Mental health crisis

I’m going through the worst mental health crisis of my life right now, and I’ve realised I can’t do this by myself.

It’s not one cause, it’s been the perfect storm. It started with COVID flipping my career upside down. Back in 2018 life was good. I was thriving in my job, on a good salary that meant I could make things happen that were never possible before.

I had nice new cars, I could treat friends and family and I organised a massive surprise 40th birthday party for my wife in the same venue we had our wedding reception. We went on the trip of a lifetime to New York, flying on A380s in business and first class. We stayed in 5* hotels and experienced the high life.

We also had a short trip to LA again, flying in first and business class on an A380 and 747. It was a dream of ours fulfilled.

At work, I was thriving, respected, a leader, and organising social activities like poker nights. The future looked bright and happy.

My relationship with my wife had never been closer, we were going to the cinema every friday night, and the short commute and lack of regular overtime meant more quality time.

Then I found out my brother in laws business was struggling. I felt very guilty and helpless to help him with the scale of the problem. I watched as he lost his business, his marriage collapsed, and they were losing their home. I began to worry that if that could happen to him, it could happen to me, too. I know that sounds irrational, but it’s how I felt.

At work, I was asked to move from the Altrincham office where I was happy to a new office in Manchester city centre, which meant a much longer commute and instead of working with my best friend at work they wanted me to work on a project on my own that was unfamiliar to me. That’s not unusual, you have to be adaptable in my industry and I’ve taken on lots of new projects before.

It was a lot of change, and I was apprehensive. A couple of weeks later, lockdown happened, and we switched to working from home.

We always had the ability to work from home if we needed to, for example, when I was expecting a delivery or had workmen. I find it harder to concentrate at home with the blurred boundary between home and work, and I never really adapted to it.

I discovered, and it surprised me, that I’m actually a people person and need the office camaraderie. Working from home felt completely isolating. I started to panic about not being good enough. It was much harder to get hold of people for advice and support, and it got to the point where just the thought of opening my laptop was causing panic attacks.

My boss was great, I’d worked with him for a long time, we had a great relationship and mutual respect, he even came to my wife’s 40th. Work reassured me my job was safe and let me have time off and were flexible when I came back from sick leave.

Whilst I was off, I focused my attention on my sister in laws situation, making sure our house could accommodate her and her 3 kids so we could take them in once their house sold.

They moved in for 6 months, and it was intense but also amazing. I felt like I was part of something, the family I never had.

It coincided with mental health decline caused by the work situation and personal fears and anxiety. I felt I was going to lose my job and that my wife would be better off with me dead, particularly with the large death benefit she would receive. I reached a desperation point where I took a small overdose of blood pressure tablets and anti-depressants in November 2021. It wasn’t a suicide attempt, I knew what I took wasn’t going to be fatal. I could have taken paracetamol. It was self-harm to release the feelings I was going through.

I got counselling and started anti-depressants, but things weren’t really getting better, and I was starting to give up, making detailed suicide plans. This put a massive strain on my wife. It must have been very scary for her. I wanted her to have support too so I organised counselling for her.

I was having an identity crisis. I judged myself by my utility to others, and I saw myself as a failure, letting them all down. It took me years to retrain for this career, and suddenly, I felt out of my depth, burnt-out, useless and financially trapped.

I also hated my body. In 2013, my wife and I both went on a health kick and lost a lot of weight, but she managed to keep most of it off, and I couldn’t. I was very proud of her but also felt like a complete failure. She never made an issue of it, and she supported me every time I tried and failed to lose some of the weight again.

I also have a rare condition that no man would want to have. I did some research and found out it was entirely curable and treatable if it was dealt with as an infant, but now there is nothing that can be done. It destroys my feeling of self-worth and esteem. I don’t feel like a man and it’s not something I can easily talk about with anyone. The comments people make are very cruel.

I spent a night balling my eyes out to my wife talking about it and she reassured me I was the only ever man she slept with so had nothing to compare me to and that she loved me and it didn’t matter to her. She said she would never cheat on me, and as bad as I felt inside about my body, her reassurance made me feel a lot better.

Living as a family with my sister in laws kids changed the way I felt about kids. I had always been scared to have kids after my own dysfunctional childhood, but I was effectively a father figure to these three beautiful children, and it made me feel I could do it.

We decided to start trying. Honestly, with my wife being over 40 and my health, I wasn’t expecting it to work. It was more a case of lets have lots of fun trying and see what happens. I had taken a fertility test, and the results weren’t great, which added to the sense of being a failure as a man.

