Hi.

Hi, I'm a 19 year old English Major and I'm really new to this forum as well as forums that discuss anxiety. I suffer from panic attacks and needle phobia that's really gone from 'phobia' to 'terror'. I'm in therapy for the panic attacks but my therapist is really as helpful as a computer that keeps hurling the phrase 'rational thought' at me. I basically have panic attacks and blackouts everytime I think of needles. My experiences ith medical situations involving needles have been nothing short of traumatising for the last 11 years of my life, so this really shouldn't be a surprise. But lately, it's been getting so bad, I will feel sensations of a needle getting stuck quite violently into the crook of my arm or the soreish feeling of a wound on parts of my body and sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night wanting to scream in terror. I started getting suicidal thoughts about how I could escape all these if I just killed myself. And I keep getting period of extreme positivity where I am convinced I will deal with it all and come out fine but then the negative times would blow in and I'd start getting all suicidal and get those feelings on my arms again. The worst of it is that everyone around me just dismisses it as a 'phase' I will outgrow eventually, but I've been trying to outgrow this 'phase' for the last 11 years and it's only been getting worse. I suppose the scariest thing about this is that this fear is not groundless because it was caused by something which actually happened to me and I have stories from people to back up my fears. I'm really some what at a loss here.