NOTICE: This article neither promotes nor discourages an individual’s use of the aftmentioned psychotropic medications. Every medication affects every person differently. It is the individual’s choice to ………..

Crikey, in our litigious society it’s preordained as more ethically offensive NOT to post this sort of cautionary banter than to waste precious seconds of our lives with an exercise in common sense. Both my seconds and my moral outrage have a shelf life (the loomimg spectre of my inescapable death) and expending these precious reserves on something so reflexively obvious is so much grander an offensively ethical faux pas.

That said, I have one addiction and overcame one addiction. Let’s begin with overcoming … giggity.

After Clare’s death at the end October of 2016 and my own hospitalization in early October of 2016, I was in an exceptionally precarious situation. I was exhausted by a monumentally uncharted psychotic episode (psych hospital) and a terrifying loss-of-muscle-responsivity crisis (medical hospital). When I was discharged from the med hospital, I learned of Clare’s death a few days later. On discharge I had a piece of apparatus to guide me home. I was on a walker, properly learning to walk again. How annoying.

While learning to walk again was high on the priority list, finding a way to manage my anxiety. The thing about my anxiety is it’s entirely separate from my bipolar symptoms. Some symptoms I experience during a bipolar crisis are completely separate from the causal root of the bipolar symptoms. Symptoms like paranoia are consequential of sever depression and when the depressive symptoms are brought to a manageable level the paranoia dissipates. Anxiety is not one of these consequential symptoms.

Because of this I needed to work with both Diane and Deb. My WRAP didn’t have an preparatory skills or mechanisms for this crisis; I’ve never had a girlfriend die while battling off psychosis and learning to walk again. This is a