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As someone recently said to me, Halloween should be a national holiday. It should be the "wear-something-fun-and-gorge-yourself-on-candy" day. It should be just a national day of fun when we're not supposed to be giving thanks or making love or hiding eggs. I could get behind that.
There are two reasons why Halloween is so fun:
1. You get to dress up and pretend to be someone else
2. You get to eat ridiculous amounts of candy and get a ludicrous sugar high
Well welcome to everyday bipolar disorder.
Making time for yourself, although not easy, makes all the difference when parenting a child with a psychiatric illness.
One of the symptoms of BPD is "transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms". That's a fancy way of saying that when a person with BPD is under a great deal of stress, he or she can dissociate. He or she experiences an "altered state of consciousness characterized by partial or complete disruption of the normal integration of a person’s normal conscious or psychological functioning", as Wikipedia puts it. Translation: detachment or distancing from reality.
Memories from when you were ill can damage your recovery. The mind, your memory, has a funny way of pushing aside the bad bits: the time in hospital, the anguish, the search for reprieve. You sort of forget the acute pain. Hiding the memories from when you were ill invites irrational thoughts (like thinking you were never ever sick to begin with).
Last week, we returned to Bob's psychiatrist to discuss the medications he takes for bipolar disorder and ADHD. Over the past year, his medication regimen (which he has taken for over two years) has become less and less effective, even as his doses are increased. I was ready to argue my case for a medication change. Luckily, I didn't have to.
J.D. Smith was in a mentally and physically abusive relationship for seven years. Today she’s a musician and she advocates for battered women. She says her main goals as an advocate are “… to help women get free from abuse and to help them get their self-esteem back.”
Anger can be the match that sparks a dip in your mood or a bout with anxiety, and according to what I've been reading recently this is because the part of your brain that normally keeps a lid on angry feelings is impaired when you're depressed.
I need a job.
Our finances favor it. My husband prefers it. My sanity demands it.
But will my oldest child's psychiatric illness allow it?
Many people aren't good at relationships, particularly at the beginning. What might be a time of excitement and optimism for the average person can turn to anxiety and depression for someone with bipolar. In this blog post, I compare the feelings I experience during the beginning of a relationship - in this case, with Erik, a new love interest - with the mood fluctuations of bipolar disorder.
You cannot always tell a person has an eating disorder simply by looking at him or her.
I stressed that because one of the most common and enduring myths about eating disorders is that the person must be young, female, and extremely emaciated to have an eating disorder.
That is simply not true.
Where do we go from here? Most of the family thinks just to let her hit bottom and then if she reaches out to help any we can. Some want to just keep paying her bills and just let her sit in the house with no responsibilities. Never been on medication and impossible to get to her when she refuses to talk to ANYONE.
Help.
On the day we agreed to videochat to make things less awkward IRL she woke up with a migraine so we rescheduled to the day after, I made sure to assure her that it was okay and to take her time. Later that day, in the late evening we had a nice chat but suddenly she stopped replying, even though nothing had happened. The day after I texted her good morning and said I hope she was feeling a little better. she wouldn't open my texts.
A couple days after I sent her a longer text saying that even though I had only known her for a short time I care a lot for her and would like to know how she are doing, telling her I'm there for her, assuring her I'm not going anywhere even though things might not be very easy. She wouldn't open it.
A week later I sent a text saying not to feel bad about not answering and that I will be there when she is able to answer again. It's been two weeks since this and she still hasn't opened my texts. She hasn't been active at all.
I don't know what else I can do. I assumed she might have fallen into a depression. I have tried to just not think about it anymore, and I haven't that much but when I do it sort of kills me inside...