I'M SUPPOSED to be keeping a diary of my mood. My mood is intermittently "up". Yesterday I had a single cup of Typhoo tea (I state the brand, in case it comes to light that a case of mass tea-spiking, with cocaine and amphetamines has occurred, because I certainly felt like I was speeding) I was high. Two cups and I was "speeding off my tits". I only kept drinking the tea because (1) I really like tea (2) I really like being high (I only avoid caffeine like the plague when I'm depressed because then, if it does anything at all, it's likely to make me feel horribly anxious and because I consider morbid anxiety to be the worst of all mental conditions, no way in hell will I go near caffeine then!... Anyway by two a.m. I'd had about five cups of tea (spread over the course of the day) and I really couldn't sleep. I went to bed for two minutes, realized sleep was impossible and so get up and spent the rest of the night watching a DVD that I couldn't even remember buying called Against the Wall, about a prison riot and reading the NA Big Book. I started at the decaffeinated coffee but frankly it tastes horrible so I gave that up and went back to bed around six a.m. and slept. But I was up by 11:30 freezing my arse off (literally).
Oh by the way does anyone else wake up repeatedly in the night to see swarms of flies at the curtains? On closer inspection these "flies" turn out to be a swarm of miniature books (hardbacks) flapping their covers merrily to stay aloft! I'm not kidding? Why does this happen to me? Is it because I'm not taking my medication? (I was depressed last week and wanted to induce a mood switch, so intuition told me that drastically reducing the dosage might achieve this and WOW I was right!) Does anyone out there actually think I should be taking psyche meds? Because a lot of people seem to think that I shouldn't. I don't mind hearing voices. I like it. It's like free entertainment beamed direct to the mind. As for visual hallucinations ~ they're always a plus. I mean, think of all those kids spending their hard-earned money on strange pills and trips ~~ and yet I get the effects for free! (Similar efffects, not exactly the same as any drug.)
Well I'm NOT hypomanic. Because ever since getting up I've felt stone-cold "normal". The high mood is intermittent. So har har har to my doctors if you're reading this I'm not mentally ill! (Again.)
IT'S SO LATE... Real Housewives of Washington DC's about to come on on ITV2+1 and I can't miss it. I really like the braying, posh English gal, Cat, who everyone else thinks is rude, eg because she goes to a wine-pressing session, decides she is bored and instead of being all pathetic, American Washingtonian and full of smiling BULLSHIT, she just says how she finds it and GOES HOME ~ like a normal British person would!
Also I really loved it when she laid into that airheaded Republican blogger about America's frankly primaeval healthcare system ~ saying how uncivilized she found it. And quite right, too! Apart from Guantanamo Bay, what makes me really not respect America is their exclusive, expensive, elitist healthcare system... so bad that people like Anna Grace say they're considering declaring Health Debt Bankruptcy!
I slept a good 12 hours last night and have had just ONE cup of tea and yet here I am all excited about today... though what's to be excited about except Real Housewives ..? ... I have no idea it is SO FREEZING COLD you can literally snap the air like an icicle out there. And I've had to top up the (pay as you go) electricity AGAIN.
Do they have pay-as-you-go electricity in America? BeverlyBabe, please answer me on this point. Also any horror stories about the backwards American health system that flatter my perspective would be much appreciated too XxxXxxX
I WAS down the Druggieclinic early because I'd gone to bed by midnight and yet somehow managed to awaken at 6am feeling crap.
A single cup of tea was enough to set me off all morning with Anxiety on top of Depression.
My Druggieworker wasn't in and there was no way I was going near the Group Session he always wants me to go to. I've attended the 12 sessions I undertook to do and no way in hell am I going near any groups again, except the legendary Nutter Club ~ the Dual Diagnosis (mental+addicted) support group that my own Consultant Psychiatrist cancelled. I'm writing in to tell him how he has disposed of my one source of support. Throughout Psychotic Break #2 (mid-January) last year Naomi, the group leader, was my single source of any practical help. Without her intervention, I might not even have got diagnosed.
