This Is My Brain On Pain

As you likely know if you read my posts here regularly, I am no longer taking any real mood-stabilizers for my bipolar disorder.  It isn’t an anti-medication stance, it’s actually just a place I ultimately came to through very little choice of my own (you can read a bit more about it here).

Now, being Bipolar I with psychotic features, unmedicated is a pretty daunting place to be, and I’m learning all the angles I need to cover.  Some I already knew and had accounted for: exercise, sleep, stress, and situations I knew were very high on the potential trigger list.  Others I knew, but didn’t really think about planning for, because they just didn’t come to mind when thinking of the day-to-day and what I needed to be vigilant about.

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Lines and Colours

In my mind, I am normal. This is because I live with me twenty-four seven (OK, not always twenty-four seven because some of those hours I am asleep).

I have BPD. In the past, I never realised that I feel emotions more easily, more deeply, and for longer than others do. I thought the intensity of my emotions was normal. Turns out, it’s not. I read somewhere that in non-BPD people an emotion typically fires for 12 seconds. In BPD’ers it can last up to 20 percent longer. BPD’ers emotions also repeatedly re-fire, or re-live, or recur, however you want to say it, so emotional reactions occur for even longer. I do. I go over and over and over the emotions, pinging from one to another like a steel ball in a pinball machine.

Once More Unto The Breach, Dear Friends, Once More. . .

“I’ve Just Wakened Out Of A Nightmare”

Exactly one year ago today, I filed the above post on my personal blog, I Was Just Thinking. . .  It was remarkable for many reasons, but the major one was it detailed what had happened to me two days prior.

On March 3rd, 2012, I went to bed in the midst of what had been a severe, protracted mood episode.

On March 4th, 2012, I woke up and I was well.

Helping to Break Stigma

When I received the job offer a few weeks ago I thought it over for a few days before excitedly accepting. My new manager arranged that she would send me some paperwork to fill out, and the next week we would meet so I could have a look around one of the branch practices I would be working in.

When I’d quit my previous job a few weeks ago I never expected to land on my feet. My parents were terrified that I had no long term prospects and I was just going to be a temp nurse.

Enlightenment Doesn’t Notice The Date

click here to Grab the Badge from Psych Central

Today has been designated World Mental Health Day by the World Health Organization.  And the theme of this day is “Depression: A Global Crisis”.  And with no good segue, here is my own discussion on that, in two parts, unequal in length, alike in their importance.

Part the First

A Canvas Of The Minds was born with the express purpose of discussing mental health, of raising awareness every day, in the best way that we knew how: through the voices of many individuals dealing with mental illness.

Disorder and the Internet : The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Internet.

It’s a word that has become synonymous with “life”.  How many hours a day can we say that we are “online”?  For some, like smartphone users, we are never truly offline.  The internet has become a deeply embedded part of our lives.  With all of the information available, social networks active and potential people to meet oceans and countries away, the entire world is at our fingertips.  How could this ever be considered a bad thing?

The Cost of Mental Health

Maintaining your mental health is expensive. Medicine is expensive. Many of the antidepressants are generic now, but still cost about $1/pill without insurance. Lithium is much cheaper at 30 cents a pill. Prices on anxiety meds vary depending on if they are generic or not. But the antipsychotics… woah! I take Geodon, which recently went generic, and without insurance the cost is $379/month! Fortunately I only have to pay $76 because I have insurance. Even Lamictal runs $170/month generic. These are only some prescription prices. What do you pay in supplements that aren’t covered by insurance?

You Know You’re Manic When

All of a sudden, a cape unfurls from your back and you jump on and off the sofa chanting, “Wonder Twins unite! Wonder Twins unite!”

You go to your mailbox and your nomination for “Greatest Person Alive” has finally come. It would be “Greatest Person Who Ever Lived in the History of History” except they didn’t get your audition for Idol.