Low-Grade Depression?

I have been trying to discern if I have been in a low grade depression or not. It can be tough to recognize these borderlands. The signs can be subtle. While I do not have negative thoughts coming at me and trying to carry me off on the backs of lemmings flooding over a cliff, I have found it harder to complete tasks and sleep less than 11 hours a day. If I am not in a depression, I am very near one, I think.

Two things in particular seem to be helping at this point. The first is my Vyvanse. The second is exercise. Vyvanse is known for raising people out of funks. Exercise is a remedy that I have used for a long time. But it only helps when I am gasping at the surface of that great ocean of drowning. So if I am down, it is not very far.

The Night of The Cut *Graphic Self Harm Trigger Warning*

******TRIGGER WARNING: Anorexia somewhat and EXTREMELY GRAPHIC SELF HARM******

DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU ARE EASILY TRIGGERED BY SELF HARM ESPECIALLY IN GRAPHIC DETAIL.

You have been warned.

This is probably the single most important story in my life. It led to a cascade of events: hospitalization, my correct diagnosis of bipolar, getting kicked out of school, and finally getting the real help I needed.

It was 6am when I finally asked my ex-boyfriend for my knife back. We aren’t on speaking terms and we are clear that we can never be. We’re either together or not. And together is awful, dangerous, addicting, full of love, full of hate.

Today I see him to get it back, so I stress out about it of course. I overthink what I will wear. I felt the need to show him how much my appearance has changed, how much I have changed. Both of which are major improvements.

Should I go laid back in my cute dorm-room college girl get up all from Victoria’s Secret? Or should I go with my traditional assemble which people describe as “edgy” because its boots and leather jackets and what not?
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What Happens in A Support Group

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A few months ago, a spokesperson for a “mental health advocacy organization” likened support groups to appendectomy patients performing surgery on one another. I said nothing at the time, but the remark and all the errors it entails have led me to consider how my support groups help me.

The claim that support groups seek to replace medical treatment is erroneous. DBSA South Orange County, like many other support groups of its kind, has issued a disclaimer indicating that our peer-run support groups are no substitute for a doctor’s care. This fact by itself defeats the glib assertion made above. We don’t try to cure people of their depression or their bipolar disorder. There are people with better skills for doing that than we.

What we offer is a safe place where people can talk about their struggles with the illness. Doctors and therapists know how to treat, but they don’t know what it is like to undergo treatment. They don’t encounter stigma. They have not experienced the catastrophic loss of community that can happen when one is diagnosed with a mental illness, when friends and family members run away.

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Tiered healthcare system U.S.

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You get what you (can) pay for

I don’t know enough about the intricacies of our healthcare system to give a explanation on how they different insurances work and why some people fall between the cracks.  I just have been in or visited facilities that didn’t require private insurance and they are night and day from ones that my employer provided insurance covers.

My first hospital stay was after I had refused to get back in the car during a road trip. I ran to a mini-mart and asked the clerk to keep my parents from me. He let me stay there and called the police. I thought they would call my husband or sister to come get me. I guess it would take too long. The officer handled it well. He kept my parents seperate from me and listened to both of us. They he had me go into an ambulance to got to a hospital.

The hospital they took me to was a County hospital. I wouldn’t recommend it. I was confused. I wouldn’t speak and then blurt things out. They pushed a cart in the room with juices and yogurt. I wasn’t sure what to do, but I soon learned to take what I needed. There was a room full of cots. I would go and lay down on a cot. At night one of the other patients helped me find the linens and make a bed. I had been lying in the cold.
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Ran out of meds… and very scared.

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So we all know quitting your meds cold turkey is a very bad idea. But sometimes… things happen.

I wasn’t really paying much attention to how many meds I had. I knew I saw my psychiatrist and would get a prescription and then the mail order pharmacy would send it to me (they’re much cheaper- 3 months for the cost of 1- and they’re authentic). However, I ran out early. I called my psychiatrist to have her fax a 1 month prescription to my pharmacy but when I got there they said my insurance had already covered this month through the mail order service. In other words- I’d have to pay out of pocket.

1 pill costs $12. And I take 2 a day.

I called my mom asking how long it’d be before we’d get the pills in the mail. And she said it won’t be for at least a few more days. The service had emailed us saying that the medications were “delayed.” But when I demanded to know what that meant, she simply sent me the email. All the email said was that it was delayed. That was it. No hint as to how delayed, nothing.

I left the pharmacy holding back tears. I guess I was going off my meds for a few days, with no tapering.

When I got home I broke down sobbing. My mom called me back about it and then asked if I was crying, when I said yes because “you don’t know what this is going to be like” she yelled at me saying I shouldn’t put this stuff off for so long.

She later apologized.

And yes I am terrified. When I forgot my pills one night I almost killed myself. Although when I found out I felt that way only because I forgot my pills, I cried with relief.

I take 2 anti-psychotics. Luckily this is less important one. My main one keeps a lot of symptoms under control- mania, anxiety, etc. This one just keeps me from being depressed. It actually made me feel like a normal type of stable. Generally I was in a good mood, instead of my normal slightly-down mood.

I am scared of having to endure the next few days until I get the medicine. We are going to call the service tomorrow and ask them to expedite it, it costs money but it is literally less than paying for one days worth of the medication.

