What's The Right Course... Meds or Not

Like I said I was probably going to do I am going to be spending some time doing, I am going to be talking more about the recent events in my personal life as well as some other issues that I am facing and choices and all that other good stuff that I am going to be having to make and things that I am going to actually have to come to terms with.  To save some time and to avoid needlessly repairing things I will simply drop a link to the last post so that those who have missed it can get caught up, and so that I can pick up right where I want to start anyway, I would also like to direct you to a post from Bryan at Gay Family Values which after reading his brilliantly written post has inspired me to open up some more and to share more as well. 

So as is made obviously clear by some of my recent post I have had an issue one that got so out of hand that it caused me to have to admit my self to the mental health department of the local hospital, at the insistence of my Family, who basically gave me the ultimatum of doing it my self or they would have me admitted against my will.(and  with strong urges from the hospitals social worker) all of this due to a very nasty spiraling out of control of a depression that really the best way to put it was like being eaten alive by the blackest soul sucking monster that one cold imagine.  Which had caused me to slip into a mind set of suicidally, to the point of having the ways I wanted to do it planed and even reached and was mentally working on what I was going to say in a note, not light stuff, yet something that was not new for me at all.  Matter of fact I have sunk to that deep of depressions since i was a sophomore in high school, and have experienced more depression then I would care to remember.  So for me to feel this low was not an entirely but the out of control spiral had happened a little faster this time.  Most likely aggravated by my working a graveyard shift which kept me awake all night when I should have been trying to get what little sleep I was being able to get. But this is something that we will come back to latter on. Now this by no means, means that I am some how depresses all the time, matter of fact I have my times where I am better then great and it is like the worlds best natural high that one can imagine.  Matter of fact to the point that I can and do have people think/accuse me of being on drugs, which I'm not and never have been.

Now this brings us to what it is that I am just starting to feel my with and which I am trying to make the best decisions on the course of action and the types of actions that I want to take to try to keep things from getting out of had again like they just have and like they have in the past.  I am just now starting to feel my way around for the path that well lead me where I want to go when it comes to the treatment of my Bipolar disorder, as it has become pretty clear that simply ignoring the diagnosis and thinking that, that will make it go away and that I can keep doing everything as I have been simply dose not work at all.  Yet it is the course that against logic there are still parts of me that want to fallow that path, the path were you don't admit to others that you have an illness.  I am once again being faced with having to make choices that can have major impacts not only on how I live my life but how I experience it to.

One of the biggest choices that I am being faced with again is the choice on whether or not to continue on a medication regiment which no matter what drug, or most likely combination of drugs would require me to be on them for the rest of my life.  To some it may seem like taking medications even for the rest you ones life to prevent from going into such a destructive mood extremes would be a no brain er, how ever I think it is one of the hardest choice facing me right now.  As a matter of fact this one choice is harder then choosing to come out, this is because it means changing a part of what has always been my experience of the world around me, something that as much as I hate it at times, and as much as at times I wish I could make go away is something that I also treasure.  This choice is hard because most any drug/drug combination that can stabilize my moods and make me much less likely to cycle also deadens my modes out.  In other worlds it prevents me from feeling my emotions as strongly as I do now, and that is something that I am not sure that I want to lose, as my ability to feel emotions as deeply as I do is something that I treasure, and something that when I am in the create mode I find to be extremely important to do what ever it is that I am doing, whether it be my photography or writing to almost anything in between.  It is a aspect of me that seems to connect me to the world around me on a level that is almost impossible to explain.  Yet part of the goal of a successful treatment is to deaden that emotional power, not only would it remove the depth and richness from the lows but also from the highs as well.

Not only am I concerned about losing the depth and richness from which I experience my emotions but I am also very wary of medication its self as a means of handling anything to do with emotions, as I have had very bad experiences with medications in the past.  I know that most of that is do to the fact that in reality they where the wrong medications.  Well that is not fair they where the right medications but do to a lack of knowledge they where really the wrong medication and given in the wrong manner.  I guess what has really turned me off of medications when it comes to treating mental health issues, at least in my case is the very negative experiences I had with them when I was younger and before I was actually diagnosed as Bipolar.  This is because of the experiences I had on antidepressants which I was prescribed many during the periods of depression during my High School career that although they would work for a short period of time would them cause much more distress and harm then if I had not taken them at all.  It was these experience that made me stop seeking out medical help when I would slip into one of my depressions. It was also one of the reasons that I stopped confiding in my family when I was suffering threw them because they would insist that I get help for them, which form experience would mean being prescribed and antidepressant.  The problem was that after the sort period where the antidepressant would work it would then start sending me on daily roller coasters where I would emotional shoot up higher then the starts and crash down in the the most powerful black whole many times a day, something that was much harder to deal with then a straight depression and which was extremely exhausting.

So now I am not only trying to decide what the best course of action to take is with this illness that all to new to me but that I am also trying to learn about it as well, so that I can try to make the choices that will be the best for me so that I can have the sort of life that I want to.  I am left not only struggling to understand this illness but also how best treat it. I know that every choice cares some sort of consequence and that there will never be a perfect choice and that is a matter of balancing the perceived pros and cons against one another and hoping that you got that equation right.   This means that I have to decide if the pros of being on a medication regimen outweigh the cons and the possibility that next time I may not be so lucky and that it is very possible that next time I might wind up doing significant harm to my self, against the desire not to be emotionally numbed, by mode stabilizing medications. Then there of course come the possibility of side effects, side effects that can also have a very real impact on my life, side effect that where part of the reason that I stopped my medication regiment before.  One which the one that I dislike the mos is weight gain, as it is I already have a weight problem and have gained about 35lbs in the last 4months with out any medication and don't need the extra help of the medication added onto that.

Then there is the fact that since I lack much in the way of a support system outside of my family there is the fact that I need to have them be part of this so that they can help me, I have to hand power over my life over to them, power that I have struggled to gain for my self now I have to look at giving some of it back to them.  This is something that I'm not to found of, as it is I feel that they get nagy and that is with out them looking out for signs or signals about my mental health and wellbeing.  Most of all though I feel quite frustrated as it feels like I have so much less power over my self then I though as it seems to increasingly be getting taken away by doctors and others in order to help with something that I don't even really understand very much, and I don't like the feeling.  It feels like I have handed the power of deciding what is actually best for me over to others and I am less a unique person but instead more just a simple case of issue to be treated.  I don't feel like an approach is being taken that takes into account the unique aspects that make me, me and not someone else.  I still don't know that I am ready to let my family into an better understanding of what it is to be and what it is to experience the would threw my eyes and my emotions because in a way I worry that they will think I am totally crazy and off my rocker for the way that I feel my own emotions.  

 I am also totally unsure of how in the world to even approach this subject or to not approach it when it comes to the possibility of those outside of my extremely immediate family, like with friends or even future potential partners, because in reality they would need to know.  Not to mention I am left wounder when I do get out of my depression and if I'm still on meds what they will do to my sex-drive as most of them do have side effects that negatively affect ones sex drive, and unfortunately when I'm depressed like I have been I don't have one any way so it is hard to say what effect the drugs are or are not having on it ether.  After all what good is it if I am "stable" but never have a sex drive, I don't think that is a great prospect.  I guess the only certain thing I can say is that nothing is certain and I don't know what I am going to do or quite what to do right now, nor possibly ever will I be 100% sure.