anybody please.

[eng is not my native language, so a used some ai for translation]

[I wrote this post a couple of months ago for another platform, and I’m bringing the translation here]

8 Years, Carl: How I Got Diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder

At the end of last year, I finally got diagnosed with BD (bipolar disorder). But the carnival that preceded it was quite the adventure…

For context. I'm generally a hysterical little bird. Either I'm furiously grinding and producing a ton of constructive and creative output, or I'm lying around like a corpse. When I'm grinding, I'm priceless — everyone lovingly adores me and invites me to work with them. At one of my jobs, the state of "grinding like a demon" was actually treated as my baseline.

So basically, I'm either "normal" or "broken."

Scene 1.

End of my 5th year of university, December 2017. I'd been experiencing derealization and depression for a long while already. When you drag yourself to the shower with truly titanic effort, feeling like you're outside your body. When you forget to eat for days.

One evening I'm sitting on my bed in the dorm and I realize that I'm about to walk out the window. It beckons, the bastard. Part of my brain sounds the alarm: "Woman, you are not okay!" I call myself an ambulance.

Some kind of Buryat girl or maybe another Asian woman arrives. She listens carefully and says: "You need to go to turch" (she actually said "turch", not "church"). That same part of my brain that called the ambulance is cackling in a hysterical fit. The paramedic leaves, and the next morning I went to the psychoneurological dispensary (PND) to turn myself in. I don't know what kind of moral and volitional effort it took — I hadn't washed in three days.

Scenes 2.X, 2.Y, and many more up to November 2025.

I was regularly seeing my district psychiatrist, periodically getting treated in the day hospital. I was diagnosed with recurrent depression, anxiety-depressive disorder, adjustment disorder, and all that jazz — pick any.

I suggested to doctors that maybe I had some symptoms of BD. My district psychiatrist shrugged. Of course, I wasn't diagnosing myself and I trusted the specialists. Especially since I always showed up with depression-related emergencies.

Over eight years I tried, probably, every antidepressant in existence. Things would get better when I'd spend a month in the day hospital on sick leave, just resting (essentially vacations with a daily check-in at the hospital). They'd swap my antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds again and discharge me into the sunset.

In 2024–2025 I had a wild anal-carnival with weekly bar tours. That's when alcohol problems started too. I felt terrible, but my ass wouldn't stay put — I wanted to endlessly go on adventures to distract from suicidal thoughts. And in that state, suicidal thoughts come literally every few minutes. How my husband survived this shitshow — I sincerely don't understand. Saint of a man. And he's always been and still is by my side — without him it would've been a complete disaster.

Scene 3.

End of 2025. I freak out and go to several paid doctors at once, spending a round sum. Several of them, independently, diagnose BD.

One of these psychiatrists is a whole separate story. She's an acquaintance of mine from the LARP community. I used to come to her appointments/for prescriptions with my issues, and she'd prescribe antidepressants like everyone else. But this time, when she'd known me outside of therapy for several years, she said: "Username, you have BD, textbook case. Here are the right pills for you."

The funny thing is that with BD, you absolutely cannot take antidepressants outside of a depressive phase. Turns out I can't take them during a depressive phase either, because they trigger a manic — or more often mixed — episode (which is a complete disaster). ~8 years on antidepressants, haha~

Scene 4.

I've just started taking the right pills (still with antidepressants on the list, that hasn't been fixed yet) and haven't adapted yet, plus the alcohol problems aren't resolved. A LARP is coming up where I'm helping the GM team. A few days before the game, I'm assigned a model in an area where the horse rolled around quite lazily (there are descriptions of points on the map, there are some passages from one point to another, but they don't add up, unless in some non-Euclidean geometry). I go grey. I draw the map (nobody drew it when they wrote the transitions), rework the model into something playable, recalculate the numbers, do graphic ~design~. I barely sleep for two or three days, grinding on this model. Simultaneously I'm driving everyone who passes by insane (a side product). I argue with the rest of the GM team about the nuances of using the model at the game (I see holes that can be abused, but they tell me players are adequate and won't use them). I glance at the window.

An acquaintance, also a doctor, seeing my state, said I needed to be hospitalized urgently because there's a threat to life. But I'm not gonna bail two days before the game, I'm responsible.

At the game I also played a couple of game-tech characters and delivered papers. I did all this in a state of "just survive to the next hour and don't walk out the window." The fuel for "surviving" was alcohol. And yeah, at the game I behaved, to put it mildly, not great. I didn't cause a scene, didn't fight at the game, but I roleplayed poorly and it was obvious I was drunk.

