blobfish-a-go-go

I have the distinct displeasure, along with a lot of other folks with mental illness, of being super sensitive to psychiatric drugs.  This week I was instructed to increase the dosage of a pill I’ve been taking for years by a quarter tab.  Day one, I got (1) the jitters, (2) irritability, (3) aggravation, and finally (4) full blown seething hate by 2:00 p.m. Day two I sequestered myself to protect my relationships. Most people think that psychiatric drugs will just zonk you out. And some do, but you never know. (Another thing you never know.) And man, I’d take zonked over this aggro shit any day. Taking mood “stabilizers” is a lot like spinning a wheel of fortune where every space is a different emotion or degree of emotion. And there are multiple arrows and infinite combinations. No wonder finding the right combination of drugs for any particular brain often takes serious perseverance. On doctor’s orders, I am returning to my previous dosage as of today and will be on X...

Every brain is unique. Bipolar brains are unique in a similarly maladaptive way to each other, but even then, they are unique from each other too. Because of this, drugs that affect the brain can affect bipolar brains differently than they affect nonbipolar brains and other bipolar brains. That’s why it can take years to discover the right cocktail of medications to help and/or stabilize a bipolar brain. That’s why the drug I was prescribed for heartburn could send me into a raging suicidal depression. That’s why so many people discover they have bipolar when they are prescribed an antidepressant and end up with an episode that sends them to the psych ward. That’s why the drug I’m on to (hopefully) attenuate the nerve damage in my leg, which the pain specialist said might make me “a little groggy,” has me holding-the-walls stoned and thinking one thought on repeat for five minutes at a time. Every new drug is an experiment. Every combination a risk. Just another perk of be...