I’m so frustrated. I discharged from the hospital in June of last year, and for a long time I stayed on the medications that were prescribed by Dr X. In March, I went through some trauma (which I have belabored in previous posts) so my outpatient psychiatrist decided to add 150mg of oxcarbazepine twice a day. My understanding was that I had just been through something awful, so the oxcarbazepine was going to be a temporary thing to get me through until I felt better. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I’m always med compliant and take what’s prescribed exactly as it’s prescribed, so I’m not going to just not take my meds, but I don’t want to be on oxcarbazepine. It’s a mood stabilizer, and it’s not fair that I have to be on a mood stabilizer when I have it on good authority that I’m not bipolar. I feel like being on a mood stabilizer means that my emotions are just random and not justified. I spent my entire childhood in a cult that taught that women’s emotions make us less-than, and we should never be allowed to make any important decisions. My kid brother is still in the cult and he always talks to me like I’m a small child and I make choices that are totally unpredictable and not based in logic in any way whatsoever, which is exactly what the group teaches that women do. Meanwhile, my mom has been telling everybody who would listen that I’m bipolar for years now, because that way she has an easy way to completely write off my emotions. If I’m bipolar, then my being suicidally depressed from ages 9 to 32 is just due to a chemical imbalance caused by genetics, and there’s no way that it has to do with me having actual trauma. I’ve told her that my doctors don’t think that I’m bipolar, and she always insists that they secretly think I am but just don’t want to tell me because it would hurt me too much. This completely lets her off the hook for her choices, and even goes so far as to make her a martyr. (“Poor [ApostateTurtle’s mom], she has a bipolar daughter. It’s so hard on her that she’s had to deal with her daughter being suicidal all this time. What a good mom for continuing to ‘love’ ApostateTurtle despite the fact that ApostateTurtle broke her mother’s heart!”)
So I didn’t want to be on the oxcarbazepine. At my last appointment, my outpatient psychiatrist lowered my olanzapine from 10mg to 5mg, which I was fine with. At today’s appointment, he suggested that we lower the olanzapine from 5mg to 2.5mg, which I was also fine with, but I asked if I could also start weaning off the oxcarbazepine that we started due to an emergency. He then explained that the long-term plan is for me to stop the olanzapine entirely (which I’m fine with) and replace it with oxcarbazepine. So basically he expects me to be on a mood stabilizer indefinitely. I really tried to argue with him that my problem is anxiety and not mood swings, but he insisted that oxcarbazepine isn’t just for bipolar disorder and he’s not saying I’m bipolar and he’s using the drug for anxiety, not mood swings. This would make sense if it weren’t for my whole life history. After all, oxcarbazepine can also be used for seizures and he’s not saying I’m epileptic. And olanzapine is an antipsychotic so that should be more emotionally triggering than a mood stabilizer. But Dr X told me that the olanzapine was for anxiety and not psychosis, so I believed it. It’s unreasonably hard for me to trust anyone who hasn’t been there for me every single day for a year, just because I have a lifetime of experience with my mother and she always says that they actually think I’m bipolar and they just aren’t telling me. My poor outpatient guy has been treating me since forever ago so you’d think I’d be able to trust him, and I mostly do, but when he decided to put me on this mood stabilizer, it feels like it’s confirming that he secretly thinks I’m just bipolar. I want to be off the mood stabilizer so I can do well and prove that I don’t need it. If I’m on the mood stabilizer, it feels like my accomplishments have the opposite effect and prove that the problem all along was my random and erratic intense emotions, and now that they’ve regulated them, I can live a normal life.
So I got out of the appointment and I cried. I never cry. My therapist would say that it’s good that I’m feeling my feelings instead of being dissociated from them, since usually I’m so dissociated that I can describe even my worst trauma with a completely blank facial expression. And I get it that I’m basically saying that I don’t want to be on a mood stabilizer because I irrationally believe that being on one proves that I’m irrational. But the whole thing sucks. Dr X said that literally the only thing significantly wrong with me was C-PTSD and my other problems (OCD tendencies, lack of executive skills, etc) were caused by the trauma. And I believed him, but I still feel like nobody believes me when I try to convey what he said. I also know that, technically, if I had had bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder (which I also don’t have) or whatever, it wouldn’t have been a solid reason for my parents to completely leave me for dead and proclaim themselves martyrs for doing so. Technically, when you get pregnant and decide not to get an abortion and not to give the child up for adoption, you are signing up for the responsibility of loving your offspring no matter what diagnosis they might end up with. Normally, parents love their kids even when they have incredibly severe brain injuries and are all but vegetative and require a ton of care. But do I know this on an emotional level? No. Apparently that’s called cognitive dissonance. All I know is that I’m on a mood stabilizer indefinitely, and that makes me feel like I’m fundamentally toxic and unlovable.
