Posted by Dragon Black on September 4, 2007, at 13:47:41
In reply to Re: Tianeptine appears to work. Now fix my brain! » Dragon Black, posted by fuchsia on September 3, 2007, at 19:07:02
Is entering and leaving a depressive episode the way I do really such a tell for BP? Can't regular old unipolars do this?
> Hello
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> The 'nestling back into the dungeon' feels like me too.
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> fuchsia
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> > > Do you consider yourself bipolar?
> > >
> > > I have bipolar and will be trying tianeptine. It's interesting that you have had a 'minicycle'.
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> > > 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....
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poster:Dragon Black
thread:779832
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20070831/msgs/780787.html