Interesting indeed. I am Bi-Polar. I cannot begin to describe my childhood because I was honestly pretty doped up through most of it. Unlike the majority, I stopped taking mood altering medications once I was an adult and had the choice to myself. Any doctor and parent will try to get kids on drugs to keep them from being a total spaz like I was, but even on some heavy stuff I was still the proverbial unstoppable object. Five by ten? Pffft. I was on ten by five. The very first medication I was ever prescribed was Ritalin. It is literally a form of amphetamine. The theory was that I would exhaust myself and be less of a problem. Nope. It just made me more active for a period in the mornings. Exhaustion does not exist at that age though. I do not think less of them for it, but I do think it is wrong to handle the "Problem" with drugs. I will have to look for the site and see if it interest me. (Most common news just irritates me.)
I understand that, although to a much smaller degree. When I was in middle school and partly through high school, i was coerced by a lot of adults into taking antidepressants and mood stabilizers...it did not help me very much. In fact, it made things a lot worse at times. There's quote that I really love, and it sums up that part of my life quite well: Turns out, I really was surrounded by jerks and that was the problem, not some "chemical imbalance"...it's just that adults like easy, quick fix solutions a lot of times. I suspect that there are tons of kids out there who get diagnosed in this same way, where looking at their home life and the people around them instead of getting them to pop pills would actually yield some results. Frontline is one of the very few news sources I actually trust. They have done some pretty daring stories on the war in Iraq, government espionage, etc.
I alternate between doom and gloom depression, and elated beyond-words mania. Usually it is the former. But when it switches to the later, I can and do defy everything but the laws of physics. I have sometimes built devices from scrap parts that function in ways I would never have anticipated. I have moved objects that weigh as much as five times my own weight with no equipment or assistance. I have cooked meals that are a delight and consist of ingredients that most would never think to use. As a matter of fact, I honestly do not know the recipe for half the meals I cook. I just get hungry and start adding foods together with spices like Oregano, Basil, Onion, Unsalted Sweet Cream Butter, Coarsely Ground Black Pepper, Soy Sauce, "RedHot" sauce, Teriyaki, Chicken Stock, Peanut Butter, Cream Cheese, Horseradish, and Mustard. The foods I use generally consist of things like Unprocessed Brown Rice, Mung-Bean Sprouts, Lentils, Skinned and Diced Red Potatoes, Boneless Skinless Chicken Breasts, Any *Real* Pasta, (Meaning it is made from actual ingredients, not chemicals.) Albacore Tuna, Unbleached Eggs, *Real* Bread, (Again meaning it is recognizable as bread and has real ingredients. Also, real bread weighs no less than twice the weight of that airy fake crap they pretend to be bread.) ... I could go on, but you get the idea. Use quality ingredients and you will make good food. Ignore recipes. If you do not know what it needs then you cannot cook. I make a Chicken Breast Stir Fry that uses Scrambled Eggs and Peanut Butter to remarkable effect. Most people think that sounds horrible and refuse to even try it, but the tastes go very well together. I use exactly zero oils in any foods I make. Unsalted Sweet Cream Butter is my oil. I absolutely refuse to even read most recipes. I get my recipes by examining the foods for sale at the grocery store. If I have one cooking flaw, it is the overuse of RedHot and Soy Sauce. I use no salt, so that is where the Soy Sauce comes in. It is about 1/3 sodium by weight and volume. I should make a cooking thread and see what others find enjoyable for a reasonable meal. (Reasonable in that the ingredients are affordable and the preparation is manageable.) Back to the subject I somewhat abandoned, Medical Doctors cannot really offer non medical solutions. They practice medicine. Not therapy. Not herbalism, not magnetic wrist bands that do nothing. They really by definition cannot do anything but prescribe medications. That said, I have been pleasantly surprised by the good advice some caring and intelligent Doctors can offer. They will gladly tell you that in some cases and for some conditions, the best medications are worse than certain herbs and other solutions. How to control a spastic child is still a mystery. If I had one, I would probably chain it to a post in it's room. But then, I hate children.
