I’m not very comfortable writing about this, but in the spirit of normalizing mental illness, away we go! 1/15

A few years ago I was finally given the very useful diagnosis of bipolar 2. Useful because that meant I finally got the meds that I needed and stopped feeling so utterly helpless about fighting my despair.

For most of my adult life I was on antidepressants, which would work for a bit and then stop working. After a while I just started thinking that there was nothing anyone could do to help me.

And then I wound up in a partial program, an outpatient hospital experience. I had to go to the hospital for six hours a day, five days a week for about six weeks. I called it Crazy Camp and actually kind of enjoyed it.

The psychiatrist there was the first person who ever even mentioned bipolar 2 to me, I’d never heard of it before. Fundamentally it means you have hypomania instead of mania, a less extreme version of being super up and having “great ideas” and being speedy and irritable.

Part of the problem with getting a diagnosis like this is that it can only really be made by finding out what drugs work best for you. For me it was a significant dose of lamictal which balances my emotions, and a few years later I’ve added a small dose of Prozac and adderall.

The lamictal balances out my most difficult emotions, including the desire to self-harm, the Prozac lifts my depression enough to be noticeable.

The adderall helps me think clearly, but messes up my sleep and possibly negates some of the good that the other two meds do. I find it hard to tell.

The main thrust of this thread is that you should keep trying to find the right diagnosis and the right doctor and the right meds. It might be pretty complicated. But just because nothing has helped yet, doesn’t mean that nothing will.

I was horrified when the partial program was recommended to me, it felt like being diagnosed as really truly crazy, and I had to talk myself into believing that I was only going there because I didn’t have the ability to find a psychiatrist who wasn’t connected to the program.

Try not to be afraid of being labeled. Being labeled can, surprisingly, free you.

And even having a pretty good idea of what’s going on in your brain doesn’t mean you get the nuances. For the first time today I read about “mixed states” or “mixity” a way of being both hypomanic and depressed at the same time.

Reading that other people understood these feelings and had named them was a relief, because even medicated, not everything goes away. You still have to unlearn old behaviors and learn new ones. Medication by itself is not a magic bullet.

My desire to self-harm more or less did magically go away, and - many other problems remain. Of course it turns out that this mixed state business is extra hard to medicate, because I am nothing if not extra.

If you’ve read this far, I hope that you’ve gotten something useful from me. And thank you for reading it! 15/15