She’s so high

Ironically, the reason I haven’t been updating much is because I’ve spent the past week hypomanic. Or so Rob says. He said on Tuesday I was “vibrating” and wouldn’t go to bed without watching me take my medication.

The past six days or so I have been here, there and everywhere and feeling pretty good, which means I tend not to update to say, “I feel pretty good”.

My brain has been racing and I’ve been full of ideas- the most fixed one being a desire to go to Paris, right now. I am not to be trusted with my bank card at times like these.

I have been entertaining many fantasies about trashing my life in London completely and starting again. I had planned to go to Paris, find a hostel, get a job as a waitress in some dour little café, write legendary books and smoke all day, throw my phone in the Seine, cut my hair off, change my name. I was in Waterloo earlier, where I could have boarded a train to Paris, but was with a friend, who had to go to Cambridge later. Tempting as it was to jump over the ticket barriers and into the Channel Tunnel, I settled for a boat ride down the choppy River Thames.

There have been many times this week I have just stopped short of doing very stupid things, but only because I was in company.

However, as you might have guessed, this evening I have come down to earth with a bang. Oh, nothing collassal. Just that mild, aggravating depression that sidles in with tiredness. I haven’t really been sleeping and now it’s catching up on me. Dull aches and pains, constant smoking, the whole kit and caboodle for me hitting the ground.

Irritibility is kicking in, so I am in the kitchen out of harm’s- and Hobbes’- way. I feel itchy and dispassionate, which is an annoying change to my demeanor in the past week.

I hope that some sort of mood stability kicks in as my appointment with the psychiatrist and CPN is on Monday. I don’t want to feel depressed when I see them as I just won’t care and won’t state my case. I will let them sift Lithium down my throat and pawn me off on Seroquel. As it happens, if I go and am somewhat clear in my intentions, I suspect they will pull the antidepressant as it’s no good for rapid-cycling. But that leaves me to dissolve into anxiety and panic attacks.

However, at the moment, I am not feeling terrible nor fantasising jumping out of a window. Just gradually deflating, which is far better than the rapid and violent lunge downwards that often assails me.

I am wondering if it is a good sign that I have experienced hypomania this week that didn’t escalate into psychotic, dysphoric mania as it usually does. My default setting these days tends to be a kind of mixed episode- the irritable, crying-laughing-energetic depression. Every time I have gone proper hypomanic, running, skipping, singing, writing, dancing, sexing, it has usually ended in me screaming at something that no-one else sees.

Mercy for the manic depressive- this is a day I don’t want to slash my wrists or scale a building. My brain has nowhere near slowed down but it is not telling me how worthless I am. This, to me, is progress.

At the moment, there’s a poster on the Moodgarden forum rallying with his “mental illness is a fake disease” propaganda and shouting about how all manic depressives only ever went manic because (takes deep breath) they were prescribed antidepressants for depression that they had an “adverse reaction” to, and thus, were incorrectly labelled as suffering from “bipolar disorder”.

Well, nope, not even close in my case. I hadn’t touched an antidepressant until this year. My first full manic episode, I hadn’t even sniffed alcohol, didn’t smoke, never touched a drug, barely even a painkiller. But it happened anyway.

There some scribblings here about searching for the neurological link.

If I could find the bloody image, I would show you a brain scan that illustrates how a bipolar brain reacts differently from a non-bipolar brain.

But, hell. All I want, all I believe, is that bipolar disorder is real. As for the medications? If you make informed decisions and are supported, and if they help you, that’s the important thing. I am sick of the anti-med bandwagon. I rolled on it for such a long time. The churlish, “ddddduuuuh mental illness is fake!” belief just reinforces the stigma of mental illness. The most important thing to me is that people with mental illness, behavioural disorders, whatever the hell you want to call it, aren’t marginalised and discriminated against for something that- yes, even if they’re aware of it- feels out of their control. I have said time and time again here that I always felt that what was happening to me was biological. I fought the good fight. I went on the diets. Changed my scene. Did the mindfullness techniques. Had the therapy. Stopped the booze. Settled down and lived a quiet, careful life. And I am still a manic depressive. I still suffer intense depression. I still suffer highs and mixed episodes. And I even have the “broken home”, the “unstable background”. And yet, I’m okay with that. My broken home and unstable background is populated with people and experiences I cherish. It didn’t destroy me. It never will.

I don’t care if they’re a cluster of symptoms defined in an outdated manual. To me, they are real. They do not define me as a person. And knowing that, hanging on to that, is what gets me through when I feel I am losing the fight.

My aim is, in the future, to be on the lowest dose of meds possible, stable, happy, sorted and peaceful. I have tried every other way. Now I feel it’s a bit of a group effort- me, medications, understanding, support and lifestyle changes. I was “crazy” before I took medications. I wasn’t an inpatient bouncing off the walls drugged to the tits. I was given a sedative and Haloperidol for psychosis. That was it- 10pm nightly, a sedative, as I was as-yet-undiagnosed. Being an inpatient saved my life.

I do not think psychiatry is perfect and in some cases, I think medications and labels are abused. But I loathe how the anti-psychiatry community bitches on the patients. Bitch on the big dogs. We’re not thick. We can make up our own minds. If Lamictal is helping someone function normally, who the hell are they to tell them they are a naive sheep buying into the psychiatry sham?