Lamictal withdraw hell

I’m in a depressive hangover. Probably not a real term but that’s what I call it. I’m not exactly still depressed, but I’m exhausted and teary. It takes a lot to focus on my breath. I’m functioning much better though.

Apparently I need to stay on this mood stabilizer. I cut my dose in half for a few days and then cut it out completely. The first few days I was moody with periods of depression. Then when I had stopped taking it I was hit was a crippling depression. I stopped doing school work, I haven’t showered in days. I’ve been doing the bare minimum. It was a pretty normal depressive episode for the most part, but then last night it turned really bad. I didn’t want to think but I didn’t want to go to sleep cause that meant I had to wake up. I kept thinking that I just wanted to go to the hospital but I didn’t want to be an inconvenience to everyone. Eventually I had a Xanax and went to sleep.

When I woke up this morning I felt like I was still sleeping. I woke up at like 11:30a, brought my daughters to school, and went back to sleep. I woke back up at 2:30p and went to see my psychiatrist. When I got there he asked me what was going on in my head and I told him I felt like I was dying. I felt like I came as far as I could and I wasn’t able to go on any further. He put me back on the mood stabilizer and upped the dose of the antipsychotic (his care summary I got after talked about an “outright psychosis”. I’m still not sure what the “outright” actually means). I went home, went back to sleep. Woke up at some point and took my meds and slowly I started coming back.

I’m so tired. I feel like I’m not capable to do anything. I wish I could sleep for a really long time and then not have to worry about picking up the pieces. I need to find the energy to shower.

Things to do instead of self-harming

Exercise

Art project

Write

Hang out with others

Watch TV/Movie

Read a book

Think about how you don’t want scars

Do your make up

Do your hair

Do your nails

Cook

Eat

Listen to music

Play an instrument

Go outside and look at the clouds/stars

Snap a rubber band or hair band on your wrist

Cover yourself with band aids where you want to cut

Go for a walk

Sleep

Play with a pet

Clean the house

Punch a pillow

Knit

Meditate

Go somewhere public

Chew gum

Rip paper into really small pieces

Talk to yourself

Hug a pillow

Scream as loud as you can

Dance

Play with play dough

Count to 100

Learn a new language

Go for a drive

Origami

Garden

Rake leaves

Throw snow balls

Throw socks against the wall

Call your therapist

Re-arrange a room

Play a board game

Watch fish

Go shopping

Browse Amazon/Ebay/Etsy

Hot shower or bath

Pop balloons

Take pictures

Play a video game

Youtube

Or....

Do what I’m doing now and make your own list of things to do instead of self-harm

Appointments

I saw my therapist yesterday and my psychiatrist today.

I made the appointment with my therapist last week when I was having the anxiety. I wanted to see him to help stop the issue snowballing. And even though the anxiety went away I decided to keep the appointment because he had said at our last appointment in November that we should stay in touch some way. The session was good. We talked about the anxiety and he said pretty much the same thing that I came to, that only a small amount of the worries I had were valid. And he said some of the worries were good worries to have. We talked about the episode a few weeks ago with the ups and downs. He was concerned about the level of rapid cycling. Concerned about my bipolar getting worse. I need to be careful if this happens again. We talked about if I was going to keep coming back. I told him that even though I don’t need to come as often as I was, I would like to still come in once in a while. He agreed that was good and said if I had another episode and needed an emergency appointment he would fit me in his schedule.

My appointment with the psychiatrist today was also good. Like all psychiatry appointments it was very short. He asked if I wanted to keep my meds the same as I have been doing so well. And while that makes sense, I wanted to change my mood stabilizer. The one I’ve been taking for two years causes acne and I’m just sick of it. Unfortunately that was the only mood stabilizer that pretty much guaranteed no weight gain. So we’ve decided to come off the mood stabilizer completely. The antipsychotic I’m on should be acting as a mood stabilizer especially for manic symptoms. So I’ll stay on that and the antidepressant and see how this goes. He said if I start having bad episodes again I should go back on it and treat the acne in some way. I’m happy with the plan.