My family, who live 100s of miles away never saw me, only heard me on the phone. Usually in the evenings when my mania was lulling ~ and a lot of online friends who know me via my blog ~ all said a lot of wellmeaning but seriously confusing things. People who knew me and actually saw me were in no doubt that I had completely lost my mind. One friend who hapened to phone me when I was in utter meldtown one morning, drove straight round with his wife, took one look at me leaving the house doing the best sane act I could manage ~ and burst straight into tears! I have absolutely no idea what was so upsetting, because I was feeling fantastic. They wanted to take me back to theirs but I pointed out that I was getting up each morning at 2:30am and wouldn't go back to bed for anyone. The psychiatrist told me after the fact that I should have been in hospital during that period. It's the most seriously ill I have ever been. I just could not help it.
Today I saw the only Drugs Worker who actually seems to care for me. This one comes from Germany. He checked my urine ~ only methadone and "morphine" (heroin) showed up. He kept asking what had gone wrong this weekend because I seemed down in the mouth and I kept saying I was fine. I keep my mouth shut and turn up my lips at the corners, as if half-smiling. I told him how much I'd gone off alcohol. So he added to my notes a breathalyser reading of zero. I told him how pissed off I was to be so anxious. He seemed not to credit how badly a single cup of tea can affect me. So I mentioned how, earlier this year, four cups flipped me out into hypomania, depression and paranoia for half a day. He mooted the idea of counselling but I told him I've had a lifetime's worth of that. I complained how four hours' interviews with the mental health nurse (more than two years ago and before I ever got the "schizoaffective bipolar" label) had left her with the idée fixethat it was some anxiety disorder that was bugging me. Despite my making the repeated point that I'd not had morbid anxiety for over a decade and a half, that I did not feel keyed-up, or a panicky grip round my heart. What I did feel was irritated, angry and overloaded with stress ~ an entirely different syndrome. When I'm anxious I want Valium. When I'm irritated, I don't. She gave me a helpsheet written for the me of twenty years ago! A person who wasted huge amounts of nervous energy turning over the same useless worries all night.
This morning was a tea-induced aberration: I DO NOT HAVE AN ANXIETY DISORDER. Or a Cluster C Personality Disorder, as she wanted to believe. (I do like that nurse, but she's too clever for her own good.) The personality disorders questionnaires I filled online (always in (hypo)manic states, as I would not ordinarily bother with such crap) said I was schizotypal and borderline! Doesn't mean I have any personality disorder at all. If the symptoms come as episodes, as mine do, it's called an "illness". Personality disorders develop by the late teens, manifesting as constant personal characteristics ~ hence that label: "personality disorder".
Then I mentioned how anxiety pisses me off a hundred times worse than any other symptom ~ extreme depression, "voices", manic meltdown, whatever...How anxiety is taken as a sign of weakness, never ever taken seriously by any doctor and how all sufferers should be shot through the head ~~ purely as an act of kindness. Which is as much as I'm prepared to say on the shameful matter.
Back in the waiting room a beautiful woman appeared. She didn't remember me, but I remembered her. I remember her because we ended up in bed together. (Long story). She is the one person I've ever met outside a clinical setting who has bipolar disorder. I told her what happened to me last year. She went and described my big manic episode for me: completely over-excited and hallucinating/~~ etc. She'd taken a big overdose of her meds at the weekend: 80 risperidone pills. A real recipe for feeling totally shipwrecked if ever there was one...
Then I went out to score heroin. Yes I'm still in thrall to the Killer B. ("B" is what we call Afghan brown.) Now I no longer drink, it's the last of all drugs... And I wish I'd taken Rachel's phone number...
Illustrated: this is the Spanish singer Jeanette Dimech. But she bears more than a passing resemblance to R...
MUSIC:~~~~~~~~
PORQUE TE VAS Jeanette performs her biggest hit (the title means "Because You're going") at the Eiffel Tower, Paris...