I will survive. But it will be hell.

And I am scared.

-Quinn

The Progress of My ADD Treatment

Diagnoses come to me long after the illnesses have wrecked my life. I received the label of “Attention Deficit Disorder” a few months back when I asked to be evaluated for it. My psychologist passed the information on to my psychiatrist who put me on Vyvanse.

I like to say that my mood-stabilizers put down a floor that allowed me to put up a house based on healthy changes in my life. Vyvanse created doors and windows that let air and light into the rooms.

The effect of the medication was apparent on the first day. I accomplished many tasks that I had been putting off and kept the motivation going for the rest of the week. When I started running out of things, I looked around the condo and found others to do. I compiled a list of future projects.

One by one, I checked them off and added more.

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Twelve Myths About Bipolar Disorder

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I have to rebut these when they are said by family members, fellow patients, and random members of the public. Every one of us who lives with the condition has heard some if not all of these time and again. You might even have a few of your own to add. You may note that I don’t include “It’s all in your head” (though the issue of faking is covered below). It is all in my head! Bipolar disorder is an organic brain dysfunction and the brain resides inside my skull. So I don’t count that a myth, just a misapprehension of the truth.

Here are my twelve most common myths:

Bipolar disorder is just something psychiatrists made up so that they can get rich.

Not too long ago, a Fox Radio commentator told a caller that she had been duped by her psychiatrist. They just made it up to get your money, he told her. She begged to differ but he was having none of it. Even when he was forced by his employer to apologize, he equivocated.

There are a few things wrong with this belief. The first any person with bipolar disorder can tell you: the highs, the lows, the paranoia, the hallucinations, and the delusions are all too real. Physicians have observed the disease in patients since the time of Hippocrates. And patients have suffered, suffered mightily.

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Review: Rethinking Positive Thinking

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Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation by Gabriele Oettingen ★★★★★

I don’t know how many times I have listened to people in support groups declare that they have decided to apply positive thinking to their lives and then watched them crash and burn. People declare all kinds of objectives for their affirmations. They will lose weight. They will master their drug problem. They will control their anger. They will grow rich. Money will come to them without effort. They will find a millionaire and marry him. They will find a fabulous new job and leave all the cares of the old one behind them. Some goals are realistic. Others are simply fantastic.

Studies show that plain old positive thinking drags people into a depressive rut. Oettingen cites the example of her work examining the attitudes of East Germans versus West Germans. East Germans spend a lot of time thinking positively. They see themselves as rich, as coming into opportunities of a lifetime which change their life situation for the better. But they still end up at bars trying to drink their melancholy away, and they never get anywhere with these plans. West Germans set reasonable objectives, put in the work, and succeed. Even though their goals are less grandiose, they are happier than their former Communist counterparts.

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Focus

I wake up and throw myself into rants about how I am irritated with a multitude of issues in my life that are all intersecting to make my day frustrating and uncertain.

After ranting for two hours to various people, I start studying. I am fixated trying to complete problem after problem with undying devotion. When I get stuck I force myself to turn my attention to what is more important- the assignments due tomorrow.

What should have been a half hour at best of work, turns into what feels like over an hour. I write an abstract for my lab report and spend an immense amount of time editing it until it is “perfect.”
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On Victor Frankl, and logotherapy

We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles – whatever one may choose to call them – we know: the best of us did not return.

I have just finished reading Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor E. Frankl. The book is written in two parts. The first part is an account of Victor Frankl’s experiences in several concentration camps, during WWII. The second is an account of Frankl’s system of therapy, called logotherapy, a humanistic variety of psychotherapy centered around the importance of finding meaning in your life. As Frankl says, in the first part, quoting Nietzsche,

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.

What ties the two parts together is the fact that, in relating his concentration camp experiences, Frankl focuses, beyond the bare fact of the abuses to which he and other Jews were subjected in the camps (those few who did somehow survive), on the psychology of being a concentration camp prisoner, both for worse (the decline, from constant hunger and weakness as much as anything, into numbness and apathy) and for better (where did prisoners find the resilience to keep going in the face of that horror). These sources of resilience include relishing brief moments of respite (a stolen potato or the chance to remove lice) or beauty (a sunset or a song), the memory of particular lines of literature and philosophy that speak to Frankl (Nietzsche, Lessing, Dostoevsky), hanging onto memories of the past (for Frankl, especially, the image of his wife, who would eventually prove to have died in another camp), humor, and seeking sources of meaning (for Frankl, an attempt to reconstruct, on scraps in shorthand, a manuscript that had been taken from him at Auschwitz, and a fantasy of a future Frankl, having survived, giving a lecture on the psychology of prisoners in concentration camps). That and a sheet of paper with the Shema Yisrael, received in the coat pocket of one who had already died, in place of the manuscript that had been taken from Frankl. When Frankl titles a postscript after his second part “The Case for a Tragic Optimism,” the fact that he has surely earned the “tragic” part of that case makes me trust the “optimism” part more.

Logotherapy, the school of psychotherapy that Frankl founded, and which he describes in the second part of his book, is a third school of Viennese psychotherapy, after Freud’s psychoanalysis and Adler’s individual therapy. In contrast to Freud’s will to pleasure, or Adler’s will to power, Frankl centers his psychotherapy on a will to meaning.
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