The Forums › Forums › Ask The Community › How do I know if I am diagnosed correctly? Depression/ADD or Bipolar?? › Re: How do I know if I am diagnosed correctly? Depression/ADD or Bipolar??
I too have had a lot of downs and downs in the half century that I have been on this planet.
About 1988, after wrapping up my post doctoral work, I sought help and was diagnosed with depression. After a couple of years of useless talk therapy I asked my GP to refer me to a psychiatrist and started taking antidepressants. Unfortunately the psychiatrist died about six months later and my GP took over my drug (mis)management. For the next seven years I was in an antidepressant as he ramped up the dose of one drug the max only to admit defeat and try the same thing with another. All along I was suffering physical side effects and, especially on the last one, Serzone, visual and auditory hallucinations. At one point my GP took me off the maximum dose of Effexor one day and onto another drug the next. The crash was so bad I almost killed myself. After that he sent me to another psychiatrist to keep writing the scripts. All through this episode I never felt any relief from the depression. In fact I had never suffered so much in my life.
Fortunately my intellectual side is strong and has been my friend all along. I looked carefully at my life and saw that my career was in shambles, I was broke, I was lonely and very very unhappy. I also saw that there was no good future in the direction I was headed.
At this point I told the MDs that I was going to stop taking the drugs and they predicted disaster. My feeling was that things could hardly be worse than they were. I tapered my dose to zero over two weeks and noticed that each day as I took less I felt better. I sought help with a CBT therapist and I have never looked back. It’s pretty clear that ADHD was the issue all along and I’m starting on a new journey here.
I do have an important point to make that I think “Sam and I” and others should hear. It is your life and no one else’s. You need to keep yourself informed and ask yourself if what you are doing is helping you. I went so far as to make an appointment with another GP and got referred to a psychiatrist who is also a researcher at a major teaching hospital. I needed to talk to someone with a fresh mind, recent knowledge and no interest in justifying my original diagnosis and ongoing drug therapy. The problem for me is that antidepressants fog the mind — I became very complacent and compliant for far too long. Also, in some people, me for example, they cause depression and none of the MDs ever picked up on this.
Sam, you sound desperate and confused which is where I was many times. My friends and my cat were a big help in these times and so was the local pub. As a student of science, I bumped into Albert Einstein quite often, metaphorically of course. He is said to have defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. Perhaps the key to your recovery is there.
I hope this gives you something to think about and I wish you all the best.
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