Manic Depression

[Warning, explanation: this is the most personal blog post I've written so far, so if being close to people makes you uncomfortable, you can skip this. But it's medically related, technically]:

Psychiatry Class. 9 AM. Dr. S is giving an cursory lecture on various mental conditions. He gets to mania. He starts listing off characteristics. An entire row of students in my lecture hall, turn around to stare at me.

Am I manic? Perchance.

Like many mental conditions, you have to have a certain number of listed signs/symptoms in the DSM to be able to classify yourself as anything. But I do have some symptoms of mania:

I dress colorfully. I also sometimes wear things I've made myself. Not things that are actually even functional. They're just LOUD. I also have hypoacusis when I'm in a really good mood. And occasionally, I just can't sleep.

A week later, I am pre-reading on depression and bipolar disorder. The depression lecture has a quote on depression by Abraham Lincoln, so I dig around in one of the journals I kept in junior high/high school, to find a comparable quote I had written ten years earlier (I am proud of myself for being so eloquent with my emotions at an age when Abraham Lincoln was still splitting trees or whatever silly nonsense he did before becoming an Illinois Senator). I also find a pretty depressing journal entry where my tone is clearly dysphoric and I am complaining about how illogical all my emotions are and how I can’t understand them and I can’t control them. It was depressing. But it also hinted at possible manic depression.

In college I often told people I was bipolar. At the time I thought it was because I wanted attention. Or because I liked to introduce myself as a biracial, bisexual, bipolar, bicycle enthusiast. But in retrospect I probably actually have a form of manic depression. I am actually treated for depression, and my psychiatrist has now put me on an anti-psychotic—Abilify [aripiprazole]—to see if it won’t even out my mood swings/control my ability to still become super, super depressed.

But I don't want to be taking Abilify. Which is weird for me: I'm on about twenty prescriptions for all my conditions, and not once before have I ever felt so--unsure about what I was taking. I grew up on Motrin and over prescribed antibiotics. God bless having doctor parents. But I don’t really want to be on this drug for several reasons. The first one, of course, is a logical complaint: side effects. Abilify can cause tardive dyskinesia, and even though that’s rare, tardive dyskinesia isn’t always curable—even when caught early.

The second reason, and this one does sound illogical, is that I like having mood swings. All people should have mood swings, and just because mine are a little more intense, so what? Also important: it used to be, several times in the past, that my emotions would not correlate with the way I thought I should feel (hence my journal entry at age thirteen complaining about how I didn’t want to feel anymore). However, now I feel great when I do something well, I feel loved, or I see or hear or taste or touch something beautiful. And I feel sad when I want to.

I guess what I’m trying to say is I like the mania, and the depression isn’t that bad when it serves a purpose and doesn’t fall into entrenched melancholic depression or melancholia. Sad is good. And sometimes I deserve sadness. It’s also a beautiful emotion.

Regardless, I haven’t developed tics or uncontrollable movements yet. Although I do feel an inner restlessness that sometimes causes me to move weirdly when I’m already moving. I REALLY DON’T WANT TARDIVE DYSKINESIA. I am probably overreacting.

Meanwhile, I will leave you all with this link to a good song by a great man who may or may not have had manic depression, and who I could imagine being bisexual and whom I know is biracial (he also purportedly got thrown out of his high school for driving a motorized bicycle (a motorcycle) through the school's hallways: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG8cUrVVuwc