After about 10 years of treatment, focusing on my symptoms of clinical depression, I started experiencing severe anxiety. I attributed it to my recent divorce, becoming a single mother, attending college full time and returning to live with my parents. The anxiety went on for months, getting more and more intense and frequent. In class one day, I experienced my first panic attack, it was terrifying. That was the last day that I was able to attend my classes, my mother contacted all my professors and arranged with a fellow student of mine to get school work to me. I finished the semester from home. I started having more and more panic attacks, each time I had one, I would not be able to return to the location where it had occurred. They mainly occurred while I was waiting in lines- at the grocery store, the Post Office, etc. Soon, I could not leave the house at all. I didn't know what was wrong, I had never heard of panic attacks; it was terrifying to feel as if I did not have control over your body or mind. I wouldn't talk on the phone, everything got worse until all I could do was pace. I couldn't sleep anymore, even with sleep medication. I don't know how else to describe the feeling except to try imagining that you feel that might start screaming, throw yourself on the ground, cry, laugh or lose control of bodily functions and you would have no ability to prevent any of these from happening. It begins to make sense, why I would eventually refuse to leave my house. Remember- this is a brain that is not working correctly, if you can imagine a heart that stops pumping blood correctly. It isn't something a person can fix, by trying harder or "getting over it".
By the time I was left to pacing, had lost 20 pounds and had gone days without sleep, my mother asked our next door neighbor, a practicing psychologist, to come talk to me. My neighbor essentially said, it is your choice, you can continue like this and slowly kill yourself or you can decide to get in the car and get help. It was painful to hear, but I did it. The entire experience was terrifying, I had to sign in, wait in a waiting room, meet someone I didn't know, try to tell them what was wrong, all while having an ongoing panic attack. I was prescribed Lorazepam to control the panic attacks, severe anxiety and to help me sleep. I was also prescribed the antidepressant, Paxil. I can still recall (20 years later) how I felt waiting in the store for the prescription to be filled- I paced around the store for 20 minutes- still experiencing one long panic attack. The psychiatrist had told me the Lorazepam was very quick acting, which it was. I had never taken an antianxiety drug previously and wished I had known about such a medication months ago before I dropped out of school and society and nearly lost my life. The Paxil took a while to start working, I didn’t really know how to expect to feel. I had started seeing a therapist, weekly, at the same time as I started the Paxil. Within about two months, I started feeling fantastic, all the self-critical thoughts were gone, I wasn’t afraid to do anything and I had more energy and ideas than I could recall ever having. I assumed that this must be how everyone else always felt. No wonder they could do some many things, when you don’t worry and are not afraid- life is not so taxing, you can accomplish so much. However, along with this wonderful change, I started making some odd choices, which did not seem odd to me, at the time. I am not certain why these choices didn’t raise red flags with my therapist and my psychiatrist; they were just happy with the progress I was making. Over the course of the next year, I made decisions that were completely uncharacteristic of me. In fact, I would have never even remotely considered making any one of them, previous to this time. I had always been extremely cautious in all my decisions, usually to a fault- thinking through every possible scenario and taking as little risk as possible. This approach pertained to every aspect of my life- personal, social, financial, etc. Manic behavior can often be just the opposite and can include engaging in risky behavior. Sometimes, I wonder if the contrast was more stark for me because of my faith and religious beliefs. When you live a life where you have abstained from smoking, drinking alcohol, dressing immodestly, having sex outside of marriage, swearing and watching inappropriate media; suddenly not abstaining from any or all of them is huge. However, in a typical mid-twenties woman, none of those behaviors would seem concerning. It was not until four years later that I would understand what happened to me that year. Since then, when someone tells me that their spouse or a mature married sibling, raised in the same religion as me, suddenly and completely changes their lifestyle; I often wonder if there was a chance that person had recently started taking an antidepressant. As I eluded to earlier, the antidepressant, which I was prescribed triggered a manic episode. This was not information that the mainstream psychiatrists or therapists either knew of or communicated well. I can’t be sure that 20 years ago “mood changes” was not listed as a side-effect on the Paxil prescription information sheet. It is late and this post is plenty long. I will write more of my story in the next post. However, if you walk away from this post with the assumption that I think taking medication for bipolar is a bad thing or that I think everyone with bipolar disorder should be pulled off of their antidepressant; you would be mistaken. In following posts, you will see that despite the negative experiences I have had with medication- it has saved my life.
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I have experienced so many things that I have wanted to share for such a long time. I want those with bipolar to know that someone understands and has experienced the same frustrations, feelings of hopelessness and pain that they have. In so doing, perhaps they can regain hope. I want to be the change that I wish to see in the world and that starts with me making my story public- that is the purpose of my blog.
