[boo-bearRAWWR!!!]

Has anyone ever wanted to just SCREAM so badly... like just want to scream at the top of your lungs and you can't seem to stop squirming around until you have? (if you do) And then you want to go run a marathon or something and just... arghh....

Been flying high all week and it's starting to drive me crazy... oh well... just needed to get something out..
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[BipolaRNurse]

Welcome to my world...... I've been feeling like that for the past several weeks, which was only made worse by losing my job, and I haven't been able to tell if I was up or down, manic or depressed. I want not only to scream, but to run all the way to Texas and back, cry, throw stuff, then clean my house till it shines!

So I finally put in a call to my pdoc today. I have to be pretty desperate in order to do that between appointments, but I reached critical mass when I woke up depressed this morning and then proceeded to tear the bathroom apart and clean every single surface until my fingers almost bled. It's great that I have all this energy and can at least direct it in a useful fashion---that's the single saving grace---but the crying jags and irritability are too much!!

Being the awesome doc that he is, he gave me about 20 minutes of free therapy over the phone and told me to double the dose of my AP. I thought I was in a depression, but he thinks it's mania because of the agitation and the need to move around so much---IOW, a dysphoric mania. Even though it's in response to all the rotten crap of being let go, which is situational, he thought it serious enough to treat it medically as well as talking about it.

So it's good to know WHAT I'm dealing with......I felt 110% better after that conversation. The only thing that bothers me is this is probably going to change my diagnosis from a tentative BP 2 to BP 1---he's been using the term 'mania' rather than 'hypomania' to describe my highs lately, and this one being a mixed episode is probably just the icing on the cake.

I wish I weren't so hung up on labels; I suppose that goes away with time, but I've been "official" for only 15 months and I'm still getting over the shock of actually having a psychiatric diagnosis. I'm also pissed off that it's now cost me a good career and a lot of my self-respect.

So yeah, I know a bit about how you feel; hope we both get better soon!

[H3rmit]

Yeah, I used to go sit in the car to scream. My life isn't like that anymore, thankfully. I got rid of the toxic people I couldn't cope with.