Hi. I don't know where to post this, so I decided to post on this community on Lemmy. If I posted on Reddit, I'd probably get shit on or they'd delete my post because it keeps saying "removed by filters".
Anyway, I'm not asking for a 100% diagnosis and I will tell a medical professional.
So, I suddenly started feeling disorganized thoughts and started thinking illogically. This does happen sometimes. If I were to talk to someone, I'd have very impulsive, emotional behaviors and I would definitely say things I normally wouldn't say otherwise. I'm trying to calm down from it and talk about it because I WILL explode if I bottle it up.
I will feel really energetic and happy like I have recently, full of ideas but unsure where to start. It does sorta feel like my ADHD due to not being able to focus and not doing things that are "boring" or too analytical.
Well, then I started having some pretty bad intrusive thoughts. I couldn't shake the feeling, though I knew it didn't logically make sense, that everyone was acting weird and was trying to hurt me. Sometimes, when people change their tone or act weird, I think I'm in a different dimension, one of the things my brain tries to convince me.
There was one time I really felt motivated and thought I could be like Indiana Jones.
One time, about 2 years ago, I was going through a rough period and I think I'd gotten diagnosed with bipolar later in that year. Well, I can't tell if it's anxiety, mania, or psychosis signs, but I genuinely couldn't shake the feeling that my friends acting different was because they'd been replaced by aliens or I was sent to some sort of dimension/universe where my friends didn't exist and had been replaced by evil people, rather than just the logical conclusion that they were upset, which turned out to actually be that they were cruel pieces of shit, but that's beside the point.
The one thing I'll say is, don't go to a doctor and start ticking all the boxes for them, knowing what those boxes are. Don't diagnose yourself.
Don't come up with fantasy ideas of "it felt like my friends were replaced by aliens", unless you actually believed they were or might have been. Be clear about what you actual believe, not what you just think is weird about thoughts you've had.
There's a fuck load of mental things and spectrums that can make people "weird". And the diagnoses for these sorts of things are often arbitrary. They don't always just say oh you got A, B, and C, classic bipolar disorder with mania, take this.
You could get told you're schizophrenic, schizo affective, bipolar, whatever. It doesn't matter. They often will treat the symptoms.
They don't have a pill to magically treat bipolar disorder. They have pills that will numb the fuck out of you to end psychotic behavior, pills with very strong side effects sometimes potentially permanent. They are extreme medications for extreme symptoms.
they have pills for depression, anxiety, anti psychotics. They will determine what symptoms are worse for you and need treatment then treat them.
So don't go in there like "hey I had the idea what if my friends were replaced by aliens", like just the intrusive thought is psychotic on its own. Be very clear about how much you believed these things and how they affect your life, and what is negatively affecting your life.
It might sound like people with X just go take pill Y and get cured but it's not like that. It's often that people have a set of symptoms, they treat the worst of it, they deal with side effects due to those medications, and chip away at their liver for the rest of their life to live a somewhat normal life, but not necessarily normal. Pretty much no one is getting cured witht these daily pills. They're getting serious treatments that sometimes have serious side effects.
While true psychiatric medicine treats symptoms and not diseases, there's a shit ton of human variation and some people have little to no side effects from some medications.
That's the whole reason doctors are so quick to change prescriptions. It's just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. But that doesn't mean they won't find something that works.
Yeah, it's just management, but that's better than it being unmanaged.
I'm not saying that OP shouldn't manage it, but I am saying that OP shouldn't struggle trying to self diagnose when they could just tell a psychiatrist their symptoms in plain and honest language.
“They don’t have a pill to magically treat bipolar disorder”
Excuse me, what? They do have pills that treat bipolar just fine, quite a few of them. Without those pills, I’d probably be dead. With them, I lead a normal, boring life that I quite enjoy.
Maybe you shouldn’t spread misinformation online. It can and will hurt people.
Sure, they "treat" bipolar disorder, but they also treat other diagnosis with similar symptoms. They're mostly treating symptoms, not the bipolar disorder, but the argument is a semantic one.
Look up your drug and see if it's used with any other illnesses. You'll likely find that it's proven effective with other psychotic disorders if it's an antipsychotic, or other mood disorders if it's a mood stabilizer. If we're talking lithium then it's mostly just bipolar disorder, but you still might see that used for treatment resistant depression.
Whether you say your medicine treats bipolar disorder or not is mainly semantics. They're treating the worst of your symptoms that interfere with your life specifically. The diagnosis often matters a hell of a lot less than what symptoms you describe to your doctor. There's a reason why bipolar people aren't all given the same drugs.
And as for what i'm suggesting to OP, they should be telling their psychiatrist their symptoms rather than focusing on what diagnosis it could be. That's my core point. Even if they got diagnosed with bipolar disorder, that doesn't mean they should necessarily take the same thing as yourself.