Didn't go away...Triggers?
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| Sun, 09-25-2005 - 11:04am |
Hello again,
After giving a lot of thought to my situation, I decided leaving town would probably cause more harm than good.
I have a lot of situations right now that I am trying to cope with all at once and it is starting to fall apart. I have never had this much trouble with my concentration, which is impacting my job, school, and my home life.
The noise in my head is getting louder and much harder to ignore. That is where the bad thoughts are. My doctor had prescribed my xanax at one time to take as needed for sleep, so I have taken one for the past 2 nights in hopes that the noise would quiet and I would be able to sleep. The first night it worked, however, last night not only did it not work, the noise got louder still. The bad thoughts were so strong that I considered taking everything I had in my medicine cabinet and just not waking up.
I guess it is that this has been a part of me for a very long time, I have finally been diagnosed, and yet it still doesn't seem to be getting better. In fact, I think they are actually getting worse! Maybe if I stopped the medications? I used to be a strong capable woman. What happened? Until I was in my 30's I never needed medication for this. And then, it was only anti-depressants that I was on until my last doctor stopped them telling me that my depression had resolved itself. Now I have been back in counseling for 2 years and within the past 3 months diagnosed as bipolar and am living in a nightmare.....or so it would seem.
I have to wonder if initially there was nothing wrong with me, other than some of the stressors of life, and the original doctor put me on the medications prematurely which caused all of this? Is that possible? Of course, my doctor tells me no, that the zoloft maybe precipitated some of the cycling though. I think what I'm trying to figure out is can taking medications make you bipolar?
Once again, thank you for listening. There is not a lot of posts this weekend. I hope everyone is all right.

Sorry again to hear that you are struggling too. I think we have all had the same thoughts about not being bipolar after all. I cannot say whether
I agree with Amanda. I too had a very hard time accepting that I needed medication. I too went off my first trial of medication thinking it wasn't really working, but then things got worse.
So Pdoc tried a different medication and I didn't feel like that was working either.
I planned to go off of it and DH convinced me to give it more time... WOW! When it finally started working, I realized how bad things had been (even when I thought I was coping very well!)
So I guess my advice is to just keep trying. And no, from everything I've read medication will NOT *make* you bipolar. Sometimes side effects are awful and that makes you feel like the medicine is *causing* your illness but if you are bipolar (and I can't say that you are) there are lots of medications to try. You just have to find the right one (or ones).
Catherine