depression introspection

Posting will be light for the next week

My husband is having surgery tomorrow and my mother will be traveling from NY to PA to help me take care of him. Then I'm participating in Race for the Cure on Sunday so it'll be a busy week away from the computer for the most part.

In advance to all the moms— Enjoy your Mother's Day.

This has nothing to do with mental health/illness

But it's something I feel like talking about anyway.

As the Democratic presidential primary race drags on, I have become more acutely aware of my skin color. When I watch CNN or read the news, the political analysts are always breaking down the demographics of who's mainly voting for Clinton (working-class whites, older women, and those with a maximum high school education) and who's mainly voting for Obama (young people, African Americans, and affluent whites). All I hear about is race, race, race. In the end, I feel like Obama's candidacy has brought race to the forefront not seen since, perhaps, the 1980's.

But this post is not about politics.

The Effexor Chronicles: Lucky Her

One woman had a near trouble-free time getting off of Effexor.

I was taking effexor for about 4 months due to having a anxiaty attack one day.

One day I just felt like I was ready to get off of them.

I started by slowly bringing down my dosage. Did that for 2 weeks. The 3rd week I stopped taking them all together.

The worst sympton I felt was the dizzy feeling, I think they call it vertigo. That lasted for up to 2 weeks after stopping the medication.

I am proud to say I am now completly effexer free, with no side affects any longer. It can be done. Just go slow !

Good luck.

Taking on pretentious Christianity: You don't always have to be happy just because you call yourself a Christian

Nancie at More Than Conquerors has a great post up including a devotional that reflects on Jeremiah 17:17: "Do not be a terror to me; You are my hope in the day of doom." It really contradicts the notion that Christians are supposed to be bright, happy, sunshine, and flowers. Christians always seem to act like because they have "joy" in Christ, they are supposed to be happy-go-lucky and everything just works out for them.

How absolutely and utterly wrong.

The path of the Christian is not always bright with sunshine; he has his seasons of darkness and of storm.

Because I'm essentially faceless on this blog, I can be me--like it or not. I'm not your typical born-again Christian. I don't act pretentious. If crap is going wrong in my life, I say it is and I won't act like things are butterflies and sunshine. I cuss (sorry to those it offends!) at times when I'm angry or frustrated. This is me; I am a human with faith in Christ.

So I'm out to blast this notion of Christians always have the "joy of the Lord," meaning "I am so happy because Jesus saved me from my sins that I have to go around and smile all day." NO. "Joy of the Lord," I think, means quiet confidence in him. Knowing who he is and what he's done for you and through all the trials of life, never letting go of that faith because you're secure in his love for you.

No Christian has enjoyed perpetual prosperity; no believer can always keep his harp from the willows. Perhaps the Lord allotted you at first a smooth and unclouded path, because you were weak and timid. He tempered the wind to the shorn lamb, but now that you are stronger in the spiritual life, you must enter upon the riper and rougher experience of God’s full-grown children.

We need winds and tempests to exercise our faith, to tear off the rotten bough of self-dependence, and to root us more firmly in Christ.

The day of evil reveals to us the value of our glorious hope.

Boy, do I feel like winds and tempests are exercising my faith. And I'm not going to act like they're not. Jesus showed the weak side of his humanity. I'm not sure why some Christians think they need to be "stronger" than Jesus.

/end ex-fundamentalist rant/

Current Mood Rating: 5.5

A little something to brighten up your day (and mine)

Click North three times. On the third time, turn the view south.

Great editorial in NYTimes

The New York Times published a great editorial supporting a ban on much of the lavish treatment that doctors get from drug reps. If adopted by medical schools, restrictions would include:

• Ban on personal gifts, industry-supplied foods and meals, free travel (not reimbursed for services), and payment for attending industry-sponsored meetings
• Ban on ghostwriting, the practice of drug companies drafting an article and then getting a doc to slap his or her name on it making it look at though the doc actually wrote it
• Drug samples would have to be submitted to a central pharmacy not individual doctors

The restrictions, however, end there. The editorial says the proposal goes far but not far enough.

Patients need to be assured that their doctors are prescribing what’s best for them, not what’s best for companies.

Can someone get a doctor to read this?

Thank you

Thank you, everyone, for your well-wishes and outpouring of support. I saw my psych today and he is adding 2-5 mg of Abilify to my medication regimen. He had me choose between Geodon and Abilify. Of course, I am hesitant to do this. Take a look at Philip's post on Abilify and then take a look at CLPsych's post about how Abilify performed against placebo. My psych pointed out that I did better on 200 mg of Lamictal but I distinctly remember feeling cognitive impairment on 200. The 150 seemed to work well for a while but I don't know what's happening. And to be quite honest, I'm always a little wary of alternative treatments even though I know they have helped so many people. I wonder if they are for me.

More thoughts soon...

Current Mood Rating

Current Mood Rating: 4.5

Gone but I don't know where

You have been drifting for so long / I know you don't want to come down / Somewhere below you, there's people who love you / And they're ready for you to come home / Please come home
~ Sarah McLachlan, "Drifting"

I have an appointment with my psychiatrist on Tuesday morning. I'm not quite sure what to do.

My "symptoms" are back. Now that I know what to look for as someone with bipolar disorder, I am aware of them. I'm having mania moments. I don't want to sleep. I have no desire to. My husband sometimes MAKES me go to sleep. I'd rather be up doing the laundry, washing the dishes, blogging, reading other blogs, making to-do lists, and organizing the apartment--all at the same time--at 2 or 3 am. (This doesn't mean all of this stuff gets finished.)

My husband and I have had physical fights in the past where he has had to restrain me because I wouldn't go to bed and I wouldn't sleep. It would be 4 in the morning and I refused to sleep and I'd fight him tooth and nail. I don't know why. I have no problem wanting to sleep at 2 pm. Make it 2 am and there's too much to do suddenly. I have the superhuman ability to get things accomplished between midnight and 5 am more than I can during the hours of 9 am to 11 pm. Right.

So now it's almost 1 in the morning and I have nursery duty at church later in the morning. Then I have a hair appointment in the afternoon. Then I'm paranoid about what my hair stylist thinks of me.

She says she's my friend but I wonder if she's just pretending to like me because she feels sorry for me. I'm really lame you know. People at work acted nice to my face and then dissed me behind my back. She does the same thing to others, why wouldn't she do the same to me? She just keeps me around and kisses up to me because I tip well.

Thinking like that scares me. It reminds me of the way my father used to think. Paranoid.
(You can stop reading here. At this point on, it's just a manic ramble that's basically full of nothing but stream-of-consciousness just because i can.)

Assorted links roundup

Pastor Mike at KUPC Ask the Pastors answered the ever-controversial question about suicide that plagues Christianity: Will a Christian go to hell if he or she commits suicide? Pastor Mike answers that suicide is "forgivable but not permissible."

Spacedit at mydepressionconnection.com says that she has gained victory over depression as a result of evil spirits being cast out of her in the name of Jesus Christ. It's a subject I've grappled with myself, and I'm not sure what to believe. But I won't be passing judgment on her.