Let’s Focus on Anxiety Then

In one last desperate attempt to get my psychiatrist to prescribe me with some form anti-depressant I have decided to release my usually suppressed pathologically demand avoidant intellect and turn this hopeless situation into one that is more in my favor. Such an impulsive idea makes me think this is another one of my manic ‘themes.’ The latest one had something to do with The Kinks and fashion but Carl Jung yet again put me on the right path.

Do you really think the person writing this does not need to be medicated?

My psychiatrist recommended I look up social anxiety and Asperger’s syndrome because those things are so unknown to me, right? Then I started thinking about just talking about my social anxiety and bring up that I think it’s more general anxiety. Don’t get me wrong; I have very severe crippling delusional paranoid fantasies when it comes to my social anxiety. I can go from feeling normal and someone will just look at me and I’ll feel a hot flush and wonder ‘why do you hate me?’

My most crippling anxiety is over change and taking orders from other people. I like to feel in control of myself and most things around me but I’ve cooled down my demanding way of making everyone aware of this and following my routine down to a T and instead just try my best to work around them.

Usually my own passive avoidance is enough but when people push me it leads to breakdowns, meltdowns and the creation of very anti-social thoughts in my mind. It makes me flirt with oppositional defiance disorder which is the childhood version of anti-social personality disorder, which is not sociopathy but more a complete disregard for the rules or the feelings of other people because you’re sick of being backed into a corner and you just want to be left alone with your solitary interests but the world won’t allow you to; no, you’re capable of much more than this – you’re just putting limits on yourself. So, you feel like burning and smashing and self-harming, not because you feel numb but because…I haven’t worked that out yet. Maybe it’s leading towards suicide. When you have both mania and depression at once that’s when you want to and can do it; you’ve finally got a lot of energy to carry it out.

I’m thinking focusing on this type of anxiety might get some response from my psychiatrist.

I recently started taking Ritalin again, recreationally, although still to medicate myself. It was a horrible day. I was in a crowded and hot environment. Alcohol was just making me tired and I barely ate at all. I was worried about many things such as getting good enough photos of the bands playing that day so I took along 4 or 5 camera lenses. But then my energy just disappeared and I felt like I was stretching myself to remain there and watch the band’s whole set.

The whole time I wanted more energy and I knew one tiny little tablet of Ritalin could do that and also give me a lot of physical complications. When I did take it mania was guaranteed. Before I took it I just struggled to say anything to anyone and my friend’s and I had met the band after the show and I was just desperate for more energy and to say anything. So I took it with alcohol and I knew exactly what chemical reaction was to happen as a cause of that.

If it wasn’t for noticing a familiar face from my past being there I might have still had a hard time getting along with anyone. I wasn’t anxious then but it was soon to follow. A few stares my way made me feel those familiar pangs but it wasn’t to bother me yet. Despite Ritalin throwing me into often delusional manias with other forms of psychosis it was controlling my usual unstable emotions.

As for my experience I was a loud chatterbox barely able to stay on the same topic for more than ten seconds. If someone said they will be back soon I’d walk off right away and the only thing that wasn’t happening is I wasn’t having racing thoughts. When the party dispersed I wasn’t done despite my feelings about ‘the loneliness of bipolar disorder: that even when surrounded by people you end up partying on your own.’ So I kept drinking and hanging out and almost made the stereotypical bad decisions but was able to stop myself and leave before things led to disaster. And then I cried myself to sleep and for the next couple of days struggled with suicidal thoughts about the night where I tried so hard to fit in I risked my own mental health, again.  It made me remember that I’m really not in as much control of this disorder as much as I’d like to think I am. I can avoid making my moods worse but there will always be the temptation of making myself manic which eventually makes my moods worse and more unstable.

For the past six or seven months I have really tried to fit in better with a group of people and that night I felt rejection from them. It might have gone back further than six or seven months but that’s how long it’s been when mania decided to take over and told me this can happen, we can do anything. They will love us. We will belong.

I’ve had many thoughts to build myself up about living this dream and now all I want to do is medicate it completely away because I know it is possible. I can manage for a time with my own problem solving strategies but I still fall back into this way of thinking and the extreme obsessive feelings whenever I become hypomanic or fall deeper into depression. Sometimes I use it to mitigate depression but it just takes me from one delusional state into another.

So…that seems like another good topic to bring up with my psychiatrist.

The problem is I’m not very good at talking about my feelings and if someone deliberately turns the conversation onto something more about what they think is going on with me it’s impossible to fight it. I’m never going to feel ok about having to take medication again even if it can turn my life around so even though I want it I’m not going to persist asking when my suggestion gets turned down when I have my own worries about taking it.

