Posted by fuchsia on September 3, 2007, at 19:07:02
In reply to Re: Tianeptine appears to work. Now fix my brain!, posted by Dragon Black on September 3, 2007, at 16:00:18
Hello
My diagnosis is BPII and I have to say you sound like me; especially with that sudden bouncing out of depression. Like you I felt the hypomania was the relief at being undepressed; what a stroke of luck, I am better now, I won't waste anymore time getting back to things. Now I think that was too sudden for it to have been unipolar. I took years for me to accept the diagnosis because I didn't want to think that I had such a serious illness.
Really, it does seem quite a phenomenon to me, bouncing out of depression like that; like flowers blooming in the desert. I don't know how severe your depression is. The fact that mine is very severe is why it seems so spectacular to me.
The 'nestling back into the dungeon' feels like me too.
fuchsia
> > Do you consider yourself bipolar?
> >
> > I have bipolar and will be trying tianeptine. It's interesting that you have had a 'minicycle'.
> >
> > fuchsia
> >
>
> Years ago I considered whether I was bipolar and finally decided that I wasn't, just MDD. My brother is (schizo-affective, actually) and my mother and one of my sisters have both been diagnosed with bipolar. However, I've always thought that both were incorrect, and a Pdoc actually retracted the Dx for my sister. My mother tends to present as just a classic unipolar. Lately, however, I've begun to reassess whether I do in fact fall into the BPII spectrum. I do minicycle into and out of depression (several times over the course of 7-10 days or so) and I tend to be hypomanic when I come out of them. I've always thought that this wasn't true mania but rather represented the enormous relief that attends leaving a depressive episode. Of course I feel hypo - it's the "return of hope" - especially when I've been on the brink and feel that things needed to get better or else, I think that it would be impossible to come out of it and just be euthymic. Within a week or two I get habituated to feeling normal again and usually am no longer hypomanic. But ultimately I don't really know, I'm aware that I have a strong psychic bias against escalating the label I wear, and I definitely have times where I fit a lot of the symptoms of hypomania. Still trying to wrap my head around it. I also have conflicted thoughts about the validity of the entire categories of BPII, cyclothymia, etc. I mean, at some point, it's like the sphere of behavior being encompassed covers pretty much everyone....
poster:fuchsia
thread:779832
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20070831/msgs/780631.html