My blog has been dormant for several months now. I thought it would be good to provide some kind of update on how I’m doing. I’ll divide it into the three aspects of my Bipolar symptoms: depression, mania and anxiety.
Starting with depression, what I think of as my severe grief symptoms – e.g., fits of crying and abiding sadness – are essentially in remission. The combination of electroconvulsive therapy and SSRI medications seem to have worked on that aspect of my mental illness. My suicidal thoughts are largely under control as well. Mostly, I have only passive suicidal ideations these days. For instance, I notice opportunities for suicide – “I could step in front of that bus”, “I could cut my wrists with that knife”, “I could drink that radiator fluid” – and sometimes I wish that I simply wouldn’t wake up. But I haven’t been in serious danger lately. What I’m really struggling with depression-wise is anhedonia, i.e., a loss of interest in activities that used to give me joy. I need to force myself to read fiction, watch TV, or listen to music. I have no great desire to go fishing even when the opportunity presents itself: I hardly fished in the Summer and Fall and didn’t get out even once while down in Uruguay. Another holdover from depression is that I haven’t had energy or focus. In particular, and as a result, I can’t write hardly at all. (Hence the long period without even an update to this blog.)
Turning to mania, I haven’t had a hypomanic episode in years now. Indeed, I wish I could trigger a manic phase, because that’s when I used to get so much done! I’ve made so much progress that I’m not even sure that Bipolar Type II is the right diagnosis anymore. I may need to change the name of my blog…
The really bad news is that, while I never experienced anxiety until five or six years ago, now it’s a constant daily presence. It has replaced the hypomania – and that’s an unhappy trade-off. I seem to be free of anxiety symptoms only when wholly distracted or when lying down. (Between the lack of energy and the desire to be horizontal to fight back the anxiety, I am spending a lot of time in bed.) The phenomenology of the anxiety is peculiar. It is free-floating fear with no object: often there’s no thing that I’m afraid of, I simply feel afraid. It’s as if there’s simply too much cortisol in my blood stream, and so my body and mind behave the way frightened creatures do (tensing up, being overly vigilant, feeling threatened), though there’s no threat. Surprisingly and sadly, no medications seem to help. There doesn’t seem to be an antidote that I can take and make the objectless fear go away.
An unhappy recent development, illustrating the anhedonia and anxiety working in tandem, is that I nowadays lack the energy and enthusiasm necessary to get out running; and I feel afraid on the relatively rare occasions when I do lace up my running shoes. Running is so good for my physical and mental health, but for a month or so now I can’t bring myself to do it, especially not by myself, but not even with a running partner.
I might sum up the curate’s egg that is my mental health these days by saying this: because I can’t bear the thought that it’s permanent, I’ve been telling myself that I’m in the anxiety phase of my recovery. Let’s hope that’s right.