Earlier this month was mental health awareness week, the
goal is to fight stigma, provide support, educate the public and advocate for
equal care. One of the ways people were participating was opening up and
talking about their mental illnesses and not being ashamed of them to help remove the stigma attached to it. Everyone
knows someone with a mental illness whether they are aware of it or not. People
with diabetes, or fibromyalgia or asthma don’t have to hide, lie about or be
ashamed of their illnesses that are out of their control and they are free to
advocate and educate without having a stigma attached to them and hopefully one
day soon people with mental illness will be able to do the same. To help make that possible people suffering with an illness need to stop hiding and start
making it a regular part of the conversation. This is me starting my own
conversation and sharing my story. Grab a snack if you plan to actually read all of
this.
I was initially diagnosed with Bipolar (aka Manic
Depressive) when I was 23 (I'm now 35). I had been through a lot in the year leading up to
my diagnosis, I had lost a lot of loved ones in a short amount of time, ended a
serious relationship forcing me to move back home, I entered a very bad
relationship, I had left my promising career as a zookeeper on a impulse out of
anger (which I now know is very bipolar thing to do), I was homeless for a time
and I was a mess. When I was 22 I had starting self harming to deal with the
stress and pressures and depression I was going through (That’s a whole
different topic I will touch on later) and I kept it hidden for a
really long time. When it was finally discovered I was in a really bad place
mentally, I was severely depressed and my mind was in a really dark and ugly
place so when I was offered help I took it, I needed it.
When I started therapy I had two people I was seeing a psychiatrist
and a psychologist and together they diagnosed me as Manic Depressive/Bipolar.
When I was given my diagnosis they handed me 2 pamphlets, one on bipolar and
one on depression and a handful of prescriptions. That was it. As crazy it
seems my family has never been one to have all of the newest technology first
so we didn’t have the internet at my house (we didn’t even have cable until I
was like 17) so unless I went to the library I really didn’t have much access
to find out more information besides what was given to my on the tri-fold given
to me. After reading both I decided I was just suffering from depression, I
hadn’t been happy in a year I surely hadn’t been manically happy like described
in the pamphlet and they were wrong, also the meds me a zombie so I quit
talking them all except anti-depressant (without my doctors knowing)
Fast-forward to the last year and a half or so. I remained
on my anti-depressants all of this time, I had tried quitting them but the detox is
a bitch so I just kept taking them. In 2013 I left my last stable job with insurance while my other meds were pretty cheap, my
anti-depressant were not and to save myself some money I decided that I was going
to wean myself off of them. Another thing that had influenced that decision was also that I had been on them
so long, how do I know if I even need them anymore? Maybe I “grew” out my
depression or something who knows. Bad Choice.
While anti-depressants are not used to treat bipolar (in fact they can be harmful to take if you are bipolar) I think
mine kept my mood swings slightly in check, not completely but enough that I was getting by, I was functioning.
Looking back now I was definitely having mood swings and
showing all of the classic signs of bipolar, the irritability, tons of sudden burst of creativity and projects started and never finishing them, thinking of all of these great idea and things I was going to do and become and see, sleep issues, spending $80.00 on burts bees
chapstick when you don’t even use chapstick, textbook mania. I
recently saw a video of me when I was obviously in a manic episode, the fast
talking, racing mind, overly happy, I would have slapped me I was so annoying. It was there, it
just wasn’t bad enough for it to really fuck up my life or for other people to see it
as something wrong. Instead of seeing bipolar, I was considered a bitch, told I was too sensitive, told I was lazy, selfish,
unrealistic in my goals, that I never followed through, I was unreliable,
antisocial, to talkative, over reactive, dramatic, short tempered etc….I was all of those things, but there was a
reason I was all of those things, I’m bipolar.
I was (and hope to resume studying to be a midwife), about a year ago the midwife I was studying under decided
to retire which had kinda left me screwed for lack of a better word. The stress of not knowing how I am
going to finish school, along with the thought of having to move across the
country to do so and financial worries started me into a tailspin. I was hiding my bipolar pretty well for a while
and then in July I had an extremely bad panic attack at the wrong place at the wrong
time and I couldn’t hide how bad it had gotten any longer. I had been having
small panic attacks for a few months but this one was at a level I didn’t
realize was possible. I had no choice but to tell my mom what had been going on
and ask for help, I was no longer able to hide it or really function normally.
