Drinking

I am applauding!!!!! This is so true. Perfect.

yes. this happens doesn't it. blah. thats why i started smoking during a depression and i never smoked before. it just seemed like something that would hurt me. what is that about?

Huh........I once had a mania where I DESPERATELY wanted to smoke. I'd never even tried a cigarette before or since. It was all I could do to not beg co-workers for cigarettes on a daily basis. Nobody could explain why this was happening. I wonder if it was, as you say, a way to hurt myself. I've wanted tattoos before just because I knew it would hurt and I've never wanted a tattoo when not in an episode so I figured that was the rationale there but I never thought about it applying to the great desire to smoke 2007. (That was SO WEIRD).

Thanks for the idea.

You're really insightful. Everything you've described is how I've been feeling. You've made me understand it much better.

I was embarrassed about it, but ended up telling my husband, who of course somewhat freaked out and told me he didn't want to wake up to a dead wife next to him.

I can see how keeping things a secret can be fatal. Like if I hadn't told my husband about it he wouldn't be keeping a closer eye on how many pills I take out for the day (he's been holding them for me).

I have an appointment with a new pdoc in a month, and I'm determined to make it until that appointment. Right now I don't know how I'm feeling. I don't really think I'm feeling anything in all honesty. I've been tracking my moods, and other than intense paranoia, and being followed around by a negative entity, I haven't known what to write down the past two days, except don't know.

Anyway, thanks for your insight copperstar.

I was a very light smoker before my traumatizing episode in january, averaged three to four cigarettes a day, so I really only needed to buy one pack a week.

But since then I've been smoking like a chimney, almost smoking half a pack a day.

It's because I've been so stressed out, and somewhat down about the whole "really" having bipolar thing and being bumped up to bp1. Until january episode I never even thought about the bipolar diagnosis. I'd have maybe a week of hypo, sometimes only three days, and it never caused me any problems. I just did silly things. The longest I was hypo was three months, where I spent my time in serious happy hypo land writing a novel. It was one of the best three months of my life. And then I crashed, and had the longest depression ever.

And since that episode in january my paranoia has been at an all time high. I mean, I was paranoid before it, but only mildly so, and only once in awhile (VERY once in awhile), and now I'm having trouble just getting through my work day without completely freaking out. It was never like that before.

I see the before me and the after me, and it's like I'm a different person now. I've NEVER had any trouble working, until now.

When I'm severely depressed I don't eat, because it's like I want to punish myself or something, by starving myself. It's why I always lose a lot of weight while depressed. During my last severe depression (couple of summers ago), I lost so much weight people were becoming concerned about it.

Why we do this? Don't know.

This makes sense and I'm sure that it is at least partially behind why so many people with mental illness are smokers and depend on it so heavily (I have pretty severe asthma and am very, very prone to asthma attacks if I breathe in cigarette smoke. When I did home health I had to ask my patients not to smoke in their own homes because it would send me to the hospital. I wore masks in many homes to help reduce the smoke I inhaled just from the air. One woman went to the "bathroom" for a really, really long time once, only to open the door to an enormous cloud of smoke. I had to leave her house but I felt so bad because the smoking was related to anxiety due to bipolar and she was just coming out of a horrible episode and needed to smoke and here I was making her try to hide it (I bet she smoked 3 cigarettes at least, one after the other). Our topic that day was stressing her some and she just HAD to smoke. I still feel bad for her over it although it's not my fault and many co-workers without asthma didn't allow smoking in front of them.

I always feel bad for smokers IP because they get nicotine patches but it's a locked 6th floor unit so there is no smoking for anyone and you can always tell people who are smokers or heavy caffeine drinkers and who are coming off those things (the heavy caffeine drinkers usually get one caffeinated beverage per day and pace around until it comes and the smokers are begging for nicotine patches about 30 minutes before med times).

I guess that it's good I didn't start smoking because 3 years after I wanted to smoke so badly I caught whooping cough and developed the asthma and it would have been rough and very bad for me to have been a smoker. (I can't imagine whooping cough and smoking; I could barely breathe with non-smoker lungs).