[janiedough]

Hi everyone,

I am very scared right now writing this post, because I am about to share some personal information that I would be unable to share with any therapist or medical doctor yet due to me being extremely embarrassed and scared of it. There have been some things that I have done over this past year that I am afraid of telling anyone about.

I have not been diagnosed with any mental disorder other than my family doctor trying to tell me that I have anxiety (I did not disclose the scary stuff because I was afraid).

Before I go on and actually type out my confession of my troubles (just to be clear, I did not harm anyone or myself which is why I thought that it was something that I could just forget about and move on), I want to make sure that it would be acceptable for me to share here. The main benefit that I hope to gain from this confession is whether my "episodes" are similar to something that anyone experienced with bipolar before. I am hoping that the "episodes" that I had could just be ADHD related. I feel like getting confirmation may help me to gain enough courage to actually talk about this to a therapist, though.

Please let me know if I am welcome here. I don't want to upset anyone with my problems if they may be silly. I relate a lot to the things that I have read about bipolar, but I have heard some things from people that contradict the medical articles I have read on the subject (like that mild forms of bipolar do not exist). (From the research I have done, I would be wondering if I could have been experiencing a "mixed state" in the past as I have no idea what I was feeling at the time).

[palerefraction]

I welcome you to PC! And if others disagree with me, than bah humbug for them. This is an online forum for those of us who struggle, regardless of dx (dx is slang for diagnosis). I hope you find what you need here at Psych Central

[Victoria'smom]

]welcome, post away doesn't matter if you have the label or not.

[~Christina]

Feel free to post, if you think something might be a trigger just use the "trigger code feature" Or you can ask a Mod if what your posting would need it.. They are very helpful.

Welcome to PC

Hi janidough, welcome to PC. Feel free to say everything that you are comfy with hun. We are all in the same boat. There are things that I find myself not ever going to be able to say to a therapist that's in my face. I hope you find the answers that you sound like you need.

[janiedough]

Okay, thank you for your acceptance. I will just go ahead and say all this stuff here then. It has been a while since I have had this many butterflies. haha. Anyway, here goes.

Possible trigger:

I currently feel a little lost in life. I have been confused about a lot of things that have been happening to me both physically and mentally. I sometimes feel like I just want to give up and scream in agony about everything that I am feeling (I have done so discretely in the past, and when I say discretely I mean I have no idea if anyone else heard the first few times and I have actually had to move out of an apartment that I shared with two friends ,after letting out my agony once, so that they wouldn't get evicted). I am controlling that impulse better this year after moving in with my bf. I want to figure out a way to change things so that I can live without that temptation, though. I sometimes feel powerless to my circumstances, while at other times I feel hopeful that I will finally figure out what has been going on this past year. I feel like I have been on an emotionally draining roller coaster over the past year and a half. I never wanted to admit these feelings in the past, but maybe I must in order to overcome them.

Here comes the scary story. This happened last year when I was overseas working for a company on an internship. I did very well during my first month of work, but things turned ugly after I caught some sort of flu-like bug. I was hazy for a couple of weeks, but was slowly recovering. I had many physical symptoms but could not get any help from the doctors overseas. Most of them told me that I had psycho-somatic symptoms and just sent me away. I am thinking that they did that mostly because I was a foreigner. I became desperate after a while and went to a clinic that used ancient chinese medicine. There, I was given some herbal prescription that made me feel like a zombie, but it helped with my "episodes" (I think the thing was called "Yokukansan"). I did not tell the doctors about my "episodes" out of fear of losing my job and getting deported.