Since I don’t have insurance I had to start looking into public health clinics
and such and the soonest available appointment was in 13 weeks, which I was finally able to go to last week.
It’s been a very trying 13 weeks for everyone, I got a few
meds from my regular doctor who decided to take the opportunity of having a
crying mess of a woman alone as the last patient to inappropriately touch me,
because who will people believe the doctor or the woman on the handful of meds?
The medications he gave me made me a zombie and were not very help full.
My manic episodes have increased and have become much more
intense, if you have ever seen the tv show Homeland and the chick goes "crazy"…that’s
been me. My brain runs a thousand miles a minute, my thoughts race and jump all
over, I can’t focus on one thing, and my speech is really fast at times to
match it. I’m very anxious about my things and people touching my things and
being in my space, it can really send me almost into a panic attack at times. I
don’t do well with change at the moment, painting my room was horrible, I know
it’s simply a new paint color but my brain just doesn’t handle things like that
well at the moment. Also packing my room so we can sell the house has been a
huge ordeal but thankfully my mother is a saint and has been very understanding
and tolerant of my madness, she see’s my struggle. I can also be very short
tempered and get frustrated easily and have moment of rage, something as simple
as not being able to find my comb can set me off big time, again, my mother
would be a saint if she was catholic.
I'm not going to lie, the mania is not always bad, I can become super creative
(jewelry making) and super productive, I become goal oriented and get shit done, I
have ambition, I’m super happy and want to dance around and be social and
everything is rainbows and whales, the world is brighter and music sounds better
and it’s amazing and it’s great. That stage of mania can be addictive, that
phase of mania is why a lot of people either go off of their meds or refuse to
take them, it’s a high without the drugs. When I am in certain stages of mania I won’t sleep for days because my
brain won’t turn off or it gets stuck on one idea and won’t let go. When we
went to Oregon earlier this month we wanted to get a wind chime as a souvenir and we didn’t so I looked up how
to make them (creative spike) and since I did that I can’t sleep at night because all my brain
can do is focus on this fucking wind chime, I even went to Lowe's and looked
priced supplies and that has helped some but my brain gets stuck on things and
won’t let go of them.
Not all mania is fun and rainbows and whales either, it can extremely dangerous and scary not only for me but for those around me. It’s what I imagine what it would be like being on coke, but it’s just my brain chemistry being off. I will be up for days and even my meds won't help, my brain races really fast and jumps around and I will lost my train of thought, my speech will be so fast it is hard to keep up with and I can't stop moving, I will pace around my house and keep picking things up and setting them down. I've worked in the medical field for a long time now, if I saw me, I wouldn't believe that I wasn't on drugs.
My depression has also gotten worse. It’s not as frequent
and so far it hasn’t lasted as long as my manic phases have but it’s much worse
than it was before. I will lock myself in my room for days at a time and won’t
do anything but sleep, I barley even eat. The world comes crashing down around
me and everything is black and dark and everything hurts, physically hurts.
Nothing in the world can pull me out of my bed or room at these times and I
will lock my door and not let anyone in. Someday I can even start as one and transition
to the other phase or have both at the same time, those are the worse, your
mind had rapid and repeated depressing thoughts and it’s bad.
So that is my story as of now, it’s not over and hopefully
it improves. This is not to say I don’t have normal days, I do, but right now
they are fewer and farther in between but I do have them. I finally got to see
a doctor at the free clinic and let me tell you our mental health care system
sucks. Really sucks. Thankfully I have family to help me but I now understand how so many
people end up on the street. I was evaluated by two people over several hours
given a bunch of medications and told to come back in 3 months. I go there once
a month for my refills and have a check in every 3 months to see if they need
to be adjusted, that’s it. That’s scary.
So that is my back story, I'm not sure what my plans are with this blog as of yet. For me writing is very therapeutic, so a of this might just be like a journal open to the world to see what it's like in my mind and how this all effects me and hopefully to journal my progress back to being more functional and onto being a midwife. Some of it will be informative and to help educate people on bipolar disorder and help other's learn as I learn. I don't know how often I will write, at times it might be several times a day other times it might be once a month we shall see. So welcome to My Jagged Mind.
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