thinking back to that initial diagnosis

Following up after that pdoc visit...

She feels reasonably sure about type 2 bp being correct.

I have come out to a select few. The most common reaction? "Yeah, I know." I only tell people I am pretty sure won't freak out because they have family members who have some sort of mh issue or are part of the medical community.

I am not clamming up as much since my family is aware. More comfort in my own skin is a double edges sword; I have said more things that I probably shouldn't but participate more.

-- Sun Jun 25, 2017 3:19 pm --

People were politely ignoring a lot more than I realized. I knew the depression was no secret. I didn't know the quirks were perceived as much more.

UpDownAround wrote:
She feels reasonably sure about type 2 bp being correct

It's good that you have some type of update. And don't be surprised if this changes, or can change over time. Or not. I was clinically depressed. Then 7 years later, I was bipolar I. 4 years after that I'm still the same, but it wouldn't be anything catastrophic if they changed it to something else. In the meantime, the most important thing is your mental health is being taken care of.

Family can be weird when you disclose this information. I told some part of family because I was always such a depressed person and I really have no reason to ever feel depressed. I wanted them to know it was out of my control, when my mood drops suddenly. It's not me. It's the illness.

It's not you, it's the illness.

When the diagnosis has changed over the years, and it has, it has been because I changed the narrative.

My 40 year old diagnosis (anxiety) was total garbage. I was getting out of a property crime (vandalism) by blaming it on a mental "event" (the idea that it was an illness that could follow me into adulthood was never discussed AFAIK) and getting a 3 month supply of valium. I took a few from the first bottle, didn't care for it that much and traded the rest for pot. "Experimented with marijuana" was the only thing listed for drug use. That experimentation involved the interaction of pot with numerous different compounds from both the farm and the pharm alone and in combination with enough samples taken across several years to be statistically significant if I could remember it accurately. However, I have fecal amnesia (also known as CRS) about details from that period.

My 20 year old diagnosis was very different. I had not used drugs in over 5 years and all my drinking was truly social. That doesn't mean I never overdid it and I am including drinking openly at home (watching TV with my wife with me having a beer and her having soda had become normal during the pregnancy). We (my one and only wife and I) had a newborn and we still were pretty starry eyed, intimate in every way (never had my guard up at home) and very concerned about why I would get so sad for what seemed like no reason and at other times have an insatiable appetite for her and alcohol.
While I don't feel totally responsible for what has happened to our relationship (she is now passive-aggressive and had/has some baggage from before us that she started to reveal once and then got cold feet - pretty sure it was abuse in a prior <5 year marriage), I do understand that being the wench I wanted after quaffing a few beers wasn't the happily ever after she had hoped for. We wanted to fix it.
My earlier experience was a distant memory (using the term very loosely) and I did not expect a diagnosis or drugs; I expected to lay back on the couch, answer some questions and then he would impart some wisdom to get me back on the path. In fact, I was ecstatic about talking to a psychiatrist since my "idiot" primary had been trying anti-depressants. Naive doesn't even begin to cover it.
Anyway, the point of that expository lump is to explain why it was one of the two times in my life that I have been completely open with a pdoc. I thought he could fix it in short order, so I accurately answered every question he asked as well as in tests he gave me. He did not ask a lot about my drug use since I had stopped years earlier and passed the blood and urine tests (tested for maybe 5 things back then). I was totally floored when he said bipolar and meds for life. If employers heard that I would have been in the soup line.

From that point forward, I went in knowing (or at least believing) I needed to exert control over what sort of diagnosis I received. I steered the diagnosis by the information I chose to reveal.

So this has been an incredibly long winded way of saying as far as this point:

quietgirl2538 wrote:And don't be surprised if this changes, or can change over time. Or not.

I think I am actually in the "Or not" camp as far as the actual illness, not to be confused with the inaccurate diagnosi that I have cultivated over the years, is concerned. I talked about that pdoc visit 20 years ago as being one of only two in my entire life where I was totally open. The other was my most recent pdoc appointment, where I got the same diagnosis.

UpDownAround wrote:I have come out to a select few. The most common reaction? "Yeah, I know." I only tell people I am pretty sure won't freak out because they have family members who have some sort of mh issue or are part of the medical community.

"Yeah, I know." is largely paraphrasing what most people said. Reactions have ranged from surprise to "No s__t!" (with the blanks filled in, that is not paraphrasing). Only two people, family members, expressed surprise and only one of them expressed disbelief (older brother, a fairly high functioning alcoholic and recreational drug user).

I told a lot of family because if I didn't then they would likely hear it from someone else. Largely because I think my mania is milder than many (most?), I don't want people making assumptions and/or being afraid to discuss it with me. I also told a couple of friends and one of them shook me up a little because he disagrees about the mania always being mild, though events he bases that opinion on are not all that recent.

The most surprising reaction was from a friend I was back and forth about telling. He is a fishing buddy I have only known a few years and not really one of my closest friends, but we had discussed depression a few times because he had mentioned his brother, who was divorced, unemployed and seemed resigned to just sitting around drinking and moping. I had shared some experiences with my dark periods that I had "recovered from" trying to offer him some hope. He was better schooled about depression than I was and called me on that. On one trip in particular, he asked me more than once "are you sure you are okay?" and I was annoyed because I was not at all depressed and inferred he was talking about drinking (which I was doing in my usual measured doses; I wasn't staggering or slurring). Anyway, his surprising reaction was anger. I don't think it was all really directed at or caused by me. He was pretty dramatic and said he wasn't mad because I ignored him or the pdoc; he was mad because of the hell I put his friend (meaning me) through. I feel like he was saying to me what he wants to say to his brother. He does want to plan a trip soon. so it isn't friendship ending anger. He is not the one who thinks my mania wasn't always mild, BTW.