And worse yet, If you go ahead and you tell someone that you're anxious and depressed due to tinnitus. well it seems that tinnitus is thrown out the window as a potential cause, after all 50 million people in the US have it, it can't be that bad!
This starts to get humiliating after a while, so I think most people just learn not to speak about it. I've been put into the general anxiety category way too many times, even though I have zero history of it prior to tinnitus. It's a serious mistake just looking at reaction, and not at least considering the severity. This kind of narrow minded thinking can really isolate certain groups.
My reaction is 10 x worse than it was when my tinnitus wasn't as severe just two months ago, hell I left here and wasn't coming back. I'm still the same person with the same reactions, I wonder what changed, couldn't be the condition, no that's all the same, very confusing.
My tinnitus started with having to actively listen to hear it, it seemed loud as I was used to silence, I even described it as loud as I'm sure most people do. After a barotrauma and ototoxic exposure it crept up into scary territory, now after some 110-140dB banging for 40 min in a MRI machine, Im at the end of the line.
I can say in my experience that those levels of severity are completely different conditions all together. The first was a shock, but i almost had to try and pay attention for it to actually bother me. The second was devastating, I had to learn to suffer, learn to take it, learn to work around it. The third (just two months in now) have created a severe form of anxiety (terror), catastrophic insomnia and deep despair.
It's all so different, I wish I still sat in the first category, and just ignorantly thought that these other people must be a bunch of negative wimps, unfortunately my eyes are wide open on this one.