My Diagnosis
I have been diagnosed with depression and social anxiety disorder. I guess that explains why I have difficulty expressing myself and have trouble talking to people that I don’t know. I’m improving though and that is all that matters. My plan is to be off my meds next year. Now all I have to do is work with my therapist and build a life that suits me. I know that I can do it. I just have to have faith in myself.
It’s a good thing that I haven’t been diagnosed with BPD even though I do have some symptoms. Parasuicidal behavior, pessimism, and a lack of long term goals (things that I’ve been struggling with since I was a teenager). I can build a life that’s worth living. I just have to have faith in myself even though that’s hard for me to do. I can be a happier person. I just need to have something to be happy about.
I’m taking Effexor-XR in the morning and Zyprexa Zydis in the afternoon. I have also been prescribed Ativan twice daily. I wish that I didn’t need medication to feel joy and help with my anxiety. I think that is why I can’t wait to be off my meds. I’m tired of swallowing pills everyday. I really am, but I can improve. Anything is an improvement at this point.
Person:
If you stop taking the meds you’re taking then, in my experience everything you were feeling before and everything that was happening in your life will come back, as if it had never left. If the drugs aren’t doing any good then a better alternative would be to tell that to the psychiatrist and tell him/her that you want him to prescribe different things untl you discover what works best.
When you say that you’re “seeking treatment”, I think you need to know that seeing a psychiatrist once every two months is not much treatment. Those are just medication visits so that you can get fresh medication prescriptions. The psychiatrists’ goal isn’t to help you understand and work through your problems, but rather just to help you find and maintain a medication regimen that will work as well as any.
There is no medication “standard for someone with bpd and depression.” Psychiatrists often figure out what illness you have based on what medication works. They try various combinations until they find a cocktail that helps you to relieve your most pressing, dangerous and discomforting feelings. And then they urge you to stay with that until and unless it stops working, because if you stop then all the old emotioanal and behavioral problems will come back.
Equally bad, if you stop taking medications then there is often an uncomfortable withdrawal, depending on what you’re taking. Then, if you find that you have to start taking medications again, there is often a two-week to a month waiting period before anti-depressants and other medications start to do any good. During this waiting period, the collateral effects (side effects) of the medication are at their worse as your body adjusts. So, effectively, if you stop taking your medication, you may have to go through a month or more of reintroduction during which you will feel no benefits but only negative side effects and adjustments. I’m talking from personal experience here, and no everyone is the same. Some people can run across a busy street with their eyes closed and not get hit by a car.
I went through a period in which I bought tools to slit my wrists and tried drilling a hole in my chest, but it’s a waste of time. If you want kill yourself, then shoot yourself in the head or hang youself. These are the methods that work, and you won’t have to worry about what happens with your money, because they won’t take dollars wherever it is you’re going.
If you’re really going to kill yourself, then exercise some self-control and don’t tell anyone your plans. If you tell anyone your plans then they will intervene and you’ll lose control of your money.
Another alternative is to get some real cognitive-behavioral therapy, where you meet with the therapist at least once a week and maybe twice. That’s the kind of intense therapy that might help you to understand youself better and work through some of what’s bothering you.
However, the therapy is like the medication. If you stop doing it then the benefits you received from it may wear off quickly. Some of us need someone to help us on a weekly or twice-weekly basis to make sense of our lives and our thoughts, feelings and behaviors.
Instead of stopping taking your meds, try to find a therapist who will become a team with you in coping with and overcoming t the feelings and thoughts and behaviors you’re facing.
I’m taking two medications. They help me to feel less desperate, impulsive and compulsive during the day and to sleep during the night. But, I still don’t feel enthusiastic or involved in anything and sometimes I wish I were dead.
You are pretty much right about this.
I was diagnosed with chronic endogenous depression and BPD, because I also tried constantly to hurt myself (but in atypical ways). I like to do mechanical things, but I never really took care of myself, so I had to go to the doctor’s office with a harmed cornea, for stitches in my hands . . .
I swam a river by myself that most people cross in boats, and at other times I swim as far as I can, out into the ocean, I rest there, and then I swim farther out still. If I get scared, I remind myself that death “is nothing but a thing”. It happens to people all the time.
Hmmm. “Obsessed with death.” There have been times in my life when I desperately wanted relief AND the only kind of relief I could believe in was death. So, I wanted to be dead. Today, I’m willing to consider alternatives to death, but I can’t find an alternative that I can have believe in enough to give it a try. (I’m giving one alternative a try right now, living with others, but it’s not working out.)
I spent about a year meditating on death, at the end of which I checked myself into a mental hospital, in the hopes that they could do something for me that I couldn’t do for myself. But, on the first day in the hospital, I let all of the angry violence out that had been building up in me, and that led me to a lockdown, high security hospital unit of a sort that I don’t ever want to see again. I’d prefer to kill myself first. That much I’m sure is true. So, I hide most of my moments of smashing things from others and I try to find other alternatives to exploding in violence, like medication, talking with my wife and a therapist, writing . . .
“What good is medication when nothing in your life ever changes?”
Medication alone hasn’t changed my life, except by taking some of the hard, nasty edge off of my anger, so that I could drive more responsibly. I am much less often at the point where I go out and buy implements for the purpose of killing myself.