To my shock, within 3 months, we were pregnant. That day we took the test was one of the happiest days of my life. My depression just disappeared, and I went into planning mode, learning everything I could about pregnancy and new borns.

I rubbed her tummy and talked to our little bean every night. We decided to have an early scan at 8 weeks. We went to the clinic excited and full of joy. There was a couple picking their photos in the reception area. We were called in, and it seemed to take a long time, but we didn’t know if it was normal or not. They moved us to another room and told us our baby’s heart had stopped beating. It was the right size, so it must have been recently. I just couldn’t process it.

I hoped they were wrong. We had to go to hospital for a follow up scan to confirm but there were still covid restrictions so I wasn’t allowed in to wait with my wife but they did let me be with her for the scan itself and discussing our “options”.

It was either waiting for nature to take its course, a hospital procedure to remove our baby or a tablet. The latter options felt like abortion. We couldn’t do that, so we went home and waited. It was devestating to see my wife in so much pain, essentially going through labour, and there was nothing I could do to make it better.

We decided to try again, and every time her period was a couple of days late, I would get excited and devastated when it didn’t happen. I felt like such a failure. I was struggling to do what I needed to do. I ended up faking it, which wasn’t going to get her pregnant. It turned out to be the anti-depressants, so I had to choose between having a baby and anti-depressants, and I chose trying for a baby.

It still didn’t happen, and I just got to the point where I told my wife I wanted to stop trying. It was just too emotionally painful. She made out she was ok with it, but really, she was angry at me.

Our communication started failing. I dealt with the miscarriage through distraction, throwing myself into planning happy things like holidays. She got involved with tiktok and a group raising money for a charity called SANDS. She thought I didn’t care about our baby, which couldn’t have been further from the truth.

I didn’t know it, but in March 2022, she started seeking sexual attention from men online. It was escapism. Someone making her feel good when home life was so hard.

This escalated to a full-blown affair from May 2022 to January 2023. Her personality changed, she spent a lot of time talking to this group and stopped using facebook. She was distant with me, and I challenged her on it in August. She didn’t even acknowledge our wedding anniversary. My aunty died in a horrific way, and she wasn’t there to support me, she was seeing the other man instead.

When I found out about her affair in January 2023, I was absolutely devastated. It was the very worst thing she could do to me with my body issues.

She still kept lying, though, and I kept discovering more information. It destroyed the trust in the relationship. We did marriage counselling. It was tough, but we did make progress and started communicating better but she had cybersex with a married teacher again in March 2023 and it sent me into a very paranoid state and from that point I couldn’t cope at all.

I haven’t been functioning. The black clouds descended, and I had no esteem left at all. No hope. No belief in myself. Just despair.

My wife told me she was unhappy and that she loved me but wasn’t in love with me and that she needed space. She moved out of our bedroom and into the spare bedroom. It was such a shock to me. I just couldn’t handle it at all. My anxiety went through the roof. I wasn’t thinking clearly and kept making things worse by trying to get through to her.

The thought of her not being in my life after 20 years of being together was just too much, too big for my brain to deal with.

I tried to distract myself, leaning on friends and family, but at night, when I was alone with my thoughts and fears, the dark clouds rolled in. I couldn’t see a future, and I wanted to end my life. I was convinced I’d lost everything, my job, my home, and my wife. I felt so alone.

I don’t have close family that I can lean on. My relationship with my mother is more like me as parent and her as child. I don’t get on with my dad. He’s not empathetic anyway.

I have a few friends but not many and they can’t be there for me all the time. They have their own lives and problems.

I feel suicidal most of the time. I just don’t know how to fend off these thoughts and feelings. I was thinking about hanging myself or jumping off a motorway bridge or suffocating with helium. I purchased a helium canister with the intention to end my life yesterday but then I sought help, contacting the crisis team and they have put me somewhere safe away from the pressure pot that is home and dealing with the fact my wife no longer loves me or wants to be with me.

They tell me I need to focus on myself and forget her, but I don’t know how. She’s been the centre of my universe for 20 years. I can’t just turn off my feelings for her like a tap. I love her. I feel abandoned, and I don’t know how to fix myself. I’m in tears all the time. I just can’t believe my life has come to this. It’s so sad and so tragic, and I can’t see a future.

I need people to give me hope as my brain isn’t working. I need a reason to live and a way to a more positive future. I want the old Jon back. Funny, kind, loving, happy, making things happen, but that seems a long way off right now. At the moment, it’s just about survival.