Mania is mania too. It can make me feel extremely confident and the ideas will just be flowing and for someone who doesn’t usually have a lot of energy it can keep me on my feet all day. I’m more social and able to focus that it’s like taking Ritalin without the side effects. Instead there are regrets when the fun part is over and the agitation begins which eventually leads to another brief but severe depression, often with suicidal thoughts.

How do I keep going after living through all of this? How do I still face every day when these episodes can happen at any moment? What I eat, drink and the level of stress I’m under all can contribute to them. Don’t even get me started on what a hormone imbalance can do to them too.

For now I have to manage the moods on my own and I have to ignore the obsessive thoughts and feelings and try to overcome this dark period of my life. But am I strong enough?

I could always ask my psychiatrist if he thinks I could have borderline personality disorder. It’s the one condition I’m likely to get misdiagnosed with. I could possibly have it but I don’t know how to self-treat it like I can bipolar. My moods to me are cyclic and so they are temporary. A more positive one will eventually take the place of the negative ones. When I think of borderline I have no idea how to treat the moods and I begin to feel very anxious.

So, I have just over one month before I see my psychiatrist again. My brother has offered to help me find another but I’m unsure. I don’t have the most typical case of bipolar and I just feel like I will struggle to explain my symptoms coherently to them and how they affect me. I know what you’re thinking: I seem to explain myself clearly enough through my writing but my ability to explain myself through writing is leaps and bounds ahead of me explaining myself through speech.

There’s also the case of me either thinking the symptoms never happened after I recover or hypomania will lead me to believe yet again that it’s worth going through the bad to get to the good (mania).

Five days into the New Year and I’m already overwhelmed from my worries.

Shanti: All I Want For Christmas…is Some Sanity

I’m a bit late with writing about my last appointment with my psychiatrist, but you can forgive me for that, it being the Christmas season and all.

I was in an agitated and anxious mood for most of the day, then leveled out and didn’t really think I’d be terribly upset if my psychiatrist would still not listen to me.

I like my psychiatrist; he is very easy to talk to about the small stuff – family, my photography, and my constant mentioning of a growing social life to get him to stop suggesting I need to go out more. But then it all gets a bit too hard to bring up the more negative stuff but I did anyway. I kept bringing up my mood issues and made it quite clear I wanted an assessment so I could have a clear diagnosis (so I know just what is going on with me) and some treatment options to look forward to, but he didn’t even seem to blink at the mention of them.

Then just as I thought things couldn’t get much worse for me he seemed to brighten up and leaned forward as a sudden realisation came to him that would explain all the troubles I’ve been going through.

He said I might have Asperger’s syndrome.

My heart sank as I questioned whether this man was qualified to be treating me as he seemed to have forgotten that we both came to this realisation four years ago. I’ve been self-treating my Asperger’s too. Like most ‘aspies’ I have learned all I can about the condition and have a firm grasp on the differences in the brain and could teach my own class on the differences between the NT (non-autistic) and Asperger’s brain, and explain how these differences create the symptoms.

When I left I wasn’t upset that my needs had been ignored again. I wasn’t depressed, unemotive or even hypomanic. What I felt like is that I had finally had some clarity; now I was sure my psychiatrist was never going to help me.

Recently, I received some mail from the good doctor who explained in a one-page letter what conditions he thinks I might have and that I should do research on my own. Asperger’s was mentioned first. He would receive about a C- in my class for the information he gave me.

ADHD was mentioned next, another condition I know quite a lot about so research isn’t necessary. I was glad that he thought I still had it as my lack of being recommended more medication was starting to worry me. But he ended it by saying there didn’t seem to be any deterioration since I stopped taking it. It’s probably because I now self-medicate with fish oil which makes me motivated, focus for a bit longer and more hyperactive. That last part probably isn’t a good thing but it sure beats lethargy and depression.

Lastly, social anxiety was mentioned; something I’ve known I’ve had since 2008 and can even be traced back to as young as five years old. I’ve never been without social anxiety and can pretty much tell the difference between social anxiety in autism and ADHD and social anxiety in those people not afflicted by those conditions. Even the social anxiety in bipolar has its own flavor of paranoia.

My psychiatrist now thinks that I should get help with these but there’s still the issue of my rapid cycling mood swings, which are briefer and more intense than the mood swings people usually experience. I’m starting to think that people don’t believe me about my mood disorder and I’m trying to forget about it, but when the moods happen, particularly the extreme high and low feelings, I note them with a sense of amusement as though still surprised. But it truly is a peculiar thing to experience again and again. I know what normal moods are like because not long ago I experienced them and I’ve got a lot of awareness about these moods that when they show signs of changing into another one I know what is coming even though no one else really believes me.

