Into the Void

How to identify mania:

One way is to make a rough calculation of the percentage of support list email that is yours. Is half the email yours? That’s the support list equivalent of being at a party and running around in a frenzy trying to keep tabs on every conversation.

My personal favorite way to tell is to read my own posts and count how many times I begin a paragraph with the word “I”. If I write a post and every goddam sentence is about me, me, me, then I know that I should be talking to a therapist instead of taking energy from people whose boundaries are too soft for them to say or even think “no” or “you are a boring, self-involved twit.” When folks talk talk talk, it’s because there’s something that they want to say. Not the mush that comes tumbling out in idle chit-chat, but something important and maybe life-changing. OMFG, no, keep talking loud and fast so that you can’t hear it.

In case you aren’t aware of yourself enough to gauge when your thoughts are racing, you are emotionally labile, or you are feeling overly optimistic, grandiose, charitable, attractive, psychotic or whatever else might be part of your mania, then you have to focus on your behavior. Or more specifically to others’ reactions to your behavior.

I realize that gaining some awareness is the first step in being able to reduce your meds, get out and make new friends, do volunteer work or maybe even get job training, and eventually even stop hating yourself and your bipolar disorder. In a way, allowing yourself to be competent and independent is like sawing off the branch you’re sitting on if your continued access to medical care requires that you be sick enough to qualify for it.

Can you imagine being paid to stay sick?

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 other night we were watching TV and my husband decided that he didn’t want to watch Crossing Jordan because it looked “too heavy.” I was about to get up and limp to the computer room, but he had flipped to a medical show called “Gray’s Anatomy.” They were wheeling in injured patients on stretchers and busily milling about.
Ok, I thought, could be interesting. I watched this show once before and I don’t recall actively hating it.
Umpteen minutes later the show was over without ever having actually begun. There was no diagnostic drama, no medical facts. Just a bunch of people wandering around in a daze, occasionally bumping into one another and reacting to their own reactions. Incomprehensible medical decisions were made, preceded by much fanfare and pointless drama but little logic.
My husband said it’s a chick show.
I have to ask this, then, because I have always thought like an engineer… The show was clearly intended for someone who doesn’t like to focus. Do a lot of chicks really wander around in an unfocused daze? It certainly explains a thing or two.

Update 5/12:
I have been informed that it’s not so much a chick show as it is a Generation X show.
It seems that the young adults today are less interested in co-creating their realities and more concerned with using their anatomy to the best advantage. What, the ’50s are back?
I have also just learned that Jill Hennessey of Crossing Jordan is bipolar. She’s a fine fox, too. I’m going to have to watch it more often.

Technorati: Crossing+Jordan Grays+Anatomy medical chicks Generation+X bipolar Jill+Hennessey TV+shows

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