I'm experiencing a strange mix of anger and sadness. Loneliness overwhelms me as I lack friends my age and feel isolated in this place for almost six years. I'm like an orphan, surrounded by elderly neighbors and no relatives,no on of my age whom i can talk with. My small sister is addicted to phones, and my parents seem indifferent. Living in a neighborhood of retirees makes my family the youngest, but their interference complicates everything.

Exam pressure adds to my woes, and despite efforts to stay mentally healthy through spiritual practices, loneliness persists. Emotional changes are evident, and crying has become routine without apparent cause. Attempts to discuss my struggles with my parents result in scolding and abuse. Social anxiety plagues me, worsened by restrictions on talking to peers due to caste differences. The lack of mental health awareness and ongoing family conflicts compound my distress.

I love traveling, but even that is discouraged. Balancing school and family expectations pushes me to study late into the night, affecting my mental health. I feel trapped, unheard, and increasingly desperate in this challenging environment.

This made my character change totally

from extrovert to introvert. I'm very very much tried.

My struggle with mental health issues began at age 24 and has never ended since. I was originally diagnosed with SAD and severe depression, later bipolar I was added to the mix. I lived through crippling episodes of mania. Anyone who says bipolar is not a disability has no idea what they’re talking about. The way you feel after an episode is grueling. You just lie in bed and wait for the day to be over. I thought it’d be a miracle if I lasted five more years like that. I was sure no one would ever be with me, I couldn’t bring anything to the table. But I survived, and got married, had a son. I’ve changed medications many times, until I found a combo that’s working for me. Some drugs were not only useless but dangerous: they triggered mania. Others just didn’t do anything. I take a mood stabilizer and an antidepressant (this one took a lot of trial and error), visit a therapist once every two weeks, and I’m in the best place mentally that I’ve ever been. I no longer want to harm anyone, I’m not a shell of myself. I can work full-time – that’s the best part. The problem is my wife. She became interested in holistic medicine, and she drives me crazy. It’s not enough that she has changed our diet to eat “healthy foods”. She stopped giving our son vitamins because they’re “synthetic” and apparently harmful. Now she nags me daily about the article from several years ago that debunks the theory that bipolar and depression are caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. She found it in an alternative medicine blog that breaks down a pretty old medical paper. My therapist said the article is total garbage; it oversimplifies the facts and is aimed at the general public. The only idea my wife absorbed was that it’s a huge conspiracy theory that made millions of people start taking antidepressants and other serotonin-balancing drugs. She wants me to stop taking them completely, arguing that I’m “healed” and my mood swings are very rare. The thing she doesn’t get is I am the way I am *because* of my drugs. She keeps sending me other suspicious sources claiming that chemical imbalances are not real, and she no longer accepts that mental health issues are incredibly nuanced. She pinned a list of all the products that are supposed to increase serotonin production to our fridge and says that if I believe in this scientific theory so much I can replace pills with eating more of such products. I don’t mind eating more dark chocolate, honestly, it just makes me sad she can’t support me. It’s like she wants to ruin all the progress I’ve made. I feel like I have no one to turn to, and my therapist is just angry at my wife. How do I get her to support me in this?