Nothing is working and no one is listening.

It is really hard for me to encapsulate everything I am going through and everything that I am feeling in a message that isn't so long no one wants to read it. But I thank you in advance for sticking in out.

Basically, I am getting the treatment that many think is the answer to bipolar depression – and frankly I don't think there is much difference between bipolar depression and unipolar depression. I am on meds and I am in therapy. Neither the combination of the two nor either one separately is helping me at all right now. I have been on so many medications in the last seven years and while several of them – mood stabilizers like lithium and antipsychotics like Seroquel are 100% effective at completely stopping a manic episode, I think I've only come across one antidepressant out of like 12 I've tried that has ever made a dent in my depression. That one is Cymbalta, and the problem with that one is that my psy doc won't give it to me anymore because he thinks that it has a high chance of flipping me into mania. I've also never gotten through any manic episode without being hospitalized once or twice in the span of 1 or 2 months. So that comes out to about 9 hospitalizations in 7 years. I have never, ever had a mania/hospitalization that didn't put me into at least 3 months of severe depression immediately after. So basically on average I spend at least 5 months out of the years either manic or depressed.

It seems like lately I've been reading a lot of material about mental illness that really emphasizes how much better quality of life is supposed to be when the affected person is “getting the right treatment”. I don't know where these publications are getting their statistics but I sure as hell don't fit into them and I'm wondering how many of the people here do.

My life situation is incredibly crappy. I live with my parents. We've been living in a hotel for 4 months because we can't find a place to live. I have no car, no job, no money, and in the last 2.5 years I have hung out with a friend a handful of times.

Last night I told my mom that I wouldn't be able to make this morning's appt. with my psych. She knew I had been up the entire day and night before. I wanted to cancel because I just knew that I couldn't even wake up with so little sleep. She made a remark about how I wouldn't get another appointment for 3 months. I let her go back to sleep but I wrote her a really nasty not about how she doesn't run my life.

This morning she woke me up because apparently my dr.'s nurse demanded to speak with me. She made comments about “being concerned” (translation, you might be getting manic) because I wasn't sleeping nights. I started crying and saying “It's not like that! I spent ONE night not asleep!) Then she said how I wouldn't be able to get another appt. until FEBRUARY. I said while crying, This is ridiculous! I miss ONE appointment and I can't get another one for THREE MONTHS. She told me to calm down and that the doctor would try to fit me in.

I also made the huge mistake of spending the entire day yesterday on twitter and facebook. I really had only spent a handful of days on facebook in the previous 6 months. But yesterday I was fired up about some things and I made a TON of posts. Some of those things were really important to me. I only got a few likes and comments. I have 176 fb friends and only a few of those are people that I USED to talk to on a semi-regular basis. I came across posts by people whom I was once close to who have since completely dropped me as a friend. All that did was make me feel even worse about the fact not only do I not have any friends in real life, but that I have no engagement with anyone on social media no matter how important or how smart or how interesting my content is. I actually get more attention on twitter (by a little bit) and almost none of my followers know me in real life.
So I have no voice. The only people in the whole damned world who care about me are my mother, my sister, and my father (who I hate). My sister cares about me by letting me and my mother stay at her house a few times a week or when my father gets drunk. When she is home she spends almost no time with us, or she is out with one of her two best friends who she sees a lot more than she sees me. My mother has become my only friend and she is not someone I can really relate to or go out and have fun with. This sounds incredibly egotistical but both of my parents are considerably less intelligent than I am and are completely uneducated.

I feel completely alone and I hate my life. That's what it comes down to. I can have all the passionate feelings in the world about really important things but nobody cares. I am inconsequential and invisible.

I go to sleep crying most nights. I used to pray just to imagine that someone was listening to me but I've stopped believing that.

I turn 36 in December. I am not doing very well.