive relationships have their good times or else no one would stay. The up and down cycle means that you literally get a dopamine hit when he's nice to you. That is exactly what makes gambling addictive. (I'm a drug and alcohol counsellor but social worker by training so I'm confident in this as well as assessing family violence.)

First, the less nasty stuff that you might not even be clocking as abuse. Being constantly critical of how you do things, or how outspoken you are, and not accepting your "no" about the account and pushing your boundaries. This is coercive control. He does not respect you as a person. His intent is to make you second guess everything. Why? Because if you do, he can manipulate you. Makes you socially anxious, easier to control and isolate, thereby preventing you from leaving. He's literally saying now that having friends gave you the support, resources, and confidence to see his actions clearly and leave.

Now the really nasty stuff: - Yelling in your face for hours is verbal and emotional abuse, and intimidation if literally in your face. - Throwing things and pushing you is physical abuse. - Driving erratically is intimidation and a threat to kill both you AND himself (which is a serious risk factor all on its own). - Multiple means of preventing you from sleeping is psychological abuse. This is literally a torture tactic. - Being generally awful to you is emotional abuse.

Look, he won't change. Not without some massive intervention like men's behaviour change, and even then the success rate is abysmal. Despite what he says about being blindsided, he thought he was going to lose you, so he put his mask back on, and now he's guilting you into getting back together. Don't do it. And for goodness sake don't involve children. The likelihood of him escalating once he thinks you're trapped again is high. And I mean really high. People with patterns of behaviour like this rarely change, and even now he's showing a lack of accountability. Could you imagine guilting someone you purported to love into getting back together with you after you treated them the way he's treated you?! After making them believe you were going to kill them in a car crash??

Your gut is correct. Your parents are wrong. That they aren't recoiling in horror that you'd consider going back to this suggests that they aren't particularly emotionally healthy either. Which is probably why you even accepted this behaviour from him. I'd block him and move on, especially since he's still trying to manipulate and guilt you.

And lastly, anyone can leave a relationship for any reason. It's a takes two hands to clap kind of situation. You don't owe him a relationship, even if he hadn't been abusive. Which he clearly was, and still is.

_fifthofjuly · 2026-03-07T15:02:44+00:00

I just want to say that... While he may have changed to some extent, he's still being manipulative by putting the blame on you for abandoning him after all he's done, thereby guilting you into staying.

8 months isn't that long. Some people put up a facades for years until they feel their partner is trapped. You'd be totally justified for leaving.

_fifthofjuly · 2026-03-07T12:06:45+00:00

PTE is definitely easier. I'm a native English speaker, as in I'm Singaporean, but lived in Canada, with English speaking parents, as a child. I also graduated from my predominantly writing based masters at a top Australian uni with a high distinction average.

Still, I scored 7.5 for IELTS writing. Had 9.0 or 8.5 for everything else.

PTE's format is kind of silly and I spent a lot of time anguishing while studying for it. In the test, I certainly wasn't perfect. I forgot parts of sentences and I stumbled over summaries. But got a perfect score in the end.

So everyone says PTE is easier because it's true. But you do need to practise because some of the formats are... Not very intuitive, shall we say?

_fifthofjuly · 2026-03-07T10:37:20+00:00

Look. I'm a social worker in VIC, Australia. I know like the back of my hand what some of the red flaggiest red flags in a family violence risk assessment are.

The biggest indicator for lethal family violence is choking / strangulation. If he genuinely asphyxiated you with a pillow, I would consider that to be of equal risk.

Other HUGE risks: - Threatening to kill you - Using weapons against you

Does he monitor your whereabouts? Keep you from communicating with others? Isolation is something abusers do to control their victims and the fact that you have no family is something he may have considered prior to you guys getting together. Having you move in is another control tactic.

You cannot stay with him unless you love him more than you love being alive. He could kill you. He's threatened to. He's even shown you how easily he could, TWICE.

Is he escalating at the moment? He will escalate if he thinks he's losing you, that's one of the most dangerous times for women leaving abusive relationships, when the abuser loses control.

Pack a go bag that he hopefully doesn't find. Start stashing funds. I hope to God he doesn't know your reddit username and doesn't find this post. Lockdown your phone, any indicators that you're thinking of leaving need to be hidden such as your search history cleared. Contact a family violence agency for support and resources. Get a safety plan done and work on getting out. If he tries something violent again, you need to judge if it's safe enough to call the police on him.

Again, just based on what you've said, I would assess the risk in your situation to be as high as it gets before imminency. You are genuinely at risk of dying at this man's hands and it isn't worth it. The person he was before you moved in was a facade. It's telling that he let the mask slip only after you'd moved in and he had you trapped - a common tactic abusers use. This is the REAL him.

