Tag Archives: Mental Health

Thought of the Week: Lithium, One Month In

About a month ago, I wrote about being diagnosed with Bipolar Type I and the treatments I’m undergoing. Specifically, I wrote about adding lithium to my daily pill diet, and being both concerned and excited about this new treatment. I was afraid of the results, afraid of the side-effects; in particular, I was afraid of what it was going to do to me mentally. I was looking forward to the possibility of a more steady life, and afraid that I would become a zombie.

So now it’s a month later, and I’ve been on lithium long enough for the effects to settle in. The overall result? It’s really, really weird.

I haven’t noticed a wide array of different crazy side-effects, but there are a couple of things that are different that I can really only attribute to the lithium itself. The first, most obvious and noticeable effect is a significant tremor in my hands particularly, and in my body in general. Sometimes the tremors become quite violent, although they are mostly more subdued. For example, I spilled tea on myself and my mouse while writing this post because of a sudden shake. It’s even a little more difficult to type on the keyboard (thank goodness for autocorrect). I’ve also noticed a strange phenomena when I’m sleeping. Mrs. Satis has for a long time said that I shake or move uncontrollably when I sleep, but recently when I’m coming awake (that state between sleeping and waking) I begin to shudder throughout my entire body. It’s not painful, but is the most peculiar sensation I can describe. Every muscle in my body, it feels like, starts quivering rapidly, and this continues for several seconds before eventually fading away, leaving me feeling normal. I’ve started to become used to this, and I had something similar (but much milder) before starting the lithium, but it’s a little unsettling.

The second most obvious change is mental. Here, I can almost feel the lithium interfering with the chemical signaling in my brain. I have a constant fuzzy, numb sensation near the back of my head – right about where the cerebellum would be, I’d say – and emotionally I’m simply gone. I can still laugh in the presence of colleagues but I don’t actually find the joke very funny; I can still frown when Mrs. Satis is angry at me for forgetting to do something for the millionth time, but I don’t actually feel upset. I feel steady, certainly; almost like a see-saw that’s frozen in place.

There’s a good side to this. I don’t get nearly so angry, and I especially don’t get so depressed. This is a hard one to explain, actually, because I still feel a great lethargy, which was always one of the key characteristics of my depression. I still want to spend all day lying in bed, sleeping. (I got ten hours of sleep last night, yet I still felt compelled to have a nap all morning.) I can’t bring myself to do anything, never mind the important things that need doing every single day (like cleaning).

And there’s a down side, which is that I can’t react appropriately to anything. If little Satis is happy, I feel a little “meh”. If Mrs. Satis is angry I feel a little “meh”. It’s okay at work – reactions are governed by pre-scripted rules for social interaction, so as long as I respond the way work wants me to respond, I’m good – but at home it’s causing all sorts of problems. Which is ironic, because the whole point of lithium was to improve my quality of life.

It leaves me wondering what the point of any of this medication is. All I’ve done is traded a violent, abusive, depressed and lazy monster for a quiet, monotone, unfeeling lazy monster. And I have no idea which is better.

Do I want to go off lithium? I’m not sure. There’s the part of me that’s enjoying a bit of stability for once. There’s a part of me that hates the relationships this “new” me is forming with his loved ones. And there’s now a big part of me that just doesn’t give a f***.

Sigh. What would you do?

Featured image from http://discoverccs.org/.

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Thought of the Week: The Darkness Burning

And so goes by another week of wasted time and workless nights; no writing, no doing, no thinking. Long evenings of dozing and watching Futurama and eating too many bowls of cereal, waiting to be able to go to bed and fall asleep, to forget the emptiness of yet another day.

I’ve been struggling with my maladies for many, many years, but was only recently diagnosed with (or learned of my diagnosis of) Bipolar Type I. I’ve already written about this, but it just all suddenly makes sense. Look at this graph:

Screen Shot 2013-10-20 at 9.24.49 PMThis is a chart of my mood over the past six months. As you can see, it goes up and down a lot. I haven’t had more than a week or two of feeling generally stable. What’s much more interesting is the pattern of ups and downs. I need more data to be able to see a genuine trend, but I’ve highlighted above periods of time where my average mood remained below a rating of “5”. They seem pretty evenly spaced, don’t they? A month of up, a month of down.

And so the cycle goes. I’m in a black phase at the moment, entering autumn and feeling overwhelmed with the work ahead of me, both in my personal life and with my novel, and although it seems like it’s lasted forever this time, I can see about that it’s only been about three weeks. Another week or two, and I might be looking up again.

Wouldn’t it be nice? What if I could predict my depression, prepare for it, set things in place to ease the way for myself and my family? “Well sweetie, in about two weeks I’m going to start making your life miserable again; we’d better prepare.”

It probably won’t work out that way. I’m unpredictable, and that’s part of the problem. Ignoring the averages, look at the variation in the above graph: I can go from a 9 to a 2 overnight, and back up again the next day. It’s not easy, believe me.