I'm not bipolar -- I have a severe anxiety disorder and clinical depression. I don't experience mania. I probably have had bouts of depression and anxiety for most of my life (in college for about 3 years as an example), but was never diagnosed until it got really bad about 10 or so years ago, and my life, essentially, fell apart. In other words I was able to hide it with mixed results until then. I actually had a great job that I loved, a lot of friends, and so on. But I was becoming less and less capable of dealing with all of the problems of life, both large and small, until I couldn't deal with anything -- phone calls, bills, waking up in the morning, even eating. I was lucky because I had friend (a former boss, actually) who had experience in his own family with his own depression (normal, not clinical, over the death of his son). He got me out of my house, and he helped me get the medical attention that I needed. Note that yes, children ARE overmedicated for mental illness. That does NOT mean that the medications are uniformly bad, only that some doctors are idiots and the families don't know how to cope. Misdiagnoses are rampant (for example, it's not uncommon for people with bipolar disorders to be misdiagnosed as depressed, and can be given the wrong medications with disastrous results). Plus not all medications work for all individuals. And medications that may be effective in adults may either be ineffective or dangerous in younger people. In any case, medication without the proper counseling and therapy, is really dumb. Plus everyone's body is chemically different, so regardless of age, not everyone responds in the same way to the same medication. Some people experience minor to severe side effects. Some people simply do not respond to some medications, but may respond to one or more other medications. That's basically why there are so many different kinds of anti-depressants, anti-anxiety drugs, and so on. For me, the drugs were essential. I probably would either have wound up dead or homeless if not for them. But, let me be clear, it was a combination of the drugs AND therapy that did it, not the drugs alone. And I'm still not back to what I or anyone else would consider 'normal' after 10 years. And my therapist always knows before I do when I've been 'forgetting' to take my medication, because it does show.
For me, I found that medications to fix my mood never worked for the simple reason that whatever the cause, I switch moods too often. If you take a common antidepressant, you probably already know that it takes several days to kick in fully and the dosing has to be regulated and adjusted to the correct amount for you. A good doctor will ask you a bunch of questions in order to fine tune it. I sometimes start the day depressed, and end the day manic. This spells doom for medical solutions. At best they can use so called mood stabilizers to help make the changes less dramatic, but over time I learned that it was easier to just deal with my mood swings as myself rather than let a pill change what I feel. I can take antidepressants and they will almost negate my depression, but they also leave me all but blind to my mania. And that is disastrous. I have gotten accustomed to mood swings and when I start thinking that I may be off by a bit I will question myself about what I am doing and if I would normally do this. This alone prevents the more crazy moments of mania where I decide to mow the lawn at 3AM or something insane. It has been almost a decade since I had tried any anti-depressants, anti-mania, or anti-anxiety medications. There may well be a silver bullet for me by now, but I am not too interested.
Well, medication for mental problems is fine and all, but it's really closer to an emotional painkiller than a real medicine, if we were to compare its effect with drugs for physical ailments. Sure, it does help when the problem escalates, but without actually doing something about the problems that caused the whole thing, the only thing that is achieved with such medications is doctors having a clear conscience, because they did "something". Which is not to say that they always can do anything more than that, since people have to be willing to get help if they are to be helped, but there are also cases where people are better off without getting anything if they can't get help other than drugs because those often tend to have drawbacks that make it difficult to achieve the same effect as they were intended to help in achieving after some time taking them. Also, I think the two of you might want to ask Daynab to split the part about drugs from the original thread, because it's pretty off-topicky.
I definitely don't think medications are always bad. In my case, however, it was literally two sessions with a therapist and then, "let's put you on this medication!" I think that kind of rush to dole out meds is scary, honestly. ...eventually, after two years of different medications and therapy, they uncovered some repressed memories (yes, they do happen) I had of being sexually abused by my brother. I still believe very strongly that the antidepressants hindered a lot of my ability to properly process and make sense of things. Medication can be great, but taking it at a developmental stage of my life, combined with a culture that tends to ignore, erase, or shame situations like mine, really messed with how well i could comprehend just what was happening/happened to me. It has taken 7+ years to sort all of that out-- i am certain that if i had not taken medication, things would be easier and faster to process. If medication is suggested after a few weeks of therapy, okay. But not after two sessions. Definitely not.