Because I can't possibly address all the topics I want to address in one blog post, I thought I would provide a list of topics that I will cover over time, on this blog. I have strong feelings about certain topics, frustrations with others and want to bring awareness to others. If you see a topic, in the list below, which I have not yet addressed, feel free to ask me about it. The topics are not listed in any particular order. The pain and hope of therapy Therapy with medication Psychiatrists: Dismissal of therapist’s opinions Unwillingness to communicate with therapists The 15 minute appointment Psychologists who prescribe- legislation Filing for disability: Lack of psychiatric support Guilty until proven innocent Discrimination by medical providers Why we don’t tell...breaking the stigma Fatal disease “I wish I had cancer” Isolation Judgement Sympathy and support Taking medication: Cost Finding the correct one(s) Why they stop working Sticking it out through the pain Choosing not to Antidepressants and bipolar: When to remove them Manic episode reactions Effexor Employment Medical insurance Working with an attorney Hospitalization Group therapy and support groups Drugs, alcohol, smoking Protecting your medications ADHD medications Birth control medications Take a stand, trust yourself When I was younger, a good 30 plus years ago, I did not expect to live past age 25. Or perhaps, more honestly, I hoped I would not live past age 25. Only recently did I discover that this is not uncommon for those who suffer from a mental illness. At that time, I had no diagnosis and certainly was not receiving any sort of treatment. In fact, I knew nothing of bipolar disorder. I may not have even had the ability verbalize how I felt; in part because I was not self-aware and in part because I was using everything I had to survive; there was not any time or energy to think about how I felt.
Many years later, I would describe my pre-teen and teen years as a time when each day, I hoped I would be hit by a car and die. I had no thoughts of suicide, I just could not imagine living day after day like I was. In addition to living with an undiagnosed and untreated illness, there were additional situations that caused emotional pain and exhaustion--family members with undiagnosed mental illnesses, poverty, instability, learning disabilities and severe social anxiety. I had friends, a number of siblings, a large extended family and was very active in my church. However, I never confided in anyone about how I felt, the challenges I had, the hopelessness, the self-hatred and the constant barrage of self critical thoughts When I say no one, that means not a single person. By all accounts, I tried to look and act as “normal” as possible. The most telling sign was that I would cry very easily and be fighting back tears on a daily basis. This was especially true for school,; I was terrified of school, the teachers or any authority figure, the school work and perhaps most of all the need to complete tasks within a certain time period. Back in those days, depression, test anxiety, social anxiety didn’t exist in any vocabulary that I was aware of. I was classified as extremely shy. Only within the past year (in my 40’s) was I assessed for ADHD, included in my diagnosis of ADHD was also a significant learning deficit in the Executive Function portion of my brain. I share this as an aside because I realized how much emotional effort I made to hide this deficit. This added to my already overwhelming emotional load. It was a rare occasion when I was able to complete my school work in class. I was taking homework home as early as First Grade (back before that was the usual), my memory was terrible, my constant prayer was to recall things long enough to complete my exams. In addition, I had no sense of common sense. I wish I could recall examples, but all I can say is that whenever someone would say, “that is just common sense”, I knew it wasn’t for me. So, I watched people, I studied how they responded to situations and tried to copy it. Looking back it is no wonder I was constantly fighting tears and physically exhausted. I did not do all of this “hiding” for any reason other than I thought these were basic things that I should be able to do. I was always telling myself that I had trouble because I was lazy, procrastinated and was disorganized. I just learned that I would always have to work about three times harder than my friends and siblings to accomplish the same things. It hasn’t been until recently that I realized how damaging this way of living would be on my physical, emotional and mental health. "You must be the change you wish to see in the world" -Gandhi
Among the hundreds of people were waiting to visit with Mahatma Gandhi were a mother and her young son. When it was their turn, the woman asked Gandhi to speak with her son about eating sugar.Gandhi asked her to come back in two weeks and said he would talk to the boy then. She wondered why he didn’t just speak to her son when he was already there, but she complied with his request.In two weeks they returned, and after waiting for a couple of hours, she was able to approach Gandhi once again.Hearing her repeated request, Gandhi immediately spoke with the boy, who agreed to begin working to eliminate sweets. After thanking Gandhi for his wise and compassionate words, the mother asked him why he wanted them to return instead of offering his advice the first time.Gandhi replied, “Upon your visit two weeks ago I too was eating sugar.” He explained that he could not speak of or teach her son to not eat sugar if he himself had not taken that journey. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140813120052-14431679-the-story-behind-you-must-be-the-change-you-wish-to-see-in-the-world |
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