How did you get Diagnosed w/Bipolar?

Post Reply New Topic

I appreciate the advice and hope that it will help someone, but I'm afraid it's not too useful to me. It sounds from what you describe that you get hypomania. I had severe mania - with extreme paranoia. I tried to write but I couldn't. Even thinking about drawing or painting something made my anxiety shoot up through the roof. In fact, trying to do *anything* other than writhe around feeling like there were ants under my skin made my anxiety go up. It was like a meltdown that lasted 2.5 weeks. When I got on public transportation, everyone around me looked like monsters, like they wanted to rape me, or eat me. When I closed my eyes, my thoughts raced even faster. When I tried to lie down, it was like ants crawling under my skin, and when I did manage to sleep about 2-3 hours per night, I had nonstop horrific nightmares that made me wake up sweating and shaking, desperate to turn the lights on but too afraid to get out of bed. When I one night decided "hell with it, I'm going out with my friends" and went to a party, I drank a dangerous amount of alcohol and chased it with some drugs - it took several of my friends to babysit me and stop me from going home with a shady stranger, and when I decided I was finished, I walked home through the entire city at 3.30 in the morning (about an hour's walk). One night, I decided I was desperate to sleep, after 2 weeks of getting around 2-3 hours per night, so I drank 2 beers, 3 cups of strong sedative tea, and used that to wash down a diazepam (valium). I still couldn't sleep.

Oh, and I'm an elementary school teacher. So you can probably see how maybe this was dangerous. It took an incredible amount of alcohol in the evenings to keep me from doing something to hurt myself, and constant sedative tea and lots of help from my co-teachers to keep me under control during my lessons. I did have to cancel all my private lessons, but I managed my base 16 hours of teaching without having to stay home, which is good, because I live alone and staying home by myself only made the thoughts get worse.

In any case, it ended a week ago, and as you can see in my last post, I finally saw a good doctor yesterday, got my diagnosis, and will be starting medication.

EDIT: Oh, and by the way, going to an emergency center in this country is equivalent to voluntarily committing yourself. I'm here on a work visa and if I don't earn enough money per month, I lose that visa and would be deported. Not to mention the inability to support myself if I'm not working (I'm on a business license and don't get any paid time off).