Unless you were a total wreck and obviously in deep emotional distress they thought could be pushed aside with the medications, I entirely agree. I self medicate myself currently. And I do not take chemicals like the seemingly standard SSRIs and anticholinergics. My best treatment for depression is Kratom. It s quick to take effect and gone without a trace within eight to ten hours. I take the minimal dose required to numb the negatives of being depressed, but they are still present and can be sifted through at my leisure. Too much of it first manifests as a stomach ache and then the cerebral effects start. But it is easy to dose and cheap. (I use a teaspoon and a chaser of Coffee.) For mania I do not actually take anything at all. I just ride it out. It always goes away. I just have to be extra careful during those times. *Edit* Thanks Daynab. (Presumably.)
It's actually unusual for traumatic memories to be repressed -- it's more common for them to be reinforced, which is why drugs have been developed that actually interfere with long-term memory creation, in order to lessen the severity of trauma. People who have taken such drugs will still remember the events, but they will be very unlikely to suffer from PTSD, depression, and so on after the event. That said, I don't have doubts that repressed memories are a real thing, nor would I challenge your claim that you have experienced them. But the scientific consensus is that the traditional methods used in the past to 'uncover' repressed memories are much more likely to either implant false memories, or in the case of hypnosis, help the subject to fabricate them himself. When a crime has taken place (a sexual assault, for example) there often is other physical evidence, and when a person's recovered memories flies in the face of that physical evidence (which happens) doctors have been successfully sued both by their patients, and by the victims of the false accusations. I'm not saying that your memories are false -- I'm saying that you have to be very careful that you corroborate your memories with other sources.
Well, there are also cases where the memories are, in fact, reinforced, but the one who experienced them doesn't want to remember consciously, in which case the memories can stay there, but he is unlikely to recall them before he copes with whatever made him repress those reinforced memories. And it is also possible for such a person to get "temporary*" dissociative identity disorder, with him getting something that is very close to being another personality, but really only differing in that this new "personality" isn't repressing those memories, but instead acts on emotions associated with those memories. But I guess it's either rare, or difficult to notice. And medication doesn't really help in such cases, because it's not about someone not being able to remember/forget, or about someone having a generally negative attitude, but about someone not being able to accept something that he knows he has no choice but to accept, while being subject to trauma that makes him simply split those decisions. And without actually finding a way to make that person accept those feelings, the only thing that can be achieved is numbing him enough to make triggering the other personality impossible (or to trigger it permanently, depending on the circumstances), and that doesn't help in the long run. * It's possible that the "split personality" doesn't go away, but instead the trigger that makes it surface does, in which case it would not be temporary but appear so.
Too many mental health workers (Calling themselves therapists and Doctors of Psychology and counselors and such.) rely upon extrapolation and pure, unadulterated conjecture for helping people who may have repressed memories. Take for instance a close family friend of mine who need not be named. She was the victim of a pretty awful rape. But she was drugged well past any capacity to recall the details of what happened at the time of the incident. Despite this, she was talked into the retarded counseling where she remembered things that are simply impossible. One such example was that the offense happened in her old home that was ashes at the time of the incident. It had burned to the ground years before. But despite this, the counselor managed to convince Police to investigate based upon the "Facts" uncovered as she remembered things incorrectly. The mind has a terrific capacity to extrapolate information. If you think long and hard about something you barely recall, you will remember what you think is accurate. If it is not confirmable via another means, it should be treated with much skepticism. Luckily for my friend, the Police realized there were inconsistencies in her recall and drug their feet investigating. And that was exactly what they needed to do. A week later she realized some of the mistakes and revised her memories. She has since told me that she would be "very sad" to learn that someone had been arrested based upon her incorrect recall of events. And that is where she is better suited to investigate than the counselor that insisted that her recall was correct. She was in no hurry to damn someone with an accusation. She wants the attacker(s) to pay for their actions, but not at the potential expense of the innocent. Now she believes the guilty party (ies?) have been arrested in a similar case that happened in similar circumstances near her home. She is not certain, but she is in no hurry to dreg up the trauma of the past that cannot be relied upon. That all said, I do believe the counselor thought they were helping. But they were simply stupid. Haste is dangerous in such things. People have the tendency to change their minds about hazy recollections of traumatic events. Luckily the Police decided on their own not to pursue this too fast, or she would have been one of several victims of the good intentions of the counselor.
