One of the drugs I take is lithium. I also take Celexa, Lamictal and Geodon... in generic form.
I ***HATE*** taking these pills. And I miss my manic episodes. But when I read this article, I recognized myself in the description of bipolar mania. Just to describe one of my suicidal episodes, that still happen every few months, is painful. I go fetal. I bawl. I shake. I try to reason through it. I tell myself it's just an episode, and I'll get through it in a few hours. I say this to myself over and over, to stop from imagining ways to kill myself. But the thoughts are there. Pills, natural gas, carbon monoxide. And sometimes jumping off a building.
At any rate, here's the excerpt... what it's like to be bipolar.
There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you’re high it’s tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one’s marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends’ faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against– you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.
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