Music Banter - Official Mental Health Thread

There is no topic that I can find for this so I guess I'll put it here for people to discuss mental illnesses and what ever else comes in here.

I guess I wanted to make this because not a lot of people really understand it. Even those of us who are diagnosed.

When I was younger I was mistakenly diagnosed with ADHD and medicated for it before they realized I was bipolar. I think I was around 10 or 11 when I was diagnosed, which is a really young age to be diagnosed with it.

All though I was diagnosed at such a young age, getting it from my father, nobody really properly explained it to me. All that I was told is that you have ups and downs, just strong mood swings that were stronger than normal. That's not the full truth. Let me start by explaining that I was told that I'm bipolar and manic depressive. Now, I thought I knew that there was a close relation to the two mental illnesses, I thought bipolar essentially meant that you'd have manic depression, but I didn't know it's because they are literally the same thing. Manic depression is the old medical term that is no longer used for bipolar.

The explanation I got, and probably the common perception, is drastically over simplified. There are two huge mood swings that you have with bipolar. One is depression and the other is mania. They typically work in opposition of each other. Depression is self explanatory, the mania is where you get these days of narcissism. You feel untouchable, you feel like you can do anything. You can't sleep, you feel more focused, you try to be more active and often times you may also get irritable.

There are also two different types of bipolar, although I guess it's not always as clear and some people fall somewhere between the two. Bipolar II is the more mild version, where you have hypomania, a less extreme version of mania. I think I was diagnosed with bipolar II but I don't remember, I honestly never got enough treatment for it, obviously since I never fully understood it until recently. Bipolar I is where you get extreme mania which can make you blatantly delusional and borders on being schizophrenic. The big difference between schizophrenia and bipolar mania is that schizophrenic people hallucinate things, while bipolar people don't. They just have ****ed up thoughts that tell them unreal things every once in a while. Personally I know I've experienced this before so don't think I'm bipolar II. Me going through extreme mania is the time that I thought I was the devil and I got kicked out of heaven for ****ing too many angels. That was a fun night, scared a lot of people though. For the longest time I thought I was schizophrenic because of that, both illnesses share symptoms, but nope. I'm obviously the better of the crazies.

Another thing that I've learned is that bipolar is not only hereditary, but it's also had a strong link towards child hood abuse. It's often been connected with people who have PTSD.

One of the most important things I've learned recently about this is it's connection to hypersensitivity. Now, I've never been officially diagnosed with hypersensitivity but it's been suggested that I have it and after looking into it I'm dead sure I have it, it's unmistakable. Hypersensitivity is where some of your senses are hypersensitive to certain things. For example, there are certain textures I just can't stand. The biggest issue, which is the most common, is that some tapping noises will really really get me irritated. Living under people, hammering sounds, sounds of a basketball bouncing outside, Nickelback, they will piss me off more than they ever should. When I looked into it I saw that it had a really close relation with autism so I was always afraid of really getting that diagnosis. I've recently learned that hypersensitivity is also a very strong symptom of bipolar disorder and PTSD. So boooyaaaaa I'm not on the autism spectrum. Hopefully.

A lot of this is important information to me, that I guess I wanted to share not as like an attention grab, or... what ever I'd get accused of. Just kind of to put this info out there because it pisses me off that I've dealt with these things my whole life and I never truly was given a proper understanding of what it is I'm going through. I'm guessing I'm probably not the only one here who's dealing with mental health issues or Nickelback and maybe this info will click with somebody else and they can better understand.