Hope everyone is well. I’m going to get back to school work now. Jazz history… fun stuff.  

Getting through anxiety

I’ve had some really bad anxiety the past few days. I think it started small but then it got to the point where I couldn’t handle anything. Wasn’t depressed yet but was getting close. I worked really hard to fight against it and I did pretty well. I wanted to avoid taking any Xanax because that is just a temporary fix. I wanted to just deal with the problems instead of just putting it aside for a couple hours until the effects of the medication died down. I want to share what I did.

Halfway through the day today I felt like I had enough of feeling like this. So the first thing I did was sit down and made a list of everything that was making me anxious. This already helped because seeing everything written down it made me realize there weren’t as many things wrong that I felt there were. I looked closely at the list and thought about each one and if it was something I could control now. A lot of it wasn’t something I could fix so I pushed those aside. For the ones I could fix now I wrote next to each one what I could do to make it better. Some of the things I had was:

How messy my house was- Stop thinking about how messy the house is and start to clean it. Don’t do it all at once but start off small. This worked very well because once I got going it was much easier to keep on going.

The amount of school work I have- Again, stop thinking about it and actually do it. Make a schedule and stick to it. When I think I want to do something else like watch TV, stop and think about what my options are and what should be a priority. Making a schedule already helped because it made me see that what I had to do was doable, whereas before I just kept sitting around thinking about all the things I had to do.

Dinner time- This has been a major stress for me. So I thought about what exactly was making it stressful. I figured out that I was deciding what we would have for dinner at the last minute. It would be too late to make anything that took a while. I need to plan, plan, plan. I’m telling myself that by lunch time each day I need to decide exactly what to have for dinner and figure out right away what time I need to start making everything.

This was not everything but I think you get the idea. After I thought through all these I went back to the list of things I could not fix. Instead of focusing on the fact that I couldn’t do anything, I tried figuring out why these things were causing anxiety. Just thinking about the cause helped me see that there is no reason to be anxious over them.

40% of things you worry about will never occur

30% are things from the past that’s can’t be changed

12% are needless worries about one’s health

10% are petty worries

8% are real legitimate worries.

Only 8% of your worries are worth it. Focus on that 8% and what you can do about it.

Skipped my meds

It was around 5am this morning. After staying up all night doing homework, writing, looking on YouTube, laundry, I noticed I had a headache. So I decided to go take something for it. Walked into the kitchen, opened the medicine cabinet, and realized I never took my meds last night. Well that explained a lot. I’ve skipped taking my medicine a few times, but I found out the hard way that I shouldn’t do that with my new medication. I start to have manic symptoms. Hence the staying up all night doing multiple things at once. So at 5am I took my meds and within 20 minutes I was passed out. Of course I ended up being absolutely exhausted and had such a hard time getting up. I slept all morning. I couple hours ago I finally got up, got dressed, did my make up (didn’t need to do my hair, did that somewhere around 3am). I’m still very lethargic. I have no energy and would love to just sit all day watching TV. I almost took my daughters shopping. I have no idea what I was thinking, that was a stupid idea and I’m so glad I didn’t do it. So I think today is just not going to be productive. My house is a mess. Thankfully I’m all caught up with school work and can afford not to do anything today.

I don’t have much more to say. I haven’t been that inspired to do much blog writing lately. I have a list of things I want to talk about but I’m just not getting anywhere.

I have an acquaintance on YouTube, Sammi (I’ll link her channel below). She discusses many things including her history with a mental illness. Recently she shared some of her hospitalization records with her viewers. It really interested me and made me realize how much I would like to read mine from my first hospitalization. So I requested to get my records sent to me. I don’t know how long it will take but once I get them I will share them with you all.

Check out Sammi's channel! https://www.youtube.com/user/rawsammi