Into the Void

A reminder: I’m an engineer. This is all my opinion based on readings in a field that is not my own. I request that as you read my posts, you also check my references.

Cigarettes are powerful anti-anxiety drugs. It’s my opinion that may smokers are self-medicating an anxiety disorder.

Nicotine has calming effects on stress-induced mood changes in females, but enhances aggressive mood in males

“Exposure to moderate stress significantly increased ratings of anxiety, discontent and aggression and nicotine blocked these mood changes in females, but enhanced them in males. This suggests that young women may start regular smoking as a form of stress self-medication, which implies that preventative and smoking cessation programmes would be more successful in women if they addressed issues of stress and anxiety, which may be core factors underlying initiation and maintenance of regular smoking.”

A bipolar most certainly will get a high score on an ADD screening test like the Copeland symptom checklist. The symptoms of ADD overlap with the symptoms of bipolar. A bipolar child scores higher on the ADD screening test that a child with ADD. Your GP isn’t qualified to make a differential diagnosis, and in fact is likely to misdiagnose you and make your illness worse.

I’m going to quote from articles about children because misdiagnosis kills so many of them. It applies to adults too, but we don’t have parents to FORCE us to continue taking ritalin when it is obviously tearing us to pieces.

Diagnosing Bipolar VS. ADHD: Similarities

“There is concern that ADHD is being overdiagnosed and bipolar disorder underdiagnosed in the population of children.”

That being said, yes, I have ADHD combined type. My psychiatrist diagnosed it after I’d been seeing him for 10 years and after an evaluation that DIDN’T included taking an ADD screening test. Screening tests are useless for bipolars. You have to be cautious.

I have been through the entire pharmacopia, or it seems that way. Every ADD med I’ve taken makes me hypomanic within a week. So how I work it is that on days I really REALLY need to focus I take it. I have tried:
Ritalin (methyphenidate) - this is the one they give our children. Somebody please explain to me why 40% of American children need psych meds?
Strattera - this was the absolute worst for me. It interferes with metabolism in the liver of SSRIs, resulting in a huge buildup of both drugs. I was up there in 3 days and in a nasty mixed state in a week.
Provigil - similar to Strattera, but takes longer to build up. YMMV! :-)
Adderall - amphetamine. SPEED FREAK! Three days in a row and I’m have “racoon eyes” and am well on my way to psychosis.

Strattera Risks May Widen
FDA,s warning about Eli Lilly’s drug Strattera causing suicidal thinking in children used for ADHD caught many parents and doctors by surprise.

“Dr. Laughren says the agency also plans to ask Lilly to include a stronger caution on Strattera’s label about its risk of inducing mania and similar mood destabilization, along with the new “black box” warning out this week. The new warning will focus on the drug’s risks for kids with undiagnosed bipolar illness, according to Dr. Laughren. In fact, “very often bipolar illness is not recognized until you [give] patients a drug like Strattera,” he says.”

Bipolar Disorder, Co-occurring Conditions, and the Need for Extreme Caution Before Initiating Drug Treatment

“Now understanding that early-onset bipolar disorder is frequently co-morbid with other childhood psychiatric conditions, doctors and parents should be concerned that a medication used to treat these other conditions may “flush out” a previously quiescent bipolar gene that can significantly worsen the course of illness and potentially wreak havoc with that child’s life. It is therefore vitally important that parents learn everything they can about their family histories, and if mood disorders (depression or manic-depression), suicide, or alcoholism come to light, treatment should proceed very cautiously. Mood stabilizers should perhaps be the first line of treatment (and it may take two such medications to stabilize the child), and attentional, obsessional, or depressive symptoms be treated only after a therapeutic dose of the mood stabilizer is achieved.”

