After a year

This post is about mental health (including symptoms such as depression, mania, self-harm (SH), suicidal thoughts, self-medicating and psychosis) and the diagnosis process. If this is a topic that is sensitive to you, please stay safe or just ignore this post. I won’t be offended!

Almost a year has passed since I last wrote a blog post. Saying goodbye to 2020, I felt that things were looking up and would continue to get better. I had finally reached an appropriate diagnosis and treatment, so it had to be great, right? Well, I can look back and almost laugh at my false optimism now.

This year hasn’t been entirely awful; I shall start off with that because otherwise, I would offend basically all of my friends. I was the most social I had ever been during my second year. So many good days and nights with friends, even despite a pandemic. However, the progress I had seen at therapy was suddenly crashing around me in the early months of 2021, and I was back to being quite depressed; I felt I had lost direction and failed at keeping “well”. Once again, the friends would keep an eye on me, and I would be honest with them if I felt like my hallucinations were coming back (which they did on a few occasions). I was falling back into old habits again with self-medicating with various alcohol on my own and taking some risky behaviours when I felt less “in control”.

In the middle months during the English summer, I prepared for my year abroad in South Korea. I’ll admit preparing to move overseas is incredibly stressful, especially when you’re in the middle of a pandemic. There were a lot of hoops to jump through with paperwork and testing etc., but it went smoothly, and I got to Korea in one piece (mostly, summer is hot and lugging two 20kg suitcases up a bazillion flights of stairs on no sleep is not a good idea). I completed quarantine with only two instances of hallucinations and continued on with my life before the new semester started. I was oddly anxious about it, but it wasn’t too much of a problem because I had the mindset of “I just need to get through it”.

About a month into living in Korea, the anti-depressant medication I had brought with me from the UK was running out and over here, you need to see a psychiatrist to have it prescribed. So, I found an English speaking clinic not too far from me and booked an appointment with the psychiatrist. I took a friend with me because neither of us were too sure how to pay (two brains are better than one after all), and she watched me fill out the forms, much to both of our amusement. The forms were pretty standard for pre-mental health appointments, although one was for bipolar, which surprised me a bit. I filled it out anyway and joked, “watch me get diagnosed with bipolar” (the foreshadowing in my life is sometimes quite amusing).

When the appointment was over, I had to sheepishly walk out and inform my friend, “He diagnosed me with bipolar disorder, and I’m now on mood stabilisers and anti-psychotics”. Needless to say, the surge of electricity that I had in my body for the rest of the day and for the next few is now clear to me to be mania. A not unusual feeling to me, in all honesty.

Why do I mention this? And why do I talk about it all in such a disjointed way? There’s a simple reason. My entire mental health journey has often been hidden behind physical symptoms, culminating in diagnoses of various fatigue or pain-based conditions. Looking at what the past almost 15 years have been like, and probably a lot longer, I can notice that there are bipolar tendencies throughout my childhood and teenage life. They quickly got swept under the rug or not properly investigated, owing to my age or other factors at the time that would conclude I was, for lack of a better term, “going through it”. Despite this, I can remember the first few times I thought about how worthless I was, I remember times I would get so upset over academics that my teacher had to question if anything was happening at home, I remember the first time I thought about death and not in a general context.

Since being diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome at 11 and my subsequent psychotic break, it’s hard to imagine why I was “merely” diagnosed with depression and anxiety. In one of the letters from the doctor, they mention the thoughts of SH and the psychosis I experienced and yet still their main forethought was anxiety. It baffles to me think that even though they are presented with a child clearly telling them about psychosis that had been going on for over 2 months, if not longer, the end result was anxiety.

Now, I’m not saying that I am a qualified professional nor am I hating on the doctors that saw me during that time. Sure, some of them did have a very large oversight to their own care but I feel that no doctor or nurse or anyone really can be exempt from messing up a few times. But. After living with mental health conditions for such a long time and probably longer, as I mentioned earlier, you pick up some vocab, some tips, you begin to see warning signs in yourself and others and you research what exactly is that electricity feeling going through you. You begin to learn your own body, your own mind and know when something isn’t quite right. So when you go to a doctor or a psychiatrist and they don’t exactly listen because of your “insight”, it becomes frustrating.

After my doctor’s appointment here in Korea, I requested my medical notes from my current GP. This had the letter from the psychiatrist I saw last year. Let’s just say, that what she heard me talk about and what I experienced are so different. You can read my last post to have some insight into what I went through, but even that is somewhat filtered. Looking back, and according to some mental health nurse friends, I really should have been a voluntary patient. I was not in a safe place, physically or mentally and I definitely needed more help than sleeping pills and a phone call.

So what is the point in all this? I’m not really sure and I think that’s okay. There is a point to be made somewhere and in all honesty, it falls in diagnosis and people with fresh eyes needing to look at you. I’m still processing this one, and that’s okay. I’m educating myself on things I suspected but now make sense. Honestly, sometimes it is scary day-to-day not knowing what kind of day your brain is going to make it. Despite that, I want to accept myself as being a person with bipolar disorder. It doesn’t define me, it’s just there. It’s not too late to educate myself on it and get the help I need.

Sometimes I want to feel normal, but I think normal would be boring by now.