Unlike typical bipolar disorders, I don’t have especially manic phases. I don’t spend money compulsively, I’m not promiscuous, and I certainly don’t feel like I can do anything and everything in the world. On the best of days it’s a struggle to force myself to do even the things I want to do. However, I do have extremely difficult depressive phases. I’m on four different drugs to try and combat this. And as of this week, I’ve added a fifth: lithium.

That’s right – the dreaded lithium. The certain and dreaded proof, if any was needed, that I truly am bipolar. And I don’t know how I feel about it. If it works – if it softens the downs – I’d be very pleased. The side effects are worrisome, though. I have a mild hand tremor as it is from my existing drugs; lithium may make this worse. In my work I need to have pretty steady hands, and this could definitely cause problems. Weight gain? I gain weight when I’m depressed anyway – my nightly routine usually includes several bowls of cereal. I certainly don’t need to get any fatter.

Worse, I’m both looking forward to and worried about just simply feeling numb. At its worst, my depression nonetheless warms me, a kind of comfort in solitude, in trusting in a known quantity. I know my depression, it is me in the most basic of ways. It’s as much a part of me as my own hands. Drawing back into it is like curling up by the fire in the dark. What am I going to do without it? Will I be able to carry on working, writing, living without as much difficulty? Or will like become even more intolerable without even the escape of withdrawing into the dark?

We’re going to have to see. My doctor hasn’t exactly started me on a low dose of lithium, though there’s plenty of room for increasing it. Part of me wants it, just to see what it’s like – and part of me is terrified.

Which will win?

Featured image from http://quenya101.com/ainulindale-quenyanna/page-5-§§14-8/.

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Thought of the Week: My Own Gothic Symphony

Disclosure time: as a teenager, I walked through the halls of a deep, dark abysmal depression. Truth be told, I still do, although it’s changed and mutated to a point where I no longer do silly things like try to kill myself.

Of course, you already knew that.

You also know that I’m resuming work on my secondary novel (primary, in a sense – I began it over ten years ago), A Gothic Symphony. You can read the first few chapters already at agothicsymphony.wordpress.com. It’s a story of tragedy, depression and despair, and it’s a story that is deeply personal to me. You see, in many ways it’s my story.

All right, it’s about a girl and things happen to her that never happened to me…but they did happen to people I knew. Pretty terrible things, too. We can laugh at them now – did you really think you’d die from a bottle of baby tylenol? – but when you’re a teenager and the world has closed around you in darkness, it’s all terribly, terribly serious. This story is a way for me to keep in touch with the “me” that was, because that time of my life was, despite the torture and agony of living in blackness the whole time, extremely meaningful. It was when I found myself and my identity.

In fact, I was talking with the Lovely J only the other day about this, and how my depression became my identity. How it felt like being depressed was the only thing I was good at. This was silly, of course, because I was good at lots of stuff, but I was especially good at beating myself up about it, both figuratively and literally. This is something I still do to this day, in fact, though the physical beating myself up doesn’t happen much anymore.

You see, depression for me wasn’t a disease to be cured; it was a home to be found, a thing to aspire to. People who weren’t depressed were cattle. Or sheep. Some ungulate or another. Depression was my savior, and I walked the fine line between the comfort of misery and the lure of death. Many times my agony felt too much to bear, but more often it was the gut-wrenching pain of existence that, ironically, kept me going.

That really doesn’t make much sense, does it? Probably why I’m still going to therapy all these years later.

Music, also, was a huge part of my life. Depressing, miserable music. Music with delightful lyrics like:

“I’ll kill myself: I’ll blow my brains onto the wall!

See you in Hell, I will not take this anymore!

Now, this is where it ends, this is where I will draw the line

So scuze me while I end my life.”

Excuse Me While I Kill Myself – Sentenced, The Cold White Light (2002)

Ah, those were fun times. I still listen to Sentenced, by the way. Another one of those comforts of old times. Bands like Sentenced, My Dying Bride, Anathema, Marilyn Manson, HIM and Abyssic Hate (I’ve written about many of these previously) filled my dark world. They, too, kept me going.

Take that, everyone who says suicidal lyrics promote suicide.

All of this – the darkness, the nighttime living, the candles, the music, the hopelessness and despair – this was my gothic symphony. I wore black all day, I’d go out with black eyeliner and lipstick (bet you want to see those photos, eh?), I obsessed over spiders and vampires and anything that felt like it came from the bleakness of 1890s victorian England.

I self-harmed. A lot.

And all of these things are Amy’s gothic symphony, as well. I feel sorry for her, I really do; all of my misery, and anguish and pain are being channeled into her, and her only outlet is being read about by all of you. I had other avenues; other things that happened to me that, sadly, will not happen to Amy.

The thing is, what I lived through, and continue to live through; what Amy is going through as the pages of A Gothic Symphony unfold; none of this is unique. People live and die every day with the same torturous agony that I lived with, and at times still do. So while A Gothic Symphony is cathartic for me, it’s also a letter to everyone who’s ever felt the black claws of despair: there are people out there who know how you feel.

I know how you feel.

Featured image from http://dailywicca.com/2011/10/08/ceromancy-the-fine-art-of-candle-reading/.

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