Friday, September 27, 2013

Anti-Depressants & Bipolar Don't Mix

Around 2004, I was having pretty bad intrusive thoughts: visions of people's spines being ripped out of their bodies; not just people, but children in my son's school! Spines went SPLAT! against the walls, blood and all. After I'd dropped my other two children off, I called my psychiatrist. She got back to me right away. She told me not to move - don't go anywhere or drive! She prescribed Celexa, an anti-depressant.

Life went on, and a few days later, I found myself at Wendy's. No, I really found myself there, standing there, not knowing how I'd gotten there. I looked at the menu board, read the words in it, and had no idea what they meant. "What do they DO here?!" I asked myself. My brain was empty. My thoughts were just non-existent. What's more, I had no recollection of driving to the store! The files were simply missing. What's more, I had no emotions. None. I didn't care about one thing or another or about one person or another. I really did not have any emotions. It was odd, but at the same time it was strangely freeing. I walked down a hallway where it was relatively quiet and called my psychiatrist. She immediately said, "You weren't supposed to DRIVE!!" Its still a mystery to me how I got home.

In 2011, I was again prescribed Celexa, this time by a different psychiatrist. I knew what it had done before, but took it anyway. One day, I was at a sit-down restaurant with a friend of mine. Waiting for the food to arrive, I began to tap my knife quickly against the table. Over and over and over and over and over. I just would not stop. I could not stop! Internally, I had to keep banging that piece of metal on another hard surface. It was so bad that my friend commented. I finally got up and left the restaurant to call a friend of mine who is a behavioral pharmacologist. He laughed at how quickly and spritely I was talking to him and he liked my funny sense of humor, but he did agree that that with the utensils gymnastics, I was likely hypomanic from the Celexa.

Some bipolar people just cannot take anti-depressants. A better choice for depression is an anti-psychotic.

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