Doing better

As you can see from the time elapse between my two posts, I am not a daily blogger! I haven't been feeling well for a while, so I have not wanted to write about my discomfort.

I frequently experience depression. I have been diagnosed bipolar and my condition was being controlled by doctor prescribed medications. Unfortunately, about 20% of people on antidepressants, experience what is called "the poop-out effect". I'm not kidding. That's the term that is used. It's when for no concrete reason, your medications stop working. There are theories as to why. One is that the brain does not like the interferance of the drugs and learns to override what the drugs are doing to improve one's condition. I didn't know that this could happen, so when I started to be really tired and depressed, I thought it was just stress from work. I had a new job at the time and my boss was someone you had to adjust to. He was unlike any other boss I have had and this was new territory for me.

Fortunately, after 9 months of this depression, I realized that I needed to contact my doctor. The one I had at the time was semi-retired which meant he was pretty much unavailable, especially when you needed him. In my opinion, no psychiatrist should ever conduct their business the way this doctor did. It is unprofessional and dangerous to the health of their patients. Fortunately, I was able to get an appointment with another doctor who was reputable, but this included a 2 1/2 month wait for the appointment. I got through it, though, and we tried a couple different medications. One helped with the mood swings but changed my tastebuds. I put up with that for 2 1/2 months and decided I could not take not knowing what would taste good and what would be nasty. I was wasting food because things I normally enjoyed were tasting different and I could not stomach them.

We changed the medication, but you have to lower the dose of the one you are on and then start low and increase slowly with the new one. This made for more mood swings and depressive episodes, but it seems I am getting better. I am wanting to be more active. I have the strength and desire to do more things and even force myself to be more active. It's kind of hard to explain. When you are depressed, you don't want to do things that might make you feel better. You don't want to spend time with people, exercise, or eat properly. You want to sleep a lot. Those are the symptoms I experienced, though there are many different symptoms of depression. When I am depressed, I know what might help, but I don't want to do it, even though I want to feel better. It's like I don't have the capacity to want what's good for me, even though I am miserable.

Depression is a sickness. I was taught by my parents that depression is a choice. It's choosing to not trust God. It's not a medical condition. It's a sin. Those beliefs didn't make me feel better and didn't help me pull out of the depression either. Depression is a mental illness. Our society can deal with physical illness, but mental illness is something we are afraid of. When I think of the mentally ill, I think of people talking to themselves or to imaginary people. I think of people who are unpredictable, people who want to talk to you but you don't want to talk to them because they seem scary. But not all mentally ill are like that. I can be fine and talk and laugh with people and seem just fine and I could still be depressed. Just being around people I could trust and that cared about me helped me feel better and function better, but my system could only take so much visiting before I would feel overwhelmed and exhausted.

I still have those moments when I am at a party for several hours and I feel like I have maxed out my capacity for stimulation. It doesn't even have to be a very exciting time, but just being around people and having expectations of how you should act when you are company at someone's house only goes so far. I have a medication that I take when I am feeling anxious. Fortunately I receive relief on a pretty low dose. Unfortunately, a side effect of the medication is that I feel tired (like I feel when I am depressed) and that does not lend itself to productive days.

I have prayed to feel better and though prayer is a powerful thing and God has provided multiple ways for people to receive help and one of the ways I receive help is through my trusted medical professionals. I grew up with my parents believing in the power of prayer and vitamins and herbs. Only after trying the prayer, vitamins and herbs were we allowed to go to the doctor. It is an understandable belief. There are horror stories about people experiencing bad side effects from medication and every once in a while you get a doctor who doesn't know what they are doing. My parents wanted to err on the side of caution and I am happy to say that I recovered from whenever I was sick, even if I didn't see a doctor.

My mom takes those experiences (the non-doctor ones) and thinks that the way I was when I was a child is the way I should respond to things now. I wasn't bipolar when I was a child. I wasn't depressed. The thing is that it was always in the background. I fended it off by being very sociable. I also eat whenever I am upset about something and I get an endorphine release from that which makes me feel better (albeit temporarily). I have had crises of faith in the past few years which took me away from weekly church attendance. This meant I was alone more and not having the joy I received from all the hugs I would give and receive in my church. I no longer accepted fully all that my church taught about God and since I am a very spiritual person, that was really hard for me.

Anyway, my meds are helping and I am able to help myself more, too. I am trying to attend more support group meetings and hopefully will get to a place where I won't need to eat to comfort myself. There was a time when I was doing really good with that. Since that has changed, I am trying to work on accepting myself for who I am no matter what my weight is. That is very hard for me because it seemd to me as a child that my parents were obsessed with weight. My mother would notice if I put on a few pounds. It would show first in my face and my mother would comment on how full my face looked, so I learned to hate my face. My mom would try to get me to learn how to have good posture by holding my stomach muscles in and tucking my bottom under when I stood, so I became obsessed with my not-flat stomach. I think that part is genetics, though, because even when I was skinny (though I did not think I was skinny at the time) I still thought my stomach was something to be ashamed of. It was never flat even when I did stomach crunches daily. I was actually in great shape, but I was clueless because my mind didn't work properly when it came to self awareness.

I don't blame my mother for making me this way. It may be that I just tend toward unhealthy thinking. There may be things in my past that contributed to my poor self esteem. I'm still working on finding that out.

That's all for now.