This is debateable: a large amount of the discourse that says repressed memories are false or that they are formed from a pastiche of other sources has been debunked/proven wrong in recent years. Most of the "repressed memories aren't real" talk has come from only a few academics who just happened to have their work widely spread in the 90's. http://blogs.brown.edu/recoveredmemory/about/faq/ - this site has a case archive (150+) where people recovered memories in court cases, leading to evidence that convicted people. This is not "I remembered the room had blue walls"-- it's "I remembered this very specific detail that I could only know if I were there in that situation at this specific time". In my work as an advocate for survivors of abuse/sexual abuse, i've met dozens of people who had repressed memories. It's much more common than most textbooks these days would tell you. Not saying false memories don't happen, but the current discourse that repressed memories are usually false is just wrong.
I have Asperger's Syndrome, and I take medication for it as well.Prozac and Ativan. Sadly, I have nothing exciting to add to this topic. Other than sometimes I wish I didn't need to take medication. When I don't take my medication, I get a bit crazy and angry a lot more easier.
How long have you been taking those medications? And do you consciously know you are behaving differently while not taking them? I ask because Doctors have told me that I should not notice my different perception of the world and what is appropriate behavior and what is not while taking medications appropriate for treatment of Bi-Polar disorder. I have found this to be entirely false. If I am ignorant of my behavior then I am likely to be very unpleasant to be around.
My views on mental disorders and solving all of our problems with medication seem to get me into a lot of fights, so I'll try to be as soft as possible... I don't believe that it is right to prescribe medication for most (not all, mind you, but most) mental disorders, someone's quirks and oddities don't need to be fixed with drugs. I've had a bunch of labels thrown on me growing up and have been on and off a number of medications, none of which improved my life in any way. After the last round of antidepressants I was put on, I'm solidly convinced that throwing pills at the problem is very rarely the solution and, in fact, creates more problems than it solves. The burden isn't on the "crazy" to drug themselves into normality, it's on the rest of us to grasp that not everyone is cut from the same cloth.
I am reminded of my last date. The short version is this: She asked me to describe myself. I asked if she wanted to hear the good or the bad. She said all of it. And so I told her I am a Bipolar Insulin Dependant Diabetic with a Seizure Disorder. I told her that pretty much summed up the bad aspects of me. I then told her on the good side, I am Intelligent, insightful, and caring. I like Cats, but not most other animals, and that I can cook very well. We talked several minutes after that until she excused herself to go to the bathroom. Fifteen minutes later I asked an older woman from a table nearby to check on her. She was gone. I do not mind that she felt we were a poor match. I do mind that she left me hanging. The old woman rightfully presumed I had done something wrong and asked what the last things we discussed were. She sighed and said one of her sons was rather like myself. She advised me never to admit my problems to someone I do not know well. She then said something that really stuck in my memory. "People want the perfect friends only. They will universally reject those they find lacking in any way. Yet they will often ignore the truth to have the happy delusion of a perfect life." That was one wise woman.
I'd just like to toss in that while ADHD is often misdiagnosed, it is definitely a real thing that -needs- to be managed with some form of medication (be that one of the safer slow release stimulants they've developed, something weird like stratera or just self-medicating with caffeine). I have decently bad ADHD (of the kind which was formerly called ADD and does not display a large amount of physical hyperactive-ness). And Omni, I would personally advise you to be upfront with who you are right away. If the other person is a potentially worthwhile friend / romance then they will be able to deal with who you are. If they can't, then it's not worth the stress that it would cause you. This doesn't mean you need to have business cards printed out that give your life story or a list of your medical conditions, or that you need to first announce them to whoever you meet, but simply that you should be open about it if and when it is pertinent.
Seems to me that he was upfront. As much as one can reasonably be expected to without seeming like you're trying to actively push everyone else away at least.
I remain up front in all cases. Nothing is worse for a relationship than discovering that the other was hiding something because they thought you could not handle it. I do not really mind when people decide I am not right for them. It happens. And it is better that they openly reject than pretend to be accepting but run off and hide or whatever. I only brought up the example above because it is a classic example of how people incorrectly deal with a bad match. And the older woman's advice is painfully true. As for dating, that was almost a decade ago. I do not bother to date anymore. I just do not want the hassle. I just think people in this world are too ready to judge everyone else. (This coming from myself, who just yesterday made a grand generalization about millions of people using Steam.)