The Overlap With ADHD

Perhaps the greatest source of diagnostic confusion in childhood bipolar disorder is that its symptoms overlap with many of the symptoms of attention-deficit disorder with hyperactivity. At first glance, any child who can’t sit still, who is fidgety, impulsive, easily distracted or emotionally labile is more likely to receive a diagnosis of ADHD than bipolar disorder. However, since over 80 percent of children with a bipolar disorder will meet full criteria for attention-deficit disorder with hyperactivity, ADHD should be diagnosed only after bipolar disorder is ruled out. While these two conditions seem highly co-morbid, stimulants unopposed by a mood stabilizer can have an adverse effect on the bipolar condition. 65 percent of the children in our study had hypomanic, manic and aggressive reactions to stimulant medications. Parents wrote to us and described some of their children’s reactions to stimulants. They said things like: “He got sky-high on Ritalin and then violent”; “Ritalin caused physical aggression”; “She got psychotic on stimulants”; “He got suicidal and tried to get run over by a car”; “He went bonkers…”

Don’t let a GP play with screening tests. See a psychiatrist.

Technorati: bipolar bipolar+disorder ADD ADHD Nicotine Copeland+symptom+checklist

The long awaited Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression, Second Edition, by Frederick K. Goodwin and Kay Redfield Jamison is finally in stores.

Hopefully you have the first edition. It is *the* reference book for bipolar disorder. Over the years many of the hypotheses set forth in the first edition have been proven out. It’s all there. Phototherapy, circadian rhythms, bipolar creativity. The effects of lithium on the suicide rate. Why we must avoid unopposed antidepressants. And that’s what I saw just riffling the pages! I can’t wait to sit down and read the medical roadmap that Drs. Goodwin and Jamison set out for the next 15 years.

A sample chapter is available for download from the Oxford University Press.

If you apply for the Amazon.com Visa when you make the purchase you can get a hefty rebate. Yippee!

Technorati: antidepressants lithium bipolar+disorder manic+depression circadian+rhythms Depression Kay+Redfield+Jamison Manic+Depressive+Illness Phototherapy suicide

Coming soon:

Into the Void - Mobile Edition

Technorati: mobile web Self-Help bipolar+disorder

Like many folks on psych meds, I’m obese. I make no excuses. I hate being fat and I’m doing what I can.

The other weekend I decided to break my diet and have breakfast at a Perkins Pancake House on a Sunday morning with two family members who are also on psych meds for bipolar disorder.

As the three of us were being led back to the table one of the wait staff looked me over then turned and called out to another staff member, “We got three pork chops!”

There is simply no call for Perkins employees to verbally abuse their customers, not even the lard-asses. It was the low spot of the day, and it has totally dimmed my enthusiasm for Perkins restaurants. I most certainly won’t set foot in the Moorestown, NJ restaurant again. Too bad for them, because when I’m there I eat a lot.

Perkins Pancake House obesity bipolar disorder rude waiters bipolar

Where there is sickness and fear, there is always someone offering false hope.

One of the shadier scams pulled on bipolars is the claim that certain lithium compounds are more beneficial than others.

This rant concerns lithium orotate.

Lithium Orotate is a salt. That means that when you put it in water, it ionizes, or splits into its component parts. Your body uses lithium at the cellular level. Your cells don’t care whether you ingested lithium carbonate, lithium chloride, or lithium orotate to get the lithium.

So what you really want to know is what the orotate part gets you. The answer seems to be a fatty liver. Your body makes all the orotic acid you need after you drink alcohol. Another way to get it is to ingest ammonia salts. Not recommended. If I’m reading this right, drinking piss will raise the level of orotic acid because excess uria also stimulates orotate production.

Now here’s where it gets interesting: There was a documentary on Mahatma Gandhi in which he stated that the reason for his good health was that he drank a cup of fresh urine, presumably his own, every morning. I think I read it in Time or Newsweek, too, but I’m at work and don’t feel like researching it. Here’s a wikipedia citation. Take it with a swig of^W^W^W a grain of salt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_urine

Let me know how that works out for you.

Technorati: bipolar+disorder lithium lithium+orotate lithium+carbonate fatty+liver Mahatma+Gandhi urine

Recently someone challenged me to

Try looking at other things moods do that are related to thought, but aren’t thought. How they change things like memory, attention, and perception.

Like whether you are motivated to work on having a life in spite of the bipolar disorder? Whether you take a small failure and read it to mean that you can *never* succeed?

I think the answer is this:

We have moods. *Everyone* has moods, ours just swing out farther. Accept it and get on with your life.

