Medication

For the first time in a decade, I’m on a new mental-health medication.This is a huge event for me, as I have navigated most of my life as someone with anxiety, bipolar, PTSD, and chronic pain with…close to nothing, chemically. I’ve been on daily clonazepam, at the same .5 to 1mg dose, for 8 years, and aside from a brief stint on Cymbalta for nerve...

I used to be rail thin. Skinny jeans and all. Ironically, since getting sober seven years ago, I’ve developed what might be mistaken for a beer gut. It’s not drastic, but I have definitely changed from a small to a medium shirt thanks to my potbelly. At 5’7”, I weigh 174 pounds, which is considered overweight by body-mass-index standards. It was a...

Before I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and generalized anxiety disorder, I was clueless. I was clueless about mental health and mental illness. My knowledge on the topic was non-existent. The reason why I did not know about mental health or mental illness was well, I never needed to know. Mental illness had never affected me or my loved ones...

Artificial happiness. That’s what I thought I’d be getting into if I went on antidepressants. I have to admit I was scared to even go there. Would I become a zombie? Would my emotions be flattened? What about apathy? Turns out these fears were, for me, irrational.But the circumstances were terrifying. My initial diagnosis of depression occurred in...

I have Bipolar Disorder.  At the end of January 2016 I finished a course of 15 ECT treatments for a severe episode of depression.  A couple of weeks after I finished the ECT I started to become very angry and irritable. The mania was setting in. You see, mania isn’t always euphoria, sometimes it’s lashing out at my husband for no reason...