I get so angered by their denial that I feel like putting a knife to my throat, or trashing a (my) room or jumping out of a window or other forms of self-harm. I can’t really explain why these thoughts happen but they creep up on me even when I do my best to suppress them. They increase in violence the longer I dwell on thoughts that seem to trigger them. And I write this here so people can see how serious my symptoms are. I’m reluctant to mention violence to other people but this is where the symptoms can lead. They’re only thoughts but powerful ones that make me want to do more harm to myself than others. An occasional problem of mine is to not get stuck into thoughts of suicide. The wannabe screenwriter I am has a very vivid and visual way of musing over suicide. Imagine if after you died you could gaze down from Heaven and watch the reactions of people you knew.

And once again I feel like I could avoid treatment for longer if just to keep the highs and have very motivated days where I have a surplus of energy to keep going even though normally I would stop after doing two or three things, but in this mood I could push that to five or even eight.

It’s a terrible thing to want mania especially when I think I could handle it and just live through the lows but then I realize I can barely take them; yesterday I was feeling a more delusional- psychosis episode coming on with a sense of paranoid distrust to the people whom I usually have high regard for. It was not without mild hallucinations too. This morning I felt depression finally hitting after a good four day absence but I managed to work on a drawing and I think my satisfaction has put me into another high mood. I admit to some arrogant air in parts of this post. I tried my best not to call myself a high intellectual.

I know my episodes can get out of control though only briefly so I don’t require hospitalisation. I’m a passive person who although can feel emotions quite painfully, on the outside no one sees any sign of distress at all. There’s a part of me that wants to force it out of me so I get the treatment I need, but then there’s another part of me that tells me it’s better being this way. I might live with a brain in constant torture and all the relationship problems that comes with it, a future of continuous unemployment and underachieving what my intellect is capable of, but I do achieve some small things. So far that is just a gallery of live band photos few respond to; not exactly the people I want, and a drawing for a friend because I can’t work out what gift to buy them. And I guess an almost successful blog post.

So, if I really want to get appropriate treatment for these moods it would help to find a doctor who can acknowledge that I have them at all. I’ll have to fight against my own anxiety and find someone else and risk losing my creative side, although if I do have bipolar what I’m achieving now is hardly imaginative enough compared to what past authors/artists/musicians with bipolar had achieved.

Tomorrow is Christmas which means very little to me. I don’t enjoy Christmas since leaving my Christian mother. I’m not overly religious but reading my Bible has helped in my self-treatment for anxiety and depression and it seems the more something is ignored or vehemently criticized the more I’m attracted to it. In this self-absorbed society of decreasing spirituality a 12-year veteran of the Pentecostal faith feels quite alone and that does not do favours for my depression. I’ve barely dwelt on these feelings as I’ve tried to get into the cheesy commercial state of the season and given in to my youthful sense of materialism.

However, on Boxing Day is when my extended family celebrates Christmas and my only anxiety is one of extreme sensory overwhelment. I like to think of it as an electrical storm in my brain. A hyper aroused-spinningworld-disorientated-emotionally unstable state of extreme sensitivity of the senses, where my mind focuses on my irritation of all people present and can spiral in to an all-out-rage. Usually I would cope with it but with a lack of medication, alcohol and the being under constant strain by some family members to be social or to do favours for them while I feel like smashing my head against a brick, especially when told this is something everyone goes through, leaves me with a feeling of trepidation.

The next day is my 28th birthday. Then soon it’s the new year. Already I’ve seen affirmations of 2014 being a more hopeful year for people, when all I can think about is it’s another year of insanity. April/May 2014 will be the anniversary of my madness. Of course, it can be traced back further than that but my moods seemed to permanently change around that time. My habit of taking high doses of Ritalin washed down with beer didn’t seem to help matters.

Well, here’s to a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year anyway. I feel like a beer.

Shanti’s Story

I used to feel ok about the medical profession but in just a few short years that was all going to change. I would be made to feel like I was exaggerating my issues and underestimating my own abilities and I would be told by someone who only saw me an hour a month what was really going on with me.

I used to think I didn’t really need to see a doctor to talk through my issues with. I tried that with a psychologist once and it didn’t work out. I went to see her on advice to get help with my severe depression despite the fact I didn’t even feel mildly depressed. I did have thoughts of suicide coming up from nowhere a few weeks a month, getting worse as I got closer to my period.

This psychologist agreed with me that I didn’t have depression; instead we both agreed it was social anxiety. But throughout my months of therapy with her I started to see that my problems came from undiagnosed Asperger’s syndrome and not just social anxiety alone. My psychologist agreed but the eventual diagnosis was not official enough. Still, she tried to help me overcome my anxiety issues but she was giving me advice you give to a non-autistic person and so I stopped seeing her.

My official diagnosis for Asperger’s an ADHD came quickly enough that I thought the psychiatrist I had was a really good doctor but I eventually got to pick up on a few of his flaws.

