Out of the Darkness...

初めまして。お元気ですか。
いいえ、元気ではありません。
 
WOW, I had a bad day yesterday. A really bad day.

It started off with my having to drag myself out of bed, still drugged up on quetiapine (Seroquel) my antipsycho pill (antimanic, antidepressant, antischizophrenia) that I'm meant to pop every night but had stopped for a few days when I'd realized my emergency back-up supply was drying up and I'm unable to get a repeat script till tomorrow. And then I'm asking that my dose be increased from 200 to 300mg. Because 200mg just is not working. It doesn't stop the loud thoughts I hear in my head ("thought insertion"). Or the mood swings.

I had been very moody all last week. Wave on wave of depression. Plus little flashes of hypomania. Resulting in weird head-states where I stayed up half the night feeling high and low at the same time ~ it's a bipolar thing. When that simultaneous high-low gets more severe and more intense so that you're clinically manic and clinically depressed at the same time, it's labelled a "Mixed Bipolar State".

One day I went up the road to get clean 1ml drug needles. Not one but TWO ordinarily reliable chemists informed me they had run out of 1mls and only had the 2.5ml syringes that take on a detachable orange needle that is 0.5mm rather than 0.33mm thick. Too big for my fine veins. And it makes you bleed twice as much. So I stamped home in misery and anger, telling myself on the one hadn that I felt so bad because I was so disappointed, that it wasn't clinical depression at all. And on the other that I was VERY ANGRY that my antipsycho pills weren't stopping me feeling so bad, because I felt Terrible. I told myself it would just clear. Sure enough it did clear. My mood magically lifted, lifted up and lifted higher so that I whizzed round the supermarket at top velocity singing Barbra Streisand songs, manoevring the Ragu-stacked trolley like a boy racer on speed and pretending to be an aeroplane: "Papa watch me fly..!" I stayed high for hours afterwards.

Anyway yesterday was my appointment with my drug worker. He seems to be the most clued-up worker I have ever had. And he also happens to chair the Monday morning antidrugs group. Although I hate such groups, the people who run them always seem to like me, because when I'm on form, I don't exactly hold back from expressing my opinions.

Yesterday I was not in any fit state to face a room full of crackheads who I didn't know. I felt too paranoid to let anyone look at my face, let alone share any ideas with them. I let them know how displeased I was whenever they tried to coax me into speech. (There were not one, but two drug workers at this meeting.)

So I sat there all sullen, restraining myself from running out the door. They kept on trying to get me to talk. I wasn't having any of it.

I had already made a commitment to myself (not the group) to attend the entire course of ten or twelve meetings. But I don't think I'm going to see this through. At ninety minutes they're far too long. I told him afterwards that if I can't stick with a TV prog or a DVD that long what hope do I have in a rambling group session?

I've fucked up my treatment by using heroin ton top of the methadone and told him this afterwards when we were alone in a little room and he was asking what was wrong.

Alone in a little room was all I ahve ever wanted from keyworking sessions. I am not willing to reveal the secrets of my heart to rooms full of crack-addicted strangers.

Well what are you doing keeping a blog then? I hear you enquire. As I say I do not want people looking at my face and here you don't see my face, you see a tubby little Golden Hamster. Trust me, if I could show up to Group looking like a furry little Hammy, I would.

So that is yeasterday and I'm tired. I'm not sleeping properly. I spend all night propped up in bed, surrounded by Japanese courses and Barbra Streisand discs. I no longer try to sleep when I can't. The Nytol didn't work. The quetiapine has run out.

Sorry if this is intsnsively boring. Really I don't want people looking at me or even thinking about me. I just want to disappear.

初めまして。お元気ですか。
いいえ、元気ではありません。

Sorry sorry sorry. I'm sorry for everything. I'm feeling a bit better today.

Last night I cheered myself up a bit bywatching the Jennifer Anniston film The Good Girl. About an unhappily married woman in a dissatisfied life who mees an even unhappier loner played by Jake Gyllenhaal. And their adulterous affair brings her no happiness at all. I watched it twice.

Here is my favourite clip. "Ladies ~ liquid drain cleaner. Two for $5. Shove something clean and new up your filthy pipes..."





It's 5pm. I'm exhausted already. Is "depression" really an "illness" or just an Excuse? Or is it even a Disease ~ a Brain Disease ~ like some of the more offensive webites like to say?

And PS while we're on the subject what is this new slogan BIPOLAR IS NOT CRAZY I hear? I came across it two or three times while trawling bipolar blogs last week. Considering that the condition used to be called Manic-Depressive Insanity and that at the peaks and troughs of depression as well as mania, sufferers routinely become completely delusional, hear voices and see visions. Not to mention becoming over-excited to the point of delirium, or depressed into catatonic stupor. All I can say is if THAT isn't crazy then WHAT IS?

Kay Redfield Jamison, bipolar sufferer, famed psychological researcher and professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, described severe mania as "as crazy as it gets".   

The list of bipolar sufferers who have made notable contributions to literature, music and other arts is too extensive to reproduce here. But there are barely ANY famous schizoaffective or schizophrenia sufferers.

But HERE is a story of inspiration:~~~~~~~

Eleanor Longden, 27, achieved the highest mark ever in her BSc Psychology from the University of Leeds last year... despite suffering from severe schizophrenia since the age of 18...


 
 



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