Could I Ever Be Medication Free?

One could hope. But I was reading through Hopeful Hellion‘s own experiences with someone who had bipolar and it rather shook me awake. I’m not going to be one of those who can risk going off of meds. There are some people who can go off meds and control their bipolarity, others will always need the help of meds, and then there is a third category of people who should not go off their meds. I see myself as falling into that third category. Why is this? Because I can become psychotically paranoid and start cutting myself again.

It really took a while to sink in, but the man in her article could very well have been me if I didn’t place a timely phone call to my psychiatrist and got immediate help. And after reading it, it’s sort of provoked a full realization of what my mind is capable of doing. It’s not pretty by any means. It’s made me realize that the game has been changed considerably with the addition of psychotic manias. What’s worse is that I’m looking back now to when I had a paranoia attack while on risperidone, and I wasn’t in any kind of mood. I was reasonably flat and completely stress free. Which ups the ante from bipolar to schizoaffective disorder. I’ll have to talk to my psychiatrist about that. And this latest time around, I wasn’t horribly stressed either. So stress does not seem to be a primer for psychotic episodes.

I can only guess at what this means, but I have a suspicion that I’ll always have a bottle of antipsychotics lying around the house just in case. I seem rather lucid in the beginnings, so if I catch them early enough, that’ll be enough to stop them cold. But my mood swings will definitely potentiate another psychotic episode. So the question becomes, will I ever risk going off of medication with the risk of psychosis on the horizon. The answer is a definite no.

It breaks my heart to think that, especially since I was considering a drug holiday for a while, but the risk is just too great. I cannot put my life in jeopardy that much by foregoing medication. Some people will be able to go off medication and succeed, but that’s not common enough to make me think that I can do it. And even if I were to go off medication and find all my triggers, like I did with my migraines, when then? I would have to risk  another episode in trying to find out what works and what doesn’t work. And I never ever want to go through another episode. It left me sobbing while calling the doctor’s office because I was so frightened. Which is a key element in all of the episodes that I’ve had, pure fear. It took everything to get to my doctors and I was hell bent on getting there only because I saw it as a safe place. If my mindset had been slightly different and I didn’t implicitly trust my psychiatrist, I probably would not gone to see him. I would not have gotten the help that was needed or the drugs that helped quell the paranoia. I would have been home, alone, scared, cutting, and perhaps finally killing myself just to make it stop.

I also have to think about my girlfriend. She’s already been through enough. I can’t stand to think of putting her through another episode of depression or mania. She’s already been through the worst of it with me and I can’t bear the thought of putting her in the situation with an unmedicated version of me either going manic and psychotic or depressed and suicidal. I want these extreme parts of me cut out.

The drug of choice right now is lithium. I’m getting down to only that so I have a baseline to compare other drugs to. My mind has been so fuzzed out on antipsychotics that I can’t remember what normal thinking is like. It’s just been a mishmash of symptoms and side effects. And really, being on lithium is the lowest that I will ever go towards being unmedicated. The research that I’ve pulled up on it shows that there are no memory deficits associated with the drug that is not explainable by the progression of bipolar disorder. It’s a safe drug when taken properly with regular blood tests, and it’s the only proven drug with anti-suicidal properties. I’ll wait to see in the long run how well it manages my manias and depressions, but it’s the lowest I’ll ever go towards being unmedicated. I feel that I just can never risk going without medication.