During the "episodes," I remember feeling confused. Sometimes I was severely depressed and could feel that terrible, yet satisfying, cold empty feeling that you get when very sad. Sometimes the sadness would lead me to just growl screaming to feel better, which sometimes turned into wailing, and from wailing, sometimes morphed into singing very scary tunes. As the singing went on, I would feel better in most cases. Sometimes, though, before singing, I would just start laughing psychotically for no reason because it just felt satisfying and made me feel better. And when I say feel better, I mean that it made that empty pain in the middle of my chest more intense, which was somehow very satisfying and it felt addictive. After a while, I could not contain myself to only in my apartment, and developed the need to hum to myself in the office at work. I was eventually asked to stop humming, and in order to control myself and refrain from humming, I had to take frequent breaks to hum it out, or stomp my feet on the ground when nobody was looking or around. A couple of times I had to go to the bathroom during the workday to let everything out. I would wail for at least half an hour. The toilets played a flushing sound, so I turned that sound to maximum during this time to help drown out the sound of my pain. This went on and on until I saw the doctor that gave me the yokukansan which just made me emotionally numb. Once I got back to the US, I felt less stressed and did not take the medicine I was prescribed in Japan because I did not pack it with me (I was afraid of it being banned or something). I scheduled a doctor's appointment with my family doctor shortly after arriving back in the US and told her about my physical symptoms (they were similar to descriptions for encephalitis at first, and the symptoms after the first two weeks matched very well with multiple sclerosis). My family doctor chalks it all up to anxiety and prescribes me to take an antidepressant (I think it was zoloft). I am tired of doctors and stress by this point so I didn't argue with her and took the medication for two months. I am a naturally forgetful person, so I forgot a day of medicine at least once during the first month, as well as the second. The medicine didn't seem to have much of an effect on me, except making me more ravenous for food, and also making me have almost no desire for sex. When I forgot to take the medicine for just one day, I remember feeling very irritable and I had very hateful thoughts that were not like me at all. I hated the time when I forgot to take the medicine, but I could not control it. A month after I started the zoloft, I went to my family doctor to address my concern of having ADHD (which my bf had been trying to get me to accept having long before I went overseas). I easily (almost too easily in my opinion) got a prescription for 20mg of adderal per day. After starting the adderal (while still taking the zoloft), I felt better. I had fewer migraines, and didn't get those twitches that I was having during lectures as much. I still felt the same about the zoloft though, and I stopped taking it after another month because it ran out, and I didn't feel like going through the terrible transition phase again. After stopping the zoloft, my symptoms got better and I felt a little more in control and peaceful. More like myself, really. I still had some mental fog and fatigue, but it was less severe than before. I told my family doctor about stopping the zoloft and told her why I did. She tried to convince me that I should try a different antidepressant, but I told her that I wasn't comfortable doing that. Since then, I have consistently (as consistently as I can) been taking the aderall. I still have issues with pain from time to time, but I feel like I am more accustomed to the flare ups now than I used to be. I try to ignore them as much as I can so that I can do the work I need to (I am currently a college student). I will admit that they still catch me off guard and make me worried, so I have talked to a neurologist who hasn't figured it out yet, and I plan on getting a second opinion soon. I am also planning on starting more therapy sessions at my school's counselling center. I am considering taking a year off after graduation due to my current health concerns so that I can figure everything out as I know that I can't work in my degree area with the problems I am currently experiencing.

Thank you for taking the time for reading my book, lol. I know that I at least have depression of some sort from last year's events and memories from my childhood. I also remember having bursts of uncontrollable anger and rage when I was young. I would just scream to myself in my bedroom when I knew that nobody else was home. Sometimes I couldn't control the time of it, though, and was yelled at for it. I thought that I was over that problem since it stopped after I became involved in sports, but it is coming back now.
I am hopeful, though, that I can overcome this again as I have in the past. I feel like I need to find help for whatever I am going through though. I don't feel like this is something that I can fix on my own anymore.

Hi there sweety, that wasn't too bad, now was it hun? It just sounds awful how you got treated, where you was stuck at and the pain that you had to endure to keep a job, omg, you poor thing.

I didn't see anything in there that you should be embarrassed or concerned about. Better yet, get a screen shot of this and just hand it to your therapist to read.

Your right, I'm a lousy story teller also and shy a way from self talk in a face to face meet due to anxiety. I've snap shot a lot of posts on here to just hand or email to my therapist.

Good luck with this hun.

[RisuNeko]

I don't know what the problem could be but keep pursuing the neurological route. I don't know if it sounds like bipolar or not, it's possible but without more information it's hard to tell. I'm glad you at least got the adhd diagnosed.

[Crazy Hitch]

you are safe here janiedough thank you for sharing this