BRAIN WEASELS STORY
Dec. 3rd, 2015 08:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraineOriginally this was a reply to sixbeforelunch , but as they say, it grew in the telling.
Basically, the tale of my mental health now and how I got to the place where I am: struggling with the crazy, always, but also, doing better than I ever have in my life.
So, I've had serious problems with depression since I was in middle school, ranging from pervasive apathy to extreme disassociation (where am I? how did I get here??). Sometimes they're worse when my life is shit, but a lot of times there's no correlation at all. So psychiatrists and counsellors generally felt that there was probably a pretty strong chemical component, esp as there's a lot of depression and anxiety in my mother's family, and I was on and off of antidepressants for like... fifteen years. Sometimes took the edge off, sometimes not.
I've also had anxiety--the attacks, but also I've always swung between apathetic depressed phases and intense, neurotic phases. Never at the same time, just swinging back and forth and back and forth all the time. Completely exhausting.
SO. Last year, I was going through some incredibly high-intensity issues in grad school, and starting to have anxiety attacks in the library between switching into "_____." So I managed to drag myself to the university counselor, she suggested talking to the psychiatrist, and she gently suggested that there might be very little emotional basis at all--just bad throw of the genetic dice, and antidepressants might be necessary for obviously persistent depression and anxiety. So we tried Lexapro, since I've been on it before and lots of people in my the family use it.
I went BATSHIT INSANE. I mean this is in the most literal way possible. I was super!!! alert!!!!! at all times, my thoughts were racing so fast and in so many directions that I couldn't concentrate on anything, I was bursting with so much energy that I couldn't sleep more than a couple of hours each night. I spent two weeks like that. I was going to have to withdraw from my favourite class (Renaissance drama! I LOVE THE RENAISSANCE MORE THAN MOST THINGS ON THIS EARTH and I idolize my prof). And then I crashed. Depression usually creeps on me, but that time it hit me like a semi--not apathy, full blown misery out of nowhere. No missing it. So I sent a "what the FUCK" message to my psychiatrist.
(It was more polite than that, though looking back also a very clearly fraying-at-the-ends one.)
This turns out to be perhaps the best thing that ever happened to me. She wrote back that that sounded like a textbook hypomanic episode--certain antidepressants can trigger them in some people. So she tapered me off the antidepressants, and while I felt a little better, I still could hardly sleep and had trouble concentrating for the next couple of weeks. (Renaissance prof had to cancel class for two weeks because of the flu, which is the only reason I scraped by. I felt bad because she suffered badly, but it gave me the time I needed.)
At that point, she said it was possible that the antidepressants may not have <i>caused</i> the mania so much as intensified lower-level hypomania that was already happening. And given what I'd told her of constant swinging between depression and """anxiety""" that started off euphoric and quickly became relentlessly neurotic, that looked... very probable. So likely my problem had never been unipolar depression with anxiety (diagnosis since forever) but undiagnosed bipolar II, which years of antidepressants would only have made WORSE. So she tried the safest mood stabilizers at a small dose, and while I was not terribly optimistic, after a couple weeks it helped a bit, and we eventually raised to the usual dosage and as time went on, it... helped a lot.
I mean, I still struggled, definitely. And by that point it was well into the quarter and I had a lot weighing on me, but it turns out I had no idea what it was like to not be depressed or manic all the time. Even though I was dealing with awful personal shit at the same time (I mean, roommate trouble, not family problems or anything), I managed to work through my classes--my Renaissance prof said I was a pleasure to have in the class and I got an A, got an A in my Austen class, A- in composition, invitation to some honour society for students in the top 15% of their grad programs, acceptance into a conference in LA, etc.
It's not ~~~magic~~~. I had two hypomanic/depressive breakdowns this quarter alone, and at least one during the summer. But at this point I'm a year and a half into my master's with a 3.95, I've never been this consistent at anything before, and I feel like I have some chance at getting through life--for, I think, the first time since I was a child. And I've found that I'm too stubborn and proud to easily give that up, so I just keep forcing myself to slog through. And I am.
I've even managed to stick to one fic!
(That one. But still.)
sixbeforelunch , but as they say, it grew in the telling.Basically, the tale of my mental health now and how I got to the place where I am: struggling with the crazy, always, but also, doing better than I ever have in my life.
