I’m in my 4th semester at a local community college and should be graduating this December. COVID-19 has wreaked havoc on my mental health and has caused me great distress. I haven’t seen my girlfriend since early February due to travel bans (she lives in England). Although I’m able to go there, it’s hard to manage flying there with my school schedule. Not being able to see her has completely destroyed me, I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I stay up at night crying. Now school has started, which is always a source of severe anxiety for me. It really puts my anxiety disorder into high gear and my mind goes into complete panic. I have to finish up some required courses for my degree and it’s freaking me out. One of them being art, I was never good at art and never had an interest and it’s so mentally deteriorating for me to take a mandatory fine arts course. I haven’t ate in two days and have lost around 5 lbs. I’m prescribed Klonopin and Ativan to help with my severe panic attacks but they aren’t helping anymore. I’m just not sure what to do or how to go about it. I feel like I’m drowning in work this semester and I’m afraid I may drop out. My first year that I was supposed to attend university was the fall of 2017 and I ended up succumbing to my anxiety and taking a medical leave. I enrolled in a CC the next fall and maintained a 3.77 GPA. Come the spring semester of 2019, my dog had a seizure and died on the morning school started and that was probably when I hit my lowest point in my entire life. To this day, I still struggle with nightmares and anxiety from what had happened. I made it through a full year this past year and maintained a 4.0 GPA through both semesters. Now, this is supposed to be my last before I move on from CC and I’m paralyzed with anxiety and fear once again and not knowing what I should do.
Doing school work that doesn’t give you any pleasure can produce a lot of anxiety, particularly when you don’t have as much of the usual social supports that helped you in the past. This time of Covid is making everyone everywhere feel weird and out of sorts.
I assume that you text and have video chats with your girlfriend now and then. Have you thought about adopting another dog? Is there something that does make you feel relaxed and happy? Like watching a comedy movie, researching something on the internet unrelated to schoolwork, baking a treat, or running or biking? If there is, you could alternate doing your coursework with something that makes you feel better to stay on an even keel.
Some thoughts I had:
Please seek out a mental health professional immediately. I think your anxiety is far beyond the scope of any advice we strangers can give you.