KLF ft. TAMMY WYNETTE: JUSTIFIED AND ANCIENT (STAND BY THE JAMS) I luuurve this track, it's so entertainingly kitch ~ know what I mean..!
I AM WRITING this quickly between the drug clinic and the supermarket. I'm off to buy pasta and Lloyd Grossman even though I haven't much appetite for either. I have been in a bad mood today. But then, of course, in the drug clinic I get babbling away and I'm in an "elevated mood" again. Yes every other day I was going hyper. Then I'd think I felt normal for a day. Though I was still abnormally excitable. Then hyper again.
Then up for 2.5-3 days (no sleep). My sleep has gone so terrible that even when I do get 5 or 6 hours, it feels like nothing and I only know I've slept because the time has vanished. Yesterday I eventually managed to slip off between at about 11am and I stayed mostly asleep till 11pm. And I managed to sleep from about 4am till 9am. So I thought I was doing really well. Until I got up and had been up for a few hours and realized I was feeling hyper again. I really like being hyper by the way. It's way better than feeling "normal", especially when that normal entails feeling run-down, peeved, stressed and exhausted. That is no type of "normal" and I shall never accept it as such. So I'd rather be in an overblown hyper elevated and irritable mood any day of the week. It's just the lack of sleep that starts getting to me. True I may well need less sleep in such a state, but there's insomnia there as well. Otherwise I wouldn't get so knackered out.
Well I still can't eat properly. Last night I ran down the chicken shop to get 2 "strip burgers" and 2 fries for £2. Even though I hate chicken shop and McDonald's style skinny fries I felt I had to eat them because I'd paid for them. So I stuffed half into my face and felt instantly nauseated. Then I managed one burger over the span of about 4 hours. Then, as I say I fell asleep after 4. And managed the second strip burger in the morning. I really wasn't in a good mood. And my methadone feels like it isn't holding me. So the duty druggieworker said I should take just a one week script for 18mg methadone and try to use nothing at all on top of it, because the way it's declining now, heroin is just going to mess it up. I only bought heroin this morning because I had money and a bad, bad mood. Being as I cannot even "use" coffee (or tea) nowadays because they are just too destabilizing, I suppose I cannot use heroin either. I gave up caffeine entirely about 15 years ago, by the way, because I thought it was doing me no good. And surprise surprise the free-floating anxiety I had nearly all the time VANISHED. Which has really put me off habitual tea-drinking ever since. (It was strong tea I was on, not even coffee.) Also there was at least one time when a few cups of coffee seemed to completely flip me out (though I was in psychotic mania at the time). And another when four cups of tea (over a good 2-3 hours) made me hyper and high, then weird and high and depressed at once and then pretty paranoid so that I felt like a mental hospital inmate. And I thought: no. And people wonder why I don't want to go near crack!
I've got another doctor's appointment this week and I'm going to have to ask for something for anxiety and sleep. Severe anxiety is one symptom I just cannot put up with. At least when you're depressed into catatonia a doctor will take that seriously. Anxiety is taken as a sign of weakness. Doctors NEVER take it seriously. I remember a patient at the mental hospital who had severe generalized anxiety (no depression). He was so obviously suffering; he was frozen in fear. Yet one other inmate in particular said he "wasn't a proper nutter" because he wasn't acting out (ie wasn't bipolar manic like the person who said this). And the staff gave him precisely NOTHING. Most certainly because he didn't make enough of a pain of himself.
Well I've got to go. Normal shcnormal. What is "Normal" anyhow? It's something I've never wanted to be. Thank you Anna Grace for writing a post just for me. And cheery-bye everyone...
16:45JUST FOR YOU BEVERLY BLEACHED BLONDE BEACH BABE MADONNA: LUCKY STAR
listen to that voice ~~ a classic from her "Minnie Mouse on Helium" period~!
~~~~~~~and doesn't Madge look young!!!!!!!~~~~~~~