I’ve been having some problems the last couple of days, not sleeping and feeling the “raccoon eyes” again. In the middle of that I made the bad decision to stay at work late since I was having luck with a problem there. Symptoms - racing thoughts, “body armor” meaning all-over tension. A building up of toxins. I was too hyper to use my biofeedback program, couldn’t even do the first task. Bah.

Last night I took an antipsychotic. Today I’m stumbling around and every few minutes I have to lie down wherever I’m at until the dizziness passes. How the *fuck* do you people who take that crap every day manage? HA! I bet you think that’s a symptom of bipolar disorder, not a med side effect!

I have things to do. So I point myself in the right direction, gathering supplies a bit at a time. My next task - after a very strong cup of coffee, which is brewing now, will be to varnish the picnic table. It’ll take longer than it would otherwise but it will get done. Yesterday I did some body work on my ‘88 Toyota pickup so that it will pass inspection.

This is where the less motivated bipolars jump up and tell me I’m not disabled. I could have gone on SSDI in late 1999 or early 2000. It would have been easy to stay on high doses of meds and get money for nothing. It just wouldn’t be me. I took the summer off and spent a big chunk of my savings going back to school to get my engineering degree instead. And learned reiki to give myself another tool for managing the illness.

The point? Yeah, hard to stay on topic when you’re stoned out of your gourd on psych meds. The point is that you have the moods. Yippee. There have always been bipolars and many of them accomplished great things in spite of it - or more likely *because of it*.

If you are a failure, it’s not because of the disorder itself. It is because of the choices you’ve made in your life. You can’t change the mood swings, but you *can* change everything else. Change is scary, even for non-bipolars, so don’t blame that on the disorder either. You deserve success - however you define “success” - so make the changes.

So quit focusing all of your energy on having bipolar disorder and start focusing it on having a life.

Or don’t. Your choice.

Coffee’s ready. Excuse me, I have to get some things done today. It would be easier if my head didn’t feel like a bag of rocks.

Technorati: bipolar+disorder medication+side+effects moods SSDI biofeedback bipolar

I’m having a bit of trouble making non-technical things fit into my brain today.
I can understand wanting to be stable. No, not really, stable people are bloody boring. What I can understand is wanting to be able to do the things I want to do without having to cancel because of a bad day. A bad day
meaning I can’t concentrate, or I am indecisive, or I am tired or maybe on the flip side the normies are just moving/thinking/being like dinosaurs.
Let’s define stability sometime, ok? I think stability means that I don’t fall so far afield that I can’t meet my obligations. What do you think?
But are those really bad days? If we didn’t have it beaten into our heads that having moods swings and being creative makes us BAD PEOPLE, we wouldn’t think twice about making time for our own needs. Maybe on the indecisive days I should shelve books by LOC number, while I should make use of the high days time flipping through books trying to synthesize new meanings.
Why do the doctors want to label us and stigmatize us and force us to behave like everyone else? And why do we buy into this abuse? Oh, right, because being forced to be someone you aren’t is painful. When someone talks about “hope” in the context of having a mental illness, what exactly does that mean? There’s no cure for this short of identifying the bipolar gene and ABORTING us. If we are going to hope, let’s hope that someday society will stop wanting to punish anyone who is a little different.

Technorati: stability bipolar bipolar+disorder mental+illness mood+swings stigma

Pendulum Bestsellers for Q4, 2005.

As always, Kay Redfield Jamison has more than one book on the list.

An Unquiet Mind : A Memoir of Moods and Madness (Vintage)
Loving Someone With Bipolar Disorder
The Bipolar Disorder Survival Guide: What You and Your Family Need to
Know
Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament
To Walk on Eggshells
Soft Bipolar : Vivid Thoughts, Mood Shifts and Swings, Depression, and Anxiety of the Mild Mood Disorders Affecting Millions of Americans
The Naked Bird Watcher
Night Falls Fast : Understanding Suicide (Vintage)
New Hope for People with Bipolar Disorder : Your Friendly, Authoritative Guide to the Latest in Traditional and Complementary Solutions

Technorati: books mental+health unquiet+mind bipolar+disorder Manic+Depressive+Illness mood+disorders,suicide