But first I want to mention the first time I realised a doctor wasn’t really listening to me and was just rushing into things. When being prescribed birth control pills I had to tell him my weight. Naturally during this period of my life I was prone to ‘arring’ before I said anything, so he took this as me not knowing so he told me to stand on a scale. I knew that the best time to weigh is in the morning with little to no clothes on and I had eaten a lot that day and was wearing heavy clothes. Still, I didn’t think it would make much difference. I ended up developing pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder, a severe version of PMS and my first taste of bipolar-like symptoms. Now I’m not sure if because the scales said my weight was a couple of kilos heavier that this happened –it may have happened anyway – but my own mental health was changed forever.

I self-diagnosed PMDD and then told my doctor about my suicidal thoughts. He told me to keep a journal of my moods for two months and then come and see him. A few days later I locked myself in the granny flat in my backyard and tried to strangle myself with a mobile phone charger. A few days later I was put on anti-depressants.

I know now that anti-depressants and mood disorders don’t always mix and I was put on a brand that was known to trigger bipolar. For about 8 months I was finally anxiety and depression free, if just a little bit unmotivated. But the honeymoon was over when I publicly melted down at a You Am I gig. I thought it was the beginning of a seizure disorder but now I can’t be sure.

Then came the ADHD diagnosis and I was already taking Ritalin before the diagnosis was official. I had all the benefits one has with ADHD medication: clearer and prolonged focus, more motivation, emotional regulation, more energy or a sense of calmness, reduced impulses and an increase in memory. My struggles with reading, writing and math was over. Overtime my social skills began to increase too.

But there were a few issues here. The euphoric period never seemed to end for me. I tried to put this down as being too sensitive to the medication. My psychiatrist had me taking higher and higher doses and when I got up to 30mg I completely lost my appetite and lost a lot of weight quickly, but I was also having hypoglycemic attacks. To make matters worse I started having seizures and this was when I learned that my psychiatrist wasn’t as open minded as I once thought. He said I wasn’t having seizures because if I was having them I wouldn’t know. I’ve since had many seizures ranging from simple partial to secondary generalized (what most people think when they hear about seizures – the very severe kind).

I decided to stop bringing it up with him and then I went off Ritalin but then I went back on when I wanted to be able to work on my science fiction. The next couple of years were a roller coaster ride. I got a lot of writing done but I stopped going out and taking photos of bands. I had been doing that since late 2004. By early 2010 I gave it up after having more suicidal thoughts. I was hell-bent on becoming an acclaimed science fiction author whose books would alter the perceptions of society. I came up with some unusual ideas that were perfect for the genre. I started to come up with my own inventions for future sci-fi tech and would be excited when I started hearing what I wrote about in the news. Then I started to have major depressive episodes in between these extreme spurts of creativity.

I eventually realized that I wasn’t going to become as popular as I thought I’d be but I still had to write because it was the only cure to my depression.

After I suffered a trauma and developed PTSD after barely living one year in Sydney these moods started to get worse. I was too afraid to be outside for long during the day and wouldn’t go out at all at night. I started to avoid going to see live bands and stayed at home having panic attacks if I was there alone.

Around this time I postponed a lot of appointments with my psychiatrist but eventually saw him again and told him about my symptoms. He told me it was an adjustment disorder and sent me on my way. No medication or therapy of any kind. When the PTSD subsided for a little bit he would then tell me my mood issues were from a lack of structure and that if I worked or socialized they would disappear.

Eventually it hit me that Ritalin was causing all my anxiety and I was well aware it was making me manic and cycling through 3-5 moods a day. It was normal for me to hallucinate and have the occasional seizure. I knew I had to stop taking it but I was dependent on it to do the basic of chores and I was addicted to the mania. It took several attempts to quit it; several extreme manic episodes where I broke up friendships and embarrassed myself in front of musicians I admired and a few near brushes with death to make me give it up for good.

The last time I saw my psychiatrist he seemed unconvinced that Ritalin had caused me to become bipolar and he thought these moods would disappear once I stopped Ritalin. It’s almost been three months and I still have the occasional manic episode and my depressions are longer and more severe than before. I’ve returned to my band photography and have now committed myself to deal with these symptoms, although it is hard. I’ve finally admitted to myself that I can’t avoid taking medication anymore but it’s made even more difficult – when the mania hits I no longer want treatment – when my doctor refuses to prescribe me medication at all. I still have fear for my own safety and have PTSD flashbacks too. And when I go through PMDD it makes my mood issues even worse. I become paranoid, delusional and on the verge of committing suicide again and often self-medicate with alcohol, making my moods more extreme and shorter than usual.

I have another appointment with my psychiatrist in a couple of days where I will make clear my demands: I want a thorough assessment so he can find out what is really going on with me. I don’t care if it doesn’t end up being bipolar but as long as I get the right treatment and begin to recover it will be enough for me. If not I’ll have to find myself another doctor which fills me with panic because of my fear and resistance to change. That in itself is another form of mental illness.