Bipolar?

I have Bipolar disorder. I often have issues concentrating, and I have nearly constant moodswings. Sometimes I can't sleep because I'm too depressed, and all I can manage to do is lay in bed thinking about the worst that can happen.

Other times, I'm all gung ho about stuff. As some of you remember, I posted a thread about working on a Challenge car, and even found someone that needs an extra hand. I haven't called him up because I feel so awkward in doing so.

Sometimes, I'm perfectly fine. Sometimes I feel like such a failure.

Does anyone else have these same issues? Care to share a story or two?

If you haven't already, I'd look into medication. I've known more than a few folks with Bipolar issues and medication really helps keep an even keel. Good luck man.

Mood disorders are a slippery slope. I have attention disorders (shocking) and have been prone to depression because of it. How long have you been with your mental specialist? If you have not been with one individual you may be doing it wrong.

It is very easy to misdiagnose ADHD, bi-polar disorder, depression and the rest of the range of mood disorders. Many appear to be very similar but what happens is they tend to layer as you try to cope. I was called "Manic Depressive" (now commonly called bi-polar) as a teen and early 20 y/o. After accepting it for years (and self medicating with beer and tequila) I actually crashed and needed dedicated mental help. It was the worst time of my life, but it was best for me. In trying to rebound I found my doctor who stuck with me even though I lost my insurance and couldn't pay for a while. That was key for me, all along I had been getting the wrong medication (alcohol is always the wrong medication by the way) and the real root base of my condition was uncovered after almost 4 years of therapy.

Again I was misdiagnosed and your mileage definitely will vary, but you deserve a proper diagnosis and stabilization. I would recommend this before adding any other stresses to your life like building a race car. If you need to race I suggest buying a cheap set of wheels and tires for your street car and go autocrossing until you get this all ironed out.

Good luck.

My Uncle is in somewhat of the same boat, I think. He's pretty misdiagnosed. If I can offer anything its to admit the issue (sounds like you have) to those around you, and get as much of a support system as you can. Friends, family, church (GRM might not be the best, but hey, I guess we're all chiming in a bit) and anything else. I find that having my Uncle around people tends to bring his mood around to those around him. If that works, there are tons of volunteering options that can put you in a happy place.

Good luck man, it's not easy.

I do not cry over the modern exotics... they are still making them. It is the Ferrari's and the Gullwing I would cry over, not that they will not get rebuilt to better than factorys stardards.

mad_machine wrote: I do not cry over the modern exotics... they are still making them. It is the Ferrari's and the Gullwing I would cry over, not that they will not get rebuilt to better than factorys stardards.

Non sequitor indeed, since I assume this is meant to be in response to the wrecked exotics thread...

To Vanilla: Good luck, and I second doing your best to get professional help. Although I'm not suffering with it myself, I worked with a good friend who suffers from (as John says) a layering of effects that ultimately boil down to bipolar behaviours. In his case the root cause is a syndrome making him extremely vulnerable to changes in his circadian rhythms - the recent switch to Daylight Saving Time would have knocked him for a 2-week loop. His natural sleep/wake tendencies rarely coincided with the "normal" business day and would vary widely by season and even weather.

Best of luck to you. Professional medication and counseling can help, as well as some other changes to lifestyle.

I have a friend who is an awesome counsler, and he does Internet counsling as well. All you need is a webcam. Email me offlist if you would like to talk with him.

Joey

A few disorders run in the family on my dad's side.

Bi-polar among them.

I got a mild version. My brother got the full helping plus a few others. I can usually stay on top of it, it's much rougher for him.

For years my wife was diagnosed with depression - medicated for it and treated fairly ineffectively - she spent almost a year just stuck without leaving the house (and can tell you when mama's not happy, nobody's happy). Found the right doc and the right meds and things got much more manageable very quickly. Right diagnosis is key. If it truly is bipolar many people improve dramatically with lithium and seroquel combo. The talk therapy side of things can be really helpful in conjunction with the meds. Talk therapy can't really overcome chemistry issues. Chemistry can't really help optimize what you're capable of (some may disagree here ) - each has their role.

mad_machine wrote: I do not cry over the modern exotics... they are still making them. It is the Ferrari's and the Gullwing I would cry over, not that they will not get rebuilt to better than factorys stardards.

Excellent representation of bipolar posting ;)

I like turtles!

I find that I suffer from depression more than most people I am close to, but I used to work with someone who was BiPolar and she was just out of control. When she was up she was on top of the world but when she was down I feared for her own safety. The medication leveled her out but then she didn't seem to have any up or down at all, so she probably needed to address the doseage or try a different med. I feel for anyone going through that, it's no picnic.

EastCoastMojo wrote: I like turtles! but I used to work with someone who was BiPolar and she was just out of control. When she was up she was on top of the world but when she was down I feared for her own safety.

Most of my family that has it is far more dangerous on the up side than on the down.

Not more likely to intentionally harm themselves, but more likely to do something that seems really "cool" at the time and is in reality really stupid.

my brother is diagnosed as bi-polar. Hes a great guy for a week, then an ass for a month. As much as he is my family, i cannot stand to be around him. I think it went on too long without finding proper diagnosis, and so he has a slightly skewed view on reality and how to behave in and around society as a result of developing his personality amidst a largely misunderstood condition. I try not to victimize the victim...or I guess i just try to remember he is sick with a disease, no different than MS or Diabetes. But I still almost never speak to him outside of birthdays etc...I just can never tell what part of the "swing" hes in, and so I just stay away. I wish he would decide to become involved with his treatment, he practically never takes his mdes, never sees his doctor, and pretty much blames everything in his life on what he cannot do since hes "sick". For him its a crutch, for my sister an d I its a barrier.

Im not sure what my post was intended to be, Im not trying to scare anyone. I think with treatment, people live healthy, practically normal lives with this disease. I wish my brother were one of them. Im sure I sound like a richard. I guess im just saying, if anything, that dealing with and surviving this - like any thing worth while - will require work, but in the end will pay off if you are honest and committed.

My soon to be ex is bipolar in a BIG way, to the point of schizophrenia. It was quite mild when we first met, as time has gone on it has progressively gotten worse. Like JB, she went with medication and also tried to self medicate with alcohol, things really started getting bad about 2005 (you should hear the story of the week just before the '06 Challenge!) and it finally exploded in October of last year while she was on a big time upswing.

I had to take my daughter and go into hiding for about ten days while my attorney was working on the Family Court. I now have emergency custody of my daughter, the wife is under a restraining order to stay away from me, the house and the kid's school and is also under court order to submit weekly for testing to make sure she is taking her medication.

I have dealt with her problems to the point that I am sick of it and have filed for divorce. It remains to be seen what will happen with custody, our house etc. No matter what, due to her refusal to deal properly with her problems she has pretty much lost everything she ever worked for.

Do NOT make the mistake she made, which was to think, when she was 'up', that she had everything completely under control because she did NOT. That's when bipolar people really need help the most.

It is a wise man who learns from the mistakes of others. Get professional help and dammit stick with it!

My wife is also Bi Polar and it is a roller coaster, when she is good she is amazing, when she is bad........shudder.

I absolutely agree with the diagnosis issue, and see the doctor if you feel yourself going into a dive.....now, seriously.

You can reduce the lows if you act on it, do not be brave or tough, seek help when you need it.

I do take prescribed meds. I go to my psych as often as I can afford to, which isn't often enough. The quacks in my town are just that, quacks, so I have to go out of town, and it's an hour trip.

I've done the therapy thing, and I get to a point where I just get really good at telling them what they want to hear so I can get out of there. Structured therapy isn't for me.

I can't really afford the right meds. Only my wife works now - I had to quit because the stress load was too high - and putting me on her insurance means we can't pay bills. She makes too much money for any sort of assistance, other than what my doc does because I'm a cash-pay patient.

To me, hobbies are my therapy. When I fail at a hobby, I tend to crash. This time around, it was my laptop. My wife bought me a stripped down model with no web cam. I bought what was supposed to be the right webcam from a seller on eBay and it didn't work. The connector was slightly different. Well, I decided to take the whole laptop apart on my bench. Nothing out of the ordinary for me, I've been a computer tech in the past and I know my way around a laptop. Well, anyway, my wife was kinda peeved, and she said it would never work again. I decided to assemble it to the point needed to power on to prove her wrong. Well, that shorted out the LCD cable, rendering the screen useless. Now I have a dead laptop and a pissed off wife. I finally find the cable online at a cost of $52. Keep in mind that this laptop was $350 to begin with. It took almost a week for the thing to get here (thanks UPS, brown must have been constipated this week). I couldn't sleep last night because I was so worried that I had also killed the LCD. I finally get to bed around 5 and get a little sleep. Part comes in, UPS man does ding-dong-ditch to my sig-required package. Get everything ready to put back together, and bam, it works. Took a week and almost $70 to get back to where I was before I started.

Anyway, that's a typical up-down-up for me. Meds help about 90% of the time. The other 10% of the time, nothing seems to do anything for me.

I've been down the Lithobid path. Twice. Last time was an extra 50 pounds added, which sent me into a pretty bad depression. I'm now having a hard time losing it. I've lost that much weight in the past, but my metabolism seems to be so crappy these days.

Not to sound like I am on a soap box, but the reason that structured therapy is not for you is the same reason you need structured therapy. I admit I got lucky when my doctor wrote off a years worth of help for me, VERY LUCKY. It saved my life.

Look into community mental health, the county, anything talk to human welfare specialists try to find your loophole into the world of free or nearly free health care.

Good luck

The soon to be ex has contacted and been seen by the local public mental health clinic. I realize it's not exactly the Waldorf Astoria but everyone has to start somewhere. Her mom says her meds have been adjusted a couple of times and she is showing definite signs of improvement.

Please, take the overwhelming advice and get some help even if it's not perfect.

'A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step'. Please don't do what my wife did and let things go till it's too late.

I have an appointment with my psych in a few days and I'll see if he can point me in any direction.

I usually swing from relatively normal to somewhat upbeat and ready to take on the world (hypomanic) to crushingly depressed with the seasons. Diagnosed with bipolar I last spring after having a manic episode that lasted about two weeks, followed a month later by a mixed episode (depressed and manic at the same time) that nearly killed me.

If you're not already, start writing in a journal, a blog, or whatever floats your boat. Try to keep up on it. Use it to track your mood and your daily goings on and how you're feeling at different times of the day, week, month, year... It makes it significantly easier to get an idea of how you cycle: how far up and down you go, and for how long. It also makes it easier to keep your p-docs up to date without relying on memory. Helps me anyways.

And +1 on the meds working 90% of the time. This is the first winter I can remember that wasn't just agonizing to get through, which is something I can only give thanks to the little lime green tablet I'm supposed to (and usually remember to) take daily. Spring has been back to snafu and I've been as volatile as ever though. Try to remember that while 90/10 isn't great, it sure as hell beats 10/90 untreated. I'm trying to anyways...

EastCoastMojo wrote: I like turtles! I find that I suffer from depression more than most people I am close to, but I used to work with someone who was BiPolar and she was just out of control. When she was up she was on top of the world but when she was down I feared for her own safety. The medication leveled her out but then she didn't seem to have any up or down at all, so she probably needed to address the doseage or try a different med. I feel for anyone going through that, it's no picnic.

I'm actually the opposite. I'm pretty cautious when I'm in the down phases, it's when I get Manic that I run the risk of being dangerous. I don't seem to have many up phases, so when I do, I feel so happy about not being depressed for a change that I think I'm damn near invulnerable. Example: "..I used to race for real! I should go down to (insert street racing site here) and show the little berkeleyers what's up!!!.." after just hearing their pipes on the balcony of the apartment one night. Ugh.

I've found that half the battle is just knowing you have it. That's actually what kept me (47yr old, with a daughter to support, and finally a real relationship with a great lady) from going down to street race that night. Just remembering over & over that it's not really what I'd choose to do if I was feeling any differently at that moment. The therapy actually taught me how to study whether it was the situation, or my feelings about it that was different. I quickly realized that I'd heard those same sounds every Saturday night for six months, and was never once tempted. I eventually laughed when I remembered that I'd just the week before had been cursing the same pack of morons for "ruining real racers' good names"!

Only other thing I can say is that John Brown's right about self-medication. Almost every single health problem I have is because of the massive alcohol and nicotine (and a pretty wild cocaine habit in college) usage I've done since I was 14yrs old.

Neurobiology is a science in its infancy. I actually quit searching for the right medication program, due to the sexual side-effects of the failed treatments (or did they fail? They actually helped restrain the Bipolar thinking, but at a "quality of life" cost I personally didn't wish to pay), and the refusal of my health insurance to pay for anything other than the "tried and true" drugs that gave me the limp noodle made me abandon the search for a chemical treatment plan that would work.

So, it's a work in progress. Occasionally, I start "self-medicating" again. And when I do, it brings home everything John said about it, except for the fact that my breakdown is physical instead of mental.

Just don't give up. I'm lucky..I've been an atheist for thirty years, and really don't believe any kind of "afterlife" exists. It kind of squashes any thoughts of harming myself in the depressive moments. I don't know why it doesn't quite lead me to stop the alc/nic/whatever usage, tho. In my head, I know it's harmful, especially at my age..but emotionally I just can't quite kick it.

The therapy is what restored what little balance I have. Start with it, and hope for better chemical solutions in the future. I know I am...

Yeah, I just have a really bad case of ADD, but it sorta keeps me sane. The closest I came to BiPolar was a girl I once dated, infact I think it was one of the best dating experiences I've ever had as a young adult, she was on lithium and only showed up when she wanted to screw.

Andrew

Right now, my doc has me on Prozac at 15mg/day, Klonipin at 2mg at night, a multivitamin supplement, fish oil tabs, and Melatonin at night for sleep.

Both my manic and my depressive patters emerge from poor sleep. Since I was 12, I've never been a good sleeper. Sleeping pills make me sleep 14+ hours, even with small doses.

Right now, we're trying to keep out of the limp mode stuff that I can't afford anyway. Any more Prozac and I cycle so fast your head will spin. I can handle about 6mg of Klonipin a day, and I keep a few 2mg tabs around at all times for emergency usage.

The latest change was the addition of the supplements. They seem to be helping as much as what the "drug" companies have come up with. We're not thinking about ditching something that's worked in some capacity for the better part of 8 years, but it seems to be making slight inroads in that last 10 or so percent that I need the most help with.

One of our friends is in about the same boat as me. He's on a pretty big SSI check. I kinda despise him for that. Then again, he's older and can't keep a job for more than about 6 weeks. The last job I had, I kept for over 2 years, and it was a E36 M3 job that even a sane person would walk out of.

What I feel I need is a support group. Not a structured support group that you go to for therapy, but a support group of close friends and family. Unfortunately, I don't really have many friends in the area. Everyone I know well, I know from the internet.

I know it seems like I'm making excuses for things and rambling on here, but this seems to help. Blogging doesn't feel right to me because no one reads it. BTDT.

Sometimes, I post threads like this on forums to see if I'm accepted. That's a huge fear of mine, acceptance. At the $2009 Challenge, I was there alone on Saturday. I didn't really talk to anyone because I felt so out of place. I chose to not wear my GRM shirt because I wanted to blend in with the nobodies. I was the guy walking around taking pics with his blackberry, wearing a black T-shirt with UER screenprinted in white on the front, driving the silver Saturn Astra parked way out in BFE. I was there to meet people, but I was too anxious to talk to anyone - afraid of rejection.

SVRex, I promise I have not forgotten about you. Understand that I feel awkward calling someone I don't know. I worked in a call center for a while making callbacks, and I got yelled at by so many customers for calling while they were busy that I can't bring myself to just pick up the phone anymore. It got to the point at work that I would race to fill my quota with resolved tickets that could be closed and just disappear for the rest of the day. Nothing was ever said about it, and I even came close to another promotion from there. The other BS workplace stress wasn't worth it, though. We won't get into that now.

I do want to thank all of you for reading through my posts. Again, I know I ramble - and Like the late George Carlin - I have no transition material.

BTW, I'm 24. I still have a lot of my life ahead of me. As long as my wife's teaching contract is renewed this summer, I'm going to school to be a teacher. I have an Assistant Principal that says it would be a waste for me to do anything but teach. As of now, I want to teach high school history.

I'm going to end this post with another thank you. It's 2:30AM, and I have to be up at about 7AM to volunteer in my wife's classroom today.

-Derick

I've been close to a person with depression about as bad as it can get, and a bi-polar person who really dislikes (maybe hates?) me for the past year or so. Its rough, and nothing seems to help all the time. I've for the most part avoided the bi-polar girl--its best for all parties involved--but the person with depression has been very near and dear to my heart. I'm not going to go into it, other than to say at times it got me down as well, once I knew that the depressed person was at the very least safe and I had time to actually think about my own self.

After all if it, I can say that life is always worth living. For me, the experience has given me an outlook on life that I need to try as hard as I can, but failure happens and its not the end of the world. Get up, and get on with your life. If you're feeling down, surround yourself with people you love and enjoy. Distract yourself with a hobby, a job you enjoy, a good book or magazine, or something to obsess over--for me, its been autocross and going over in my mind how I'm going to do it this year, and what would I do if I had more money. If all else fails, I can go play a song on guitar. Singing helps too.

At some point I hit a breaking point, and needed to make the decision: was I going to get all depressed (I was very close to dropping out of school), or was I going to just go with the flow, and try to be the man I want to be. I learned never to lose sleep over something that wasn't that big... A failed test? No big deal, in the grand scheme of things. Same as a scratch on the car (although that will piss me off when I do think about it). I have found that since I have come upon this, I have felt mentally healthier than I ever have. I've become close friends with my dad, which I never would have seen coming a few years ago. Life works out, although not always like you planned. Now if I could just work out this insomnia that I've had for the past 8 months, I'd be feeling pretty good. I feel very fortunate that I was able to handle it the way I did. I have no idea why I never turned to drugs, but I'm happy today that I didn't. Also, I think that one of the most important things in life is to have a dog. Over winter break, having someone greet you at the door-someone who is always happy to see you-just brightens up my day to no end.

I think the big thing to remember is that someone loves you, no matter who you are. Good luck, and remember, always look on the bright side of life.

My wife has always been a poor sleeper. It got so that when she went to bed I'd stay up a while to make sure she was out, then sleep on the couch because I didn't want to wake her up.

Something that helped her a lot: develop a 'going to bed' ritual; little things you do that signal it's time to snooze.

Her biggest problem was that when she got manic she decided she didn't need all that medicine and doctors.