Quote:
Originally Posted by Innerzone
In hindsight, I can see this. I'd originally been dx'd MDD by a GP, and had been massively depressed for a very long time before finally relenting and going in. She gave me an AD. Before two days, I was... WOOT!!!  I really knew nothing of BP, and was just so damn happy to not be depressed, I didn't care/recognize a problem. Didn't go in. Then she'd only see me crashed, and just kept on with different, combined and various dosages of ADs. My cycling got really crazy. But I didn't know it was cycling, because I didn't know what that was. Because I'd been doing it all my life, it seemed "normal", till realizing that it was amplified and speeded up, and really bad, it finally dawned, "Wow, I've been more f'd up that ever!" (Haha, you'd think dancing on countertops in the middle of the night, singing at the top of my lungs and shouting, "they've got my whole old record collection!!!" would've been a clue, but no. And that was early on! No insight, clueless GP.) Once it got figured out, I learned about BP and it was like reading my life story. Realizing my GP was totally out of her depth with me, I finally conceded that a Pdoc was in order. Even so, I stubbornly didn't want meds. Not long and guess who started bouncing off the walls again?
Even so, and to your concern, I was dx'd when not hypo. It was talking about decades of what turned out to be totally classic BP. Really, it was so obvious that to this day it's unfathomable that I made it that long. It was later that she saw (unmedicated) me launched. |
You're writing my life story again!
Only instead of dancing on countertops, I stood on a pool table in a frat house on a party night and demonstrated how I could hook my tongue ring through my nipple piercing.
Among other things. And the ADs made me hallucinate - so what did they do? Evaluate me for schizophrenia (nope!) and change the ADs, over and over.
I had to figure it out myself, and the first time they totally brushed me off - 15 years later, I could actually explain the problem a bit better and it was absolutely clear that it was (still) BP. T asked me why no one had picked up on this before; I figure it was mostly lack of insight and not knowing what symptoms to report. I know they don't want to ask leading questions for very good reasons, but I had no idea that what I was experiencing wasn't normal. Well, aside from the hallucinations.
Since being in treatment, I've been very mildly hypomanic at the T's a couple times, but other than that, the professionals have never seen me in true form.