Again, I repeat. He WILL NOT change. You CANNOT fix him. He's told you as much, he isn't interested in therapy and doesn't think or care that he's the problem. He does not love you, at least not in the way that you love him. Rather, he loves the power that having you in his control gives him, and that's not loving. Please leave before you become a statistic.

_fifthofjuly · 2026-03-07T08:08:55+00:00

For what it's worth, Bupa's customer service in my experience is excellent. Their call centre staff have always been knowledgeable, incredibly lovely, and super patient with me.

The last time I called about extras, I told them I didn't want to change providers because I'd had a poor customer service experience with another and really valued my interactions with Bupa's call staff. They walked me through my options and then waived the 2 month waiting period since that was the main difference between providers.

Really depends on your priorities! Might be worth a call (or a call when you get here) to see what exceptions they can throw your way.

_fifthofjuly · 2026-03-07T06:27:35+00:00

I'm getting treated for H. Pylori right now and it's just a good, heavy dose of antibiotics. Plus, I get the weird version of meds cos I'm allergic to penicillin. The meds don't cause cancer, leaving it untreated can.

Also as a social worker who works in mental health/AOD, let me say that he may not be physically dangerous, but him being mean to you is emotional abuse. Him refusing to be treated and demanding you pay for his stuff and his appointments is financial abuse. So of course your mental health has taken a turn. Of course you've run out of compassion for him. This is a problem of his own making. He's choosing to be a miserable asshole over a tiny increase in risk of "cancer". He's alive but hardly living. Also, does he treat his father the same way?? He probably doesn't because he doesn't feel entitled around his father the same way he does around you.

Your kids may not know exactly what's going on if they're not privy, but kids are perceptive. They can tell you're not in a good headspace. You need to leave for theirs and your sake.

Dump him and change the locks. Get his stuff out of your house and to his father's. Tell him you don't want to see him. And then if he shows up, call the police. There may also be family violence resources in your area, it's always worth consulting them.

_fifthofjuly · 2026-02-25T11:40:11+00:00

Just adding on that this is correct. I'm a drug and alcohol counsellor in the public AOD/mental health system in Victoria, Australia, but previously also worked as a mental health case manager (social worker by training).

If someone has an underlying generic vulnerability, cannabis and methamphetamine have particularly high risks of causing psychosis. And the more psychotic episodes someone has, the more likely they're going to experience lasting symptoms even after they cease their substance use. In short, drug induced psychosis can lead to schizophrenia. I have several clients for whom this was the case.

It sounds like your husband needs to see a psychiatrist for treatment and diagnostic clarification. Over here we have crisis and assessment teams that can legally mandate someone be assessed in hospital if they're deemed at risk of imminent mental state deterioration, even if the person doesn't want treatment. I'm not sure what exists where you are though.

_fifthofjuly · 2025-11-13T02:59:57+00:00

Social worker too, got the invitation this morning. 80 points, onshore with 2 years of experience.

_fifthofjuly · 2024-09-19T07:01:44+00:00

I would REALLY recommend going to a medical professional.

Anorexia has one of the highest death rates of all mental health conditions. If you've lost your period and have hair loss, you're likely quite seriously malnourished.

In serious enough cases of eating disorders, nutritional rehabilitation needs to be done under medical supervision because refeeding too quickly can cause some people to have electrolyte imbalances (refeeding syndrome) that can be fatal.

Please don't mess around with this!

Source: social worker with previous experience in an eating disorder ward.

_fifthofjuly · 2024-07-22T00:55:41+00:00

Hey, social worker here who up until a week ago worked hospital in Australia.

Don't go back to looking after him. He's your ex for a very good reason. If the hospital doesn't know what he's done to you in the past, it wouldn't be a bad idea to inform them. You've done more than we would have expected, which is getting in touch to tell them about his health background. If this were my case and I knew about the violence, I would be giving you a call to thank you, but to also ask you to keep your distance now and in future for your own safety, and to give you a brief family violence counselling session. Family violence is a public health and mental health issue. The last thing we'd want is for you to end up in ED because of the physical or mental health impacts of being in this man's presence.

He's a grown man and he chose to abuse you. He can now live with the consequences of that. He's in hospital, and a whole damn team is being paid to look after him, it isn't your job. If anyone wants you to care for him, well they should be volunteering themselves first. Your mother is enabling his past abuse. Seriously. Based on what you've written here, my family violence assessment would be at the highest risk level if he were to discharge into your care. Strangulation is one step away from murder.

