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What Mania Is For Me
Mania is something that many people think they understand, but they only know what they’ve seen in media portrayals. Mania takes on various forms for different individuals. Much like not everyone experiences depression in the same way, not everyone has the same type of manic episodes. Mania isn’t all shopping sprees and rapid speech. It isn’t always thinking you can fly and taking on the world. In this blog post I’ll be describing how mania/ hypomania looks on me. Let’s start with how it physically feels. I want to rip off my skin. It’s as if I can feel the blood circulating through my body and every individual hair on…
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Treatment Resistant Depression: What Has Helped Me
Although I have bipolar disorder, it manifests itself mainly with severe, crippling depression. I’ll discuss my hypomanic episodes at a later time. Unfortunately for me, conventional treatment with antidepressants and different types of therapy have not worked. I only recently found out why the typical medications are not beneficial to me after changing psychiatrists. After reviewing the long list of antidepressants, mood stabilizers, and sleep medications that I have tried with little to no results, he suggested I take a genetic test. Now the genetic test doesn’t confirm or deny your diagnosis, it merely narrows down the selection of drug classes that may be suitable for treatment. The goal of…
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Baby Steps Back Into My Normal
The past few weeks have been tough. Not as tough as the weeks/months leading up to my hospitalization, but hard as hell nonetheless. I have been going for my TMS treatments on a steady schedule again and have tried a short stint on a new medication as well. The TMS has helped a great deal with my depression, but hasn’t brought me back to my fully functioning state yet. Unfortunately, although I’m not firing on all cyclinders as of yet I still have responsibilites that don’t give a damn if I’m well or not, they need to be taken care of. Thankfully my mom and big sister have really really come…
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When You Can’t Trust Yourself: The Struggle to Know Love
One important fact to know about me is that I have Bipolar Disorder. This diagnosis is debatable depending on which one of the many doctors I’ve seen since I was 12 you may ask, but this is what makes the most sense. This fact about me is important because it shapes how I view my world, my relationships, and myself. It also greatly impacts how others view me and interpret my actions. Now, I’ve titled this post “When You Can’t Trust Yourself: The Struggle to Know Love”, because with having a mental illness, and being able to recognize it, there is a tendency to question everything you feel, especially in…
