Man, you guys have some eye opening info.
extremely bad social anxiety
That was my story. I got so bad at my worst point that I could have easily been diagnosed with Avoidant Personality Disorder. I fit the majority of the DSM criteria for diagnosis. Many years of therapy, a good dose of self esteem building, and a year of training to become a certified hypnotherapist got rid of the worst of my social anxiety. It's still there, but it's not crippling anymore.
Bi-polar is one of the most mis-understood disorders there is. A lot of people get this confused with hyper-sensitivity or borderline personality disorder. Also, people that have used drugs and alcohol heavily exhibit many symptoms of these disorders as our coping skills are greatly compromised by the substances.
If our suffering, whether it's truly due to bipolar or not, were purely an intellectual practice, then questioning the validity of the current psychiatric process might make more sense. But our suffering is real - so sometimes we just have to leave that to psychiatrists to suss out.
Personally? After thinking of myself as bipolar for a while, and becoming more and more confused about how this actually applied to me, and realizing more and more that what people tout as "fact" is actually "theory," and that much of that theory makes no sense, I gave up on labeling myself. I take my problems as they arise, and deal with myself as an individual.
Very true. Psychiatry is still in its infancy, and to be perfectly honest, the more I learned about psychology, the less seriously I took it.
At this phase in medical knowledge, psychiatric diagnoses are, more often than not, nothing more than a description applied to a constellation of symptoms. There are probably a dozen different causes and courses for what we currently throw until the "bipolar" umbrella. And so, I just don't take that sort of language very seriously.
I do know that I am psychologically different from most people. And this has meant I have had no help from anyone in trying to figure out how to cope with myself. Coping being different from medicating, mind you.
It is entirely possible that what was dubbed as psychosis in my case was extreme PTSD. It is entirely possible that what got dubbed as bipolar in my case is BPD, or CPTSD, or simply the result of someone who has walked through life being the target of xenophobia all her life. Take your pick.
This is why approaches to wellness are so multi-dimensional, and there is no way to apply one method to every single person who happens to have a certain constellation of symptoms.
How do you all deal. I'm currently in a very down period in my life, but i'm more prone to manic episodes. It's been about 2 weeks of deep depression, but I know any second I could be flyin' high with unlimited energy and not enough things to do.
Do you feel it's a curse or blessing? When I'm manic, and luckily more often than not, it feels like being on coke. Every time it suddenly appears it's actually a great feeling, probably the best "high" you can get.
But it gets us into trouble, that's for sure. It's only good for a short period of time before you start acting impulsively and losing control of yourself.
I think "mixed states" are the worst, where you can't sit still, feeling like crawling out of your own skin. It's a very desperate feeling, like you're really down in your thoughts but have so much energy that you contemplate a number of unhealthy things to try and deal with the feelings.
I think the worst part is not being able to sustain relationships because you normally go into them in a manic state, charming them to bits, full of life, only to leave them high and dry when you get low and can't help but inform them of how they're nothing like you--that it makes you uncomfortable having them around you, etc.
Then having your mind change completely within a few weeks, fighting temptation to lead them on any further,... knowing full well that the process will repeat itself.
So strange. I wish I could handle the meds sometimes so I could stay even keel, but they made me too much of a zombie. I had to toss 'em. (and I tried every combo out there, trust me. It wasn't about finding the right combination, meds just aren't my thing).
Anyways. Good day to all, and feel free to share what you like/don't like about this illness, or anything Bipolar related.