Delicate

This is a very delicate topic so I am going to be as sensitive about it as possible. You see all 3 of my breakdowns had one thing in common, i abused stimulants. I was prescribed them but i was not using them as medically prescribed. I would use them to stay up all night and study for my exams or to be that little bit of extra productive at my serving shift. I did take the adhd test and was clinically diadnosed as adhd BUT adhd can mirror Bipolar and the way my psychiatrist explained  to me was that if i were on the right medication to begin with i wouldnt have found the need to abuse prescription stimulants in the first place. This happened for my breakdowns in 2010 and 2013. In 2016 it was different. I was NOT abusing stimulants, i was using vyvanse as medically prescribed and slowly adding in strattera when i added in strattera that is when things started going south. So it is always a question in the back of my head of whether or not i am just not capable of taking stimulants or whether i actually have a mental illness. However, how my psychiatrist has explained it to me is that if you are taking too many stimulants which probably happened when we added the strattera your brain gets over focused and it breaks. It gets chemically imbalanced. This does not mean you are not Bipolar, it just means that you are not capable of taking stimulants with out taking Bipolar medications as well. (I do not take stimulants anymore, that is another story for another time)

The only thing i am certain of going forward is that i have broken that 3 year cycle, i have an abundance of energy and i dont feel the need to take the stimulants to "cope", so I will continue to take my medications as prescribed because they make me feel stable and well.

Another reason i would take stimulants is to numb the pain of the depression i would feel sometimes. It is so true that sometimes the happiest people you meet are often the saddest. They just know how pain feels so they spend their time bringing people joy because they dont want other people to feel the pain they feel. I would often go into depression for various reasons, because i didnt know what direction i was heading in my life. Because i feared the future. Because i was hurt by a boy. Because i was in a fight with my family. Because i didnt like myself. Because i didnt feel pretty enough. You name it, i felt it!

Times have changed, I no longer feel those false sense of insecurities and i have an amazing psychiatrist who i can e-mail and who will reapond the same day! I can tell her exactly how i feel and she will adjust accordingly. It was a tough road getting here. I had to try over 20 different medications and my mom had to fight tooth and nail to get me on the correct medication to not make me a walking zombie until i could fend for myself and describe how i was actually feeling.

Medications work differently for different people, what works for me probably wont work for you. Our chemistries are different. Some medications made my hair fall out. Some made me sleep all day. Some made my legs hurt. Some made my face twitch. Now 20 medications later i am on the right ones for me and since February of this year I have been so tragically and magically alive. Its been a miracle!!!

There is hope at the end of the tunnel. I no longer face depression. I have my down days and i have my up days, that is part of human existence. But i no longer feel the pains of hopelessness that i need to drown out the pain by abusing a substance that leads to the deterioration of my mental health.