Hi everyone, I googled bipolar forum and ended up here. I guess I just felt I needed someone to talk to about what i'm going through who really understands and this seems like a good place to start.

I'm 29 and was diagnosed bipolar II when I was 19, after resisting medication for a while I gave in because I was rapid cycling every few days and it was torture. Not too long after that I discovered marijuana and also started drinking, probably not the best idea. Just before christmas 2005, while smoking daily and living with my dad and 17yr old sister, I took a small amount of my sisters psychedelic mushrooms (cuz I was stoned and it seemed like a fun idea I guess) smoked a bowl and went to bed. Long story short it seemed to flip a switch in my brain and I lost touch with reality and wound up in the back of an ambulance and spent 2 weeks in a psych ward at harborview hospital in seattle. From there I slowly came back and ended up spending two weeks in an inpatient facility and then transitioned to an outpatient program where I had a psychiatrist manage my medication.

Since then I have not seen a psychiatrist, i've been on the same 1200mg dosage of generic trileptal, which has done wonders. While going through bouts of depression and elevated mood the extreme highs and lows have been managed with the trileptal. Over the last three years I developed anxiety which I was prescribed celexa for, again it worked well and helped even me out.

Beginning at the end of summer i've had a pretty hard crash. I changed restaurant jobs, which was very stressful and induced some bad anxiety which caused me to lose that job. I was screwed, the anxiety was too bad for me to pick myself back up and I ended up moving in with my dad and stepmom an hour north, in a very isolated location. I then went into deep depression where I had no hope for the future and was very suicidal, I didn't try anything but I was close. Since then things have improved slightly but i'm still unemployed, depressed, and my mood is not stable. I just started seeing a counselor who i'm going to work with to start developing a treatment plan but i'm still feeling completely overwhelmed, life just seems so difficult and bleak right now.

I went through a two week period right before thanksgiving in which I was hypomanic. This was after flying to colorado alone in a severe depression to help my very bipolar mother, who was manic, unmedicated, and smoking pot all day. I believe this temporarily pushed me into a hypomania, in which I was inspired to write this:

A typical depression is a drop in mood, like stumbling into a hole in the ground. It may be difficult to crawl back to the surface but it’s still in view, like how a golfer can still see the green from a sand trap. While stumbling into a hole in the ground can be troublesome, imagine tumbling down from the peak of the highest mountain and into a deep dark cave in which you can barely see rays of sunlight peeking through a crack in the rock where your life was. Crawling out of this cave just once seemed impossible, but imagine each time you get back to the surface and pick up the pieces of your shattered life your doomed to go right back in that cave. Sometimes years can go by before you find yourself back in that darkness, but for some it could be a monthly, weekly, or even a daily fall. It would be one thing if you fell from the surface, but each fall is preceded by a climb up to the top of that mountain. At the peak of the mountain, just like the cave, the surface is out of view. From this height you can’t see the surface because the sun shines so bright and reflects off the clouds below. You can’t see your mundane life below because you are in awe of the infinite possibilities you can see from this height, you believe you can fly. But then you fall. You tumble back down the mountain and past your life at the surface, you’re back in the cave.
Again, you can see the rays of daylight on the cave wall, reminding you how it felt to be alive feel dimmer then last time. This is bipolar disorder.

To the people in your life who stay at the surface, bipolar disorder can look like the common cold. Everyone catches a bug now and then that can cause you to crawl into bed for a few days and use some sick days at work. Depression is like the common cold of the mind, caused by a nasty bug in the form of the loss of a loved one, losing your job, or any other environmental stressor. This sickness is an internal reaction to an external circumstance that makes you fall in a hole of depression. Because you are reacting to an external circumstance that puts you in this hole the remedy is simple, fix the problem. Others have fixed the problem and gotten out of this hole, they’ve had the bug and they think they know what it’s like, and how they can help. Drink tons of orange juice and get plenty of sleep some will say. Other’s suggest nyquil, plenty of fluids, and to just sleep it off. But you don’t have the common cold, you have ebola. Instead of the horrible physical effects ebola wreaks on the human body, clear for all to see, the effects of the deep hopeless bipolar depression are trapped within the mind hidden from view. Orange juice don’t do **** for ebola. NyQuil can’t clear up ebola in a couple days with a few days of work and a plenty of rest. Why doesn’t your cold clear up like everyone else’s they all wonder. You don’t have a cold, you have an epidemic plague, and nobody knows, often not even the person suffering.

Sorry if this was too long :/