I think what medication can do is give a person some breathing space to engage in therapy and make life changes that make life more rewarding, like start or change a career, find a girlfriend, get a new apartment . . .
I take diazepam and nortriptaline. The nortrip is the best anti-depressant I’ve found for myself so far, even though I become noticeably fat because, like Prozac, the medicine makes me feel as though I always need to eat something more.
The diazepam helps me to sleep, which is important. Sleep deprivation is itself a kind of torture (which is why the CIA made detainees go without sleep for as much as eleven days). Sleeplessness makes people snap. A psychiatrist told me that most of the patients he admitted to the hospital had gotten very little or no sleep in the days before they were admitted.
A doctor told me once that I was doing very well and didn’t need to take Prozak and Trazadone anymore. Within the next six months, I had intentionally crashed my car, the uncontrollable tears came back in my eyes, and I started thinking about committing suicide again. I think it was a foolish and unnecessary decision to stop taking the Prozac and Trazadone, and the results were predictable: the depression, sleeplessness and angst came back. I think the decision that I didn’t need therapy and medication was made more on the basis of the clinic’s desire to free up space for someone else rather than based on what would be good for ME long-term.
After that last extremely negative experience with a high-security psychiatric ward, I have found the tools to stay unhospitalized for six years. My strategy is to do something new and different when what I’m doing becomes unbearable or unbearably monotonous and unrewarding. If that doesn’t work, I move to somewhere new and different where nobody knows me and building an existence all over again, at least externally.
I realize now that I was hospitalized that last time because I ASKED to be hospitalized. When they refused to admit me, I asked whether I would go to jail or to a mental institution if I killed someone? That convinced them immediately that I should be hospitalized. I had thoughts of killing people, but I wouldn’t have done so (except myself). I had simply decided that somebody who felt as I did needed to be hospitalized.
Now, I realize that’s no solution, and I have to use medication and behavioral changes to keep my behavior within limits where I’ll never be taken to such a terrible place again. I can’t even remember much of what happened in the week after I destroyed a hospital room on the first day after my admission. I must have been so drugged up that I can’t remember anything. For all I know, I had shock therapy. I can’t know that I didn’t, because I can’t remember anything from that time. (If I did, that would be the first and only time.)
A friend of mine told me to forget about my thoughts of death and go out to the beach, in the sun, and have fun. I realized that if I could achieve what he suggested then my life would be much better. So, I gave it a try and within a month or two I met a beautiful woman at the beach and we spent almost a year together. We traveled. It wasn’t perfect, but it was still much better than staying in the house and ruminating about death.
So, I if I have any suggestion, it would be to go out of your house and greet the sun, and spend time with other people who are doing the same thing. Walk in the mountains or on the beach. Buy a canoe and invite a friend to go canoing with you.
If you don’t live near the beach or the mountaains, then sell everything you have and move to the beach. Buy a good book and sit in the sand reading. If you don’t know how to swim yet, then to to the YMCA or YWCA and learn. Fuck, learn to surf! (I don’t know how to surf.)
But don’t stop taking some sort of medication. It’s like asking, “what will happen if I stop eating?” If you stop eating you will get skinnier and skinnier and then your organs will fail. And then you will ask yourself, “Why did I think not eating would be a good idea or would change things for the better?”
Are you there?
you are nothing but a pure open awareness. the features you affix to yourself do not stick. you have to hold them there. this means that at every moment you have the potential to be anything, everything, or nothing. Sartre sees this as an overwhelming responsiblity and basically comes to the conclusion of what’s the point? but simone de beauvior (his lover from whom he took all of his ideas) rejoices in the opportunity to reinvent herself at every moment. most of the other existentialists will get you down, but read de beauvior. and then read the cliffnotes or something. she’s kind of hard to understand.
basically- you give yourself reasons to live. it’s that simple and that impossible.
I was loaded up by my parents from 2nd grade until senior year of high school on a cocktail of 200+mg of adderall, 100+mg of zoloft, zyprexa and concerta. Even though those medications helped to rid me of depression and my anxiety I prevented me from living my life. Never dated until i got to college, didn’t feel to much except when my friend started getting me high and that’s when I realized how much i was missing. I stopped taking everything when i ran away after some medical complications from that I did have a few weeks where my depression got bad and I fought threw it with the help of some friends. Its been three years since i have taken anything for depression and i have only had one major three month long hell of depression where i thought i would surely kill myself but that was a while ago and i have been great. everyday i just have to remember how much i didn’t feel or notice. I like having emotions, not all are bad. Good luck.
Imagine growing up in a country where “depression” is pretty much considered a taboo among young people. No diagnosis, no treatment, no support groups. Just you all alone.
That’s how I grew up. I don’t believe in pills – they just make you feel better for some time but are unable to uproot the source of the pain. Only you can do that, with your strength and will.
You can be happy. You will be happy. Some day
I think you are pretty inspiring <3.
Was dx bipolar in my early 20′s….here I am 20 yrs later….I still have mood swings and I have Seasonal affective disorder…so overcast, gloomy and winter days SUCK……With that said, it is a fight, everyday. And I mean everyday! Keep fighting…there are a a lot of us out here fighting the good fight alongside you!