Me and my social anxiety blog

Thanks for taking a look at my blog, hopefully you will find it interesting or helpful, maybe at times entertaining although I doubt it :-p

I’ll try and explain a bit about me and my social anxiety disorder, and the reason that I’ve set up this blog.

I was watching a TV program on BBC1 called Horizon – How Mad Are You? It was basically a kind of “big-brother” but with some people who have a mental illness and some “normal” people. The people in the TV show would have to perform tasks, and there would be 3 experienced psychologists who would watch the footage and try and decide which ones showed signs of mental illness and which ones seemed to not show any signs of being mentally ill.

Anyway in one of these tasks the people had to one-at-a-time stand up in front of a small group of strangers in a pub and perform stand-up comedy for about 10 minutes. It was said that this task was to establish if any of the people showed signs of social anxiety disorder. The people that had SAD might show signs of extreme nervousness and might really dread the performance. I kind of knew that it was very likely that this was something I had, after they went into a bit more detail about social anxiety disorder (disliking talking in front of people, feeling very self-conscious, etc).

I went on to a few websites to do a little research and found some interesting and useful sites, one of which is a forum which many people who suffer from SAD currently use. It’s really nice to be able to talk to people who suffer from the same thing, and its quite re-assuring to hear stories of other people who have social anxiety disorder. It makes me feel less silly, if that makes sense. The forum can be located here: Social Anxiety Discussion

I decided that it might be good for me to create a blog about my dealings with social anxiety disorder, and just generally about my life. Not because I think of myself as an interesting or glamour-seeking person, but I just feel that it might help to keep a kind of diary and it might be helpful to fellow SAD sufferers :)