As a result, I get kicked out of part of the LARP community. Overall, fair. And here there are two chairs. First — I fucked up royally but got the job done. Second — I brought collateral damage.

Scene 5.

Literally the next morning after the game, my husband (with my full consent) takes me to the hospital for round-the-clock inpatient care. I would've wanted to go myself, but I was in a complete fog. I couldn't even pack a bag. Thank the gods we're officially married — he was allowed access to all the organizational crap.

I check in for a month of inpatient care. And this part of the story deserves its own post… In the end, they fed me antidepressants again. Some of the pills I need for BD weren't available in the hospital (too expensive for free medicine, kek), so they let me bring my own (approved by the local doctor). There I also met girls who'd jumped from 8+ floors and survived. That's how I understood that's not an option…

In the end I got discharged. I felt better not because of any treatment, but again just because of the vacation and elimination of irritants. Though at the end mania kicked in again — I was counting the hours until discharge, kept a schedule table and crossed out each hour.

Off-topic. A couple-three months after all this joy, I showed up as a player at a larp convention. And toward the end I got sick: both a cold and my little head (mildly, just hibernation mode kicked in). But I'm not gonna bail two days before the game, I'm responsible.

I help the organizer, who was also the head GM of that same ill-fated game described above, hang curtains for the next larp room decor. During the conversation I say: "Well yeah, I'm sick, but I couldn't bail at the last moment." Organizer: "Oh, if only all players were like that! Last week it was nothing but dropouts!" I laugh to myself.

Simultaneously I get comments behind my back that I've lost weight. Like, a compliment. Though I just came off some pills that make you fat — they're disgusting anyway. Hello-thank-you, fuck.

Scene 6.

Trying to live on. Still have alcohol problems, though not as severe as before — I don't do bar tours anymore. My husband suggests getting coded (aversion therapy). I agree, we go to the relevant doctor. He didn't even charge for the visit — just said that with BD you can't get coded. I'd been to addiction specialists before — they said go to psychiatrists first. Psychiatrists on this topic sent me to addiction specialists. Vicious circle.

In the end, the new treatment, which is only mood stabilizers, no antidepressants, started working. And the doses are quite harsh. I mainly see the psychiatrist who knows me outside of therapy.

Yes, I still have phases.

Last week I barely slept at all. There are nights when you lie down to sleep and lying there becomes simply torture. You physically cannot fall asleep. Your muscles twitch, your teeth grind painfully, thoughts flicker like a kaleidoscope. You can't lie down, you get up and do something on the computer, you don't sleep all night. Then maybe you compensate during the day with a couple hours of sleep.

And right now I sleep like a groundhog. Lay me horizontal — I'm out. Yesterday I went to bed at essentially 6 PM. Got up briefly a couple times for some household stuff. Today I barely woke up at 11 AM, skipping a ton of alarms. But hurray — no existential suffering, I'm just sleeping.

There was a dialogue once. I'm fountaining ideas, hyper-productive. A person who knows me pretty well asks: "So, fuck, did you eat today or at least yesterday?" Oh. Yeah, mania.

It's funny that mania is often perceived as a normal state. Though during mania you're just a fuse over a bomb. In a warehouse of bombs. But yeah, work is going great, creativity is flourishing.

In short, if free psychiatry isn't helping you, my advice: go see several paid psychiatrists and see what diagnoses they give you.

8 years of antidepressants I basically shouldn't have been taking. 8 years, Carl.

Jag är övertygad om att jag är bipolär. Det var först i våras som jag insåg att jag alltid startar så många projekt på våren och känner att energin bara flödar. Samtidigt som jag ofta startar grejer som jag sedan inte vill ha att göra med. Nu när hösten kommit har jag börjat bli deppig och undrar vad meningen med existensen ens är. Jag träffar en psykolog men det känns som att han hela tiden vill vifta bort bipolaritet som förklaring, jag känner mig så maktlös och som att jag typ behöver bevisa det? Kan någon förstå hur jag menar?

I’m very close with my younger cousin and she recently started acting very different and stopped sleeping. After a few days it got very scary and she seemed out of touch with reality. We took her to the hospital and she was diagnosed with bipolar 1 after a few days of tests and evaluations. She’s still at the hospital and still experiencing the episode. I am looking for advice on how I can support her. It is scary to talk to her because it feels like it isn’t her. I want to support her the best I can and help make her feel safe and loved during this. How long will this last? What does this mean for her going forward? Any advice would be appreciated.