So, I've had serious problems with depression since I was in middle school, ranging from pervasive apathy to extreme disassociation (where am I? how did I get here??). Sometimes they're worse when my life is shit, but a lot of times there's no correlation at all. So psychiatrists and counsellors generally felt that there was probably a pretty strong chemical component, esp as there's a lot of depression and anxiety in my mother's family, and I was on and off of antidepressants for like... fifteen years. Sometimes took the edge off, sometimes not.
I've also had anxiety--the attacks, but also I've always swung between apathetic depressed phases and intense, neurotic phases. Never at the same time, just swinging back and forth and back and forth all the time. Completely exhausting.
SO. Last year, I was going through some incredibly high-intensity issues in grad school, and starting to have anxiety attacks in the library between switching into "_____." So I managed to drag myself to the university counselor, she suggested talking to the psychiatrist, and she gently suggested that there might be very little emotional basis at all--just bad throw of the genetic dice, and antidepressants might be necessary for obviously persistent depression and anxiety. So we tried Lexapro, since I've been on it before and lots of people in my the family use it.
I went BATSHIT INSANE. I mean this is in the most literal way possible. I was super!!! alert!!!!! at all times, my thoughts were racing so fast and in so many directions that I couldn't concentrate on anything, I was bursting with so much energy that I couldn't sleep more than a couple of hours each night. I spent two weeks like that. I was going to have to withdraw from my favourite class (Renaissance drama! I LOVE THE RENAISSANCE MORE THAN MOST THINGS ON THIS EARTH and I idolize my prof). And then I crashed. Depression usually creeps on me, but that time it hit me like a semi--not apathy, full blown misery out of nowhere. No missing it. So I sent a "what the FUCK" message to my psychiatrist.
(It was more polite than that, though looking back also a very clearly fraying-at-the-ends one.)
This turns out to be perhaps the best thing that ever happened to me. She wrote back that that sounded like a textbook hypomanic episode--certain antidepressants can trigger them in some people. So she tapered me off the antidepressants, and while I felt a little better, I still could hardly sleep and had trouble concentrating for the next couple of weeks. (Renaissance prof had to cancel class for two weeks because of the flu, which is the only reason I scraped by. I felt bad because she suffered badly, but it gave me the time I needed.)
At that point, she said it was possible that the antidepressants may not have <i>caused</i> the mania so much as intensified lower-level hypomania that was already happening. And given what I'd told her of constant swinging between depression and """anxiety""" that started off euphoric and quickly became relentlessly neurotic, that looked... very probable. So likely my problem had never been unipolar depression with anxiety (diagnosis since forever) but undiagnosed bipolar II, which years of antidepressants would only have made WORSE. So she tried the safest mood stabilizers at a small dose, and while I was not terribly optimistic, after a couple weeks it helped a bit, and we eventually raised to the usual dosage and as time went on, it... helped a lot.
I mean, I still struggled, definitely. And by that point it was well into the quarter and I had a lot weighing on me, but it turns out I had no idea what it was like to not be depressed or manic all the time. Even though I was dealing with awful personal shit at the same time (I mean, roommate trouble, not family problems or anything), I managed to work through my classes--my Renaissance prof said I was a pleasure to have in the class and I got an A, got an A in my Austen class, A- in composition, invitation to some honour society for students in the top 15% of their grad programs, acceptance into a conference in LA, etc.
It's not ~~~magic~~~. I had two hypomanic/depressive breakdowns this quarter alone, and at least one during the summer. But at this point I'm a year and a half into my master's with a 3.95, I've never been this consistent at anything before, and I feel like I have some chance at getting through life--for, I think, the first time since I was a child. And I've found that I'm too stubborn and proud to easily give that up, so I just keep forcing myself to slog through. And I am.
I've even managed to stick to one fic!
(That one. But still.)
no subject
on 2015-12-04 07:42 pm (UTC)It's really good to hear that you're doing well. Congrats on that GPA. :)
no subject
on 2015-12-05 07:16 pm (UTC)I'd never gotten a 4.0 in any term in my life, and now I'm getting them in all but one (when I got an A-)? It's so bizarre, haha. Still rough, but knowing what is actually going on in my brain helps a lot even when it doesn't change anything.
no subject
on 2015-12-05 04:56 am (UTC)no subject
on 2015-12-05 07:17 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2015-12-11 05:42 am (UTC)no subject
on 2015-12-29 08:11 am (UTC)