Lithium

The types of thoughts, and manner of thoughts I was having when I wrote the post, ""How are you? "I'm Okay."" seem to have slowed right down since I increased my Lithium dosage.

A few weeks ago I was having extremely rapid suicidal thoughts, mixed with a rapid self deprecating/loathing "voice" inside my head telling me how awful I was, and how my boyfriend was trying to leave me, and how I should just end it all. The best way I could describe my mind at the time, with it's "machine gun" like thoughts, is to say it was "manically" depressed.

Like the referenced post I had a piece of music relentlessly, rapidly and repeatedly playing over and over in my head. My thoughts were so distressing and so unforgiving I really wanted to just remove my brain from my head. I thought I was really going mad, so I increased my mood stabilizer: Lithium.

Almost immediately after increasing the Lithium I felt some relief. A few weeks later I still feel depressed, but I am having more moments of relief and the bad "noises" in my head have slowed right down. With the demise of all that negative energy I feel a sense of hope again. I feel like maybe I can feel better. This is a huge relief. Thank you god...whoever you are.

Am I the Only One?

**Addendum added: I just went for a walk and I realized that another reason I don't understand is because of my difficulty understanding, or accepting anything that is not black and white. I get completely confused when something is in a gray area. It makes absolutely no sense to me.

I often feel annoyed, frustrated, and maybe like I am being lied to when my pdoc and I discuss my diagnosis. I was talking to a friend about this and she asked me, "Why does it matter?"

That is a good question, and at first I really couldn't think of why it mattered to me. All I knew was that it did. It really did. It really, really did. It annoyed me, frustrated me, made me question my illness, made me worry about my illness, and made me not understand my illness.

Here is a "stream of consciousness" discussion with myself about WHY this bothers me so much. (***I have not edited it, because I was feeling a bit angry as I was writing...and if I edit I will remove some of the feelings):

First my pdoc says, I have major depressive disorder with cycling that takes me almost to hypomania, but not quite. Fine...I think that is close to accurate, although I can think of many times when my own feelings were that I was way to high for this to be "normal". Not that I want to 'be" a label, or be labelled, but it is kind of like when a person is diagnosed with something, they want it to be the right diagnosis...for example, if I have liver cancer, I don't want to be told I have kidney cancer, only to find out later I have liver cancer. I just want to know.

My confusion is compounded when my pdoc and I decide to use medications that work for BP disorder, when he expresses that I have a "bipolarlike": depression...(huh?) ...and when I find my mood increasing dramatically, my not sleeping more than a few hours a night and my mood ranging from super high, to wired, to happy, to high again and back. When I see myself doing more than I have done in years, all initiated within the time I have not been sleeping, and yet felt high and energetic.

But I still haven't figured out WHY it matters to me so much...partly sometimes I feel like the truth is withheld because of the stigma many attach to bipolar disorder, partly it seems my pdoc doesn't really put much emphasis on diagnosis, rather he looks at symptoms and how to address those (which makes sense)...but what happens if something happens to him and suddenly people who do base their treatments on diagnosis, see I am on a "bipolar" medications combo, yet I do not have bipolar. What if they decide I don't need the medications I am on? what if they don't recognize that I cycle despite not having bipolar?

I still don't understand why I feel frustrated that my mood disorder doesn't fit into a simple descriptive diagnosis. I can't be the only one. Some people have Major depression with no cycling, some have cyclothymia: "The highs of cyclothymia are called hypomania, a milder form of mania. The lows consist of mild or moderate depression"...Mayo clinic), some have BPII Mayor depression and hypomania, some have BPI, major depression and mania...where are the people who have major depression and a milder form of hypomania...sort of a reverse of cyclothymia? It doesn't make sense. And if people exist along some kind of spectrum, why don't they simply have some kind of, for example, 1-10 rating for mood cycling of all different kinds?

Also, how do you explain to your family what is going on? to your spouse? your friends? if there is officially no such thing as what you have? How do they find out information that might help you if what you have does not exist in any "official" context? How do they know you are just not making it all up?, or that you struggle both with the highs and lows?

I'm not sure if any of this makes sense, or if it even matters to anyone. Am I the only person confused by a psychiatric diagnosis? I guess the big reason I feel irritated is that I just want to know. I need to attach a name to how I feel. I want to know if my mood cycling is my fault, if I am in control of changing it, if I have done something wrong to create this type of mood hell. Or do I have an illness that causes me to feel this way? Is change my responsibility completely? Or are parts of my highs an illness which I need to control with medicine/therapy/lifestyle changes? Do I really go high...or do I imagine it? For some reason right, or wrong, I need to understand more than I do.