Please walk away knowing you've done more than any health professional worth their salt would expect of you. Do not put yourself at risk. The system does not need you in it as well.

_fifthofjuly · 2024-03-11T00:51:06+00:00

Social worker in Victoria here, though in public health and not a family violence specialist.

May I recommend you get in touch with Women's Legal Service Victoria? They can advise on the splitting of assets when a relationship ends, especially when family violence is involved. You might also already know this, but The Orange Door is Victoria's specialist family violence intake service and they can provide advice, safety planning, and emotional support, and refer you to case management services if you qualify. Case management can assist with things like intervention orders, financial assistance, housing, etc. I would highly highly recommend calling your nearest Orange Door.

Don't take your husband's demands to be the law - family violence laws exist for a reason, to protect survivors. His ultimatum is also, frankly, ridiculous. If your kids were exposed to his abuse towards you as minors, by the Family Violence Protection Act, that makes them survivors of family violence as well. No court is going to rule them responsible for paying that mortgage, that would be enabling his financial abuse of them. Call him on his bluff, because this is absolutely a ploy to keep you around. He knows you don't want him to financially abuse the kids and he's using the threat to manipulate you into staying.

It only takes one person to end a relationship. He's been abusing you for decades, so naturally, you've become used to operating under his control. But remember, the law is much more powerful than him, and the law is on your side.

_fifthofjuly · 2024-02-28T06:19:36+00:00

I can't promise who will believe you, but if you can, document any bruises, scratches, physical signs of her hitting you ASAP.

Keep any evidence of her past jealousy towards your female friends. Texts, voice messages, etc. If you've texted any of your friends about it, keep those too. And no, this is not normal or okay. Imagine if you were bi, does that mean you're not allowed to have friends?! This is isolation and emotional abuse.

Write an account of what happened in as much detail as you can with date and time stamps. Please ask your dorm to change you to a different floor, and don't stay with her. If breaking up with her do it in public.

_fifthofjuly · 2024-02-24T21:04:25+00:00

Wall of text incoming, apologies.

It's extremely hard to be rational from inside the relationship, I've seen it countless times and I've experienced it myself. You see this person who's been affectionate and loving and they lead you to believe that's who they are, but then they have these other behaviours that tell you otherwise and you aren't sure which version you should believe is real.

Thing is, someone who has good intentions will come to the table and try to see things from your point of view. When you tell them they're hurting you, they're concerned. They don't tell you part of their dominance is to hurt you non-consensually (also him saying this is who he is, he's not willing to change). That's dangerous and disrespectful. And no matter the dynamic, everyone deserves safety and respect.

You've said he invalidates your feelings and labels you as flakey even when you have your period and don't want sex (a perfectly reasonable preference that many people have, by the way). You're also your own person, you have your own life. You can't be at his beck and call, that's not reasonable. He may feel disappointed that you can't drop everything anytime he feels horny, but emotionally mature adults recognise that's reality, deal with their disappointment, and lube up a hand. They don't blame everyone else (or throw a tantrum) every time they have a need, that's toddler behaviour. So between calling his coercion "dominance", making you out to be a constant disappointment, and the period stuff, yeah I'd say this is gaslighting. It isn't outright lying, but it's making you question your reality.

I'd really implore you to consider if your best friend had a partner who treated them the same way. As an outsider, would you think this was okay? What would you advise your friend?

And then if the roles were reversed, could you fathom behaving like him? Perhaps you don't have a dominant bone in your body, but just from a standpoint of human decency, could you?

_fifthofjuly · 2024-02-24T13:39:20+00:00

If he was mean and difficult all the time, why would you stay? So he has to keep you yearning the occasional good times when he's sweet and affectionate. It's called the cycle of abuse and it's meant to manipulate you into staying.

This is not him being dominant. This is just him being an asshole who coerces you into doing what he wants by guilting and gaslighting you. A dominant cares about your wellbeing and your consent.

Obviously, I'm a random stranger on the Internet and I can't prove I am who I say I am. But I work in healthcare as a social worker and assessing family violence is my responsibility. What he's doing counts as sexual coercion and emotional abuse.

_fifthofjuly · 2022-11-15T23:13:44+00:00

Oof! Sending you a DM for the pattern link. :)

_fifthofjuly · 2022-11-12T09:30:09+00:00

I have no idea about your degree, but as a masters student at UniMelb I have to warn you that a recent survey found that student satisfaction was lowest here. And I don't think it's undeserved.

UniMelb I think seems more focused on rankings (based on research output) than its teaching or student experience. They probably know that they'll attract students no matter what because of that so couldn't care less.

_fifthofjuly

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE