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Mental Illness?


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  • 1 year later...

So now its my turn. I'm dealing with what is very likely bipolar. It has been pretty debilitating. I can't think straight, remember things or make decisions. All of this has kept me from working or doing things I enjoy. I am unable to concentrate enough to watch movies or any kind of continuing series, to read or even play most video games.

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There is considerably more, those are just the points that are most debilitating for me

 

Normally I am a very thoughtful, introspective person. I consider things, keep up on current events and I have a knowledge based job that is based on weighing evidence and making decisions. Now I can't even look at it menu or spend time looking at my clothes to pick out what I'm going to wear.

 

Oddly and fortunately, I don't have issues with parenting, but every other area is awful.

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Is this something that has come on out of nowhere, or have you always been like this? I only ask because after all these years you haven't seemed to have trouble before sans crappy outsider influences. Or maybe you just haven't mentioned it.

 

Obviously people, like your mom, can go undiagnosed, but you still have a sense of something being up. Is this new, or something that has gotten harder to manage over the years?

 

It's shocking to me how much stress can effect us like any number of mental illnesses.

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In answer to your questions, yes. To all of it. There's definitely a stress component, but I have always had exaggerated highs and lows. Never really enough to cause any problems, but enough that I've thought about it.

 

 

I'm almost certain that it runs in my family, and I have a very close, long term friend who knows me well who is a psych nurse practioner who stated that he isn't surprised by the diagnosis at all, but I would be the type who may only have one bad episode every decade or so and therefore never be diagnosed until it coincides with other factors.

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Are you seeking help? My Mom is bipolar, and what you're describing largely doesn't describe her symptoms. What you're describing reminds me of acute stress. Regardless, you should speak with your primary care physician and get a referral to someone who can help you out.

 

Good luck Brando and be kind to yourself.

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My sister and a good friend is bipolar.

 

I am thinking severe manic depression.

 

Bipolar people suffer from delusions of grandeur and a kind of weird high elation that collapses into irritability and often poor judgement calls in managing their life. For instance my sister will feel on top of the world and that she can handle anything. She stays up making jewelry all night long singing songs and plans to sell the jewelry on etsy and it will get her millions of dollars and she'll be picked up on Ellen and she's so excited. She visits rock and gem shows. She takes part of a class on how to make jewelry. She gets expensive equipment to make the jewelry. Then she exhausts herself so badly and the plans are not working so good so she sinks into feeling worthless and sleeps all day and her fervor and interest in jewelry subside and the expensive equipment gets lost or stolen or broken and she doesn't know where this is or what happened to the gems she bought a few months ago but they're somewhere in the piles of things on the table. She starts cutting herself or hitting her head because its overwhelming for her and she cries a lot. And expects anyone she calls to complain about her life to be there to pick up the phone and listen to her cry about how it's all crap.

 

Manic depression is distraction and lack of interest. It can be triggered by big changes ie new babies and jobs where you feel less secure as you learn new things and adjust to new schedules or your sleep deprived from looking after kids all day and can't think straight because you can't get two minutes to be. Lots of people actually have a episode of this at least once in their life where you become listless and feel like nothings happening and basically a big fat MEH.

 

If you feel suicidal please reach out to anyone. Seriously. Anyone. You are awesome and you're a good dad and people love you.

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Bipolar and manic depression are the same thing. They officially changed the name of the disorder from manic depressive to bipolar back in 1980 in the DSM III. There is no distinction between the two.

 

Bipolar is a fairly large category with a range of symptoms with the hallmark of heightened and lowered moods that cause difficulty in a person's life. Sometimes the manic episodes are more pronounced, sometimes the depressive. Sometimes hypomanic episodes are incredibly productive and wonderful to be around, sometimes they're just really irritable or nearly delusional in their grandiose sense of self. Sometimes people's capacity for spotting detail goes through the roof, sometimes they exhibit characteristics resembling ADHD like Fozzie describes.

 

My basic point is, you can't really compare someone to what your own family member or friend are going through and say that it's NOT bipolar. Because it can present in radically different ways for different people.

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Dude, all I know is what they've diagnosed my sister and my friend with. I have experienced bipolar disorder as a caregiver for 30+ years. I do know that experience. It was late at night when I wrote that post so I couldn't think of the word but my mom and another friend have been diagnosed as severely depressed. I apologize for saying manic.

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Yeah, I've been seeing my PCP and a counselor. Also waiting to get in to see a psychiatrist.

 

Yesterday, my counselor and I went through the DSM-V description of bipolar. I'm a fairly unique case, in that I'm fairly rational even during my irrationality, meaning that I'm very drawn to making irrational decisions and doing stupid things (ie going and buying a PS4 because I'm home alone and want something to break the monotony, even though I'm just alone for a few hours) but I know they're irrational and talk myself down. I also have a certain degree of delusions of grandeur, thinking that somehow I'm incredibly important or that my issues are impacting everyone, when they're really not.

Most of the time, my manic states are very hypomanic - I tend to be more controlled, just have an elevated mood, need less sleep, I am good at focusing that energy still, though, so it rarely presents as a problem. When it does, it involves things like rashly buying a zoo membership for my family without really discussing it with my wife.

 

I alternate this with periods of depression as well.

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I'd seen this thread here for quite a while and debated whether or not I wanted to share this publicly. But I've already talked about some of it a bit here, and sharing seems to help both me and anybody else dealing with similar circumstances, so why not.

Around five or so years ago my mom and dad split up, mostly because my mom went kind of nuts. The best I can gather is that she was going through some sort of mid-life crisis and decided to sabotage her own life so she had an excuse to abandon everything. She saw a guy behind my dad's back, blamed everything on my dad, then split and dumped my teenage siblings off on aunts and uncles so she could move hundreds of miles away with the new guy and apparently declare bankruptcy on her life and start over. I could more or less handle my parents splitting after I'd already gotten married and had a place of my own, but the way she handled things did a number on me. I questioned everything that she'd ever said or done. I still wanted to see her, but I approached it extremely cynically given what I saw as extremely poor choices on her end. A lot of the ensuing chain reaction of events following her blow-up caused a number of mental health roadblocks for me too.

After time passed and I'd put some thought into it, I kind of realized that some signs had been there all along for her. I did some research and realized that a lot of her personality ticks and the way she very purposefully engineered all of those events were tell-tale signs of a few varieties of mental illness. When I went through a big episode myself almost two years ago, I had to wonder if it was hereditary. I swore that I wouldn't go to the same ends that she did and I started making a lot of changes. It wasn't overnight in any way at all, but I think I've gotten myself to a way better place recently. But still, it freaks me out how quickly things imploded for her, and I still worry that it could happen to me at some point.

I can at the very least happily co-exist with my mom around holidays these days, and I am glad to see her. But I'm still extremely apprehensive about being overly involved, especially when the co-conspirator of her whole drama is still by her side. For better or worse, the whole sequence of events has played a big hand with other events in changing me too. I'm not necessarily as optimistic and take charge as I used to be, and more apprehensive and cynical. I still don't think I've entirely figured it out, and I'm pretty sure it and another event that's another story altogether is holding me back in a lot of ways. I guess I just take everything a lot slower now because I'm afraid I'll put myself in a similar position to my mom and just purposefully implode everything.

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This is why I think it's good that people are trying to take away mental illness stigma's. A lot of times we hide our issues and as a functioning alcoholic my Mom was great at it as she held a job for 20+ years. It doesn't have to define us but it helps us to understand and not enable if we know about it.

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