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Month: May 2019

Mental Health is not Easy

Living with Major Depressive Disorder and Bi-Polar is just a bit difficult. I spent the better part of the last year unmedicated as I transitioned away from a psychiatrist who just could not understand why a patient might have to adhere to what their insurance allowed. That really was the last straw for me in a doctor patient relationship that often lacked two way communication. The biggest issue was that my medication was no longer working for me and I was sinking deeper into depression with each passing day. It did not help that there were multiple difficult situations I was going through in my personal life which just compounded the depression and mood swings.

I stopped seeing that psychiatrist and weaned myself off of all the medications and surprisingly did not get much worse, this was mainly due to how depressed I had become while medicated. After months of hell I went to my primary care physician and he tried to help me but the medications he tried were not working for me, so he sent me to a new psychiatrist. Thankfully years of treatment, maturity in accepting my mental health, and no more fear of speaking honestly about how I felt, I was able to establish a good rapport right from the beginning and the psychiatrist quickly added Bi-Polar to my diagnosis and started me on a new mood stabilizer. I had been on a mood stabilizer before, in fact I was on the same one for over a decade but never was that adjusted. By identifying and treating the Bi-Polar instead of simply treating the depression I feel better than I have in years.

Now that I am feeling better I have to face the many tasks that fell by the way side as I struggled just to focus on my doing my job daily and taking care of my family. In many ways it is daunting, I find myself struggling with where to start on the list of projects, home repairs, automobile repairs, and other tasks that I now need to pickup and take care of before they get any worse. The silver lining is that now that I am fairly stable the to-do list is now driving me further into depression, instead I am faced with frustration which is much easier to deal with.