It's good you are honest with yourself. (And that you avoided the $320 hat. What IS a $320 hat anyway? ). But I think there are probably more productive ways to feel good about yourself. I used to like to wear scrubs because I felt like I was hidden away in a uniform and it protected me from people knowing anything was wrong with me. Does looking nice and having expensive items do that for you? Because really it isn't the clothes that tell the world much about you.

I can speak for nobody but myself of course but there have been a few times we have gotten my sleep stabilized. For me that has only a partial effect on the rest. If I'm sleeping well it is likely that there are depressive symptoms poking through somewhere. But for me it is always like trying to plug a whole in a crumbling dam with a finger; you run out of fingers quickly.

I think the problem with adding med after med is that eventually you get so many that it's impossible to know what is doing what. That's especially true when they are all changed at once. I'm on a bunch of meds but each was added months from the others and dosage changes are always done 1 per month unless something goes very wrong. So we know pretty well that 400 mg of neurontin helped me when I reached that dose and because I was a disaster on regular doses of neurontin (I think I was on 600 mg 3x/day) and wasn't ok until the dose went below 600/day (and we have tried increasing to 500 mg without success a year after I was stable on 400) so we know that 400 is the dose for me. I just don't understand how it is possible to know what is making you manic/mixed when so many stimulants are being increased at once, just like I would be very upset if all the sedating meds I take were increased at once.

I'm actually going to have blood drawn for a clinical trial next week that is trying to find how people metabolize meds and determine how to predict that so they eventually may be able to use that information to choose meds instead of the guessing game it is now. My psychiatrist is really eager to get the results and see what my levels are doing. Is my seroquel sky high like one would expect? Is topamax which I take at a very low dose because I couldn't tolerate more but it does seem to have an impact doing anything at all? Etc. So someday there will be a better way to manage this, hopefully, but for now I don't see any way to understand how meds affect someone that isn't one step at a time and only going over FDA recommendations if there is a very clear rataionale. And if it isn't helping you and your behavior is very manic, like with the spending, then doesn't that say a lot about how it is all working now?

I just know if I were in your shoes with the meds I'd be very unhappy and very much wanting someone else to at least look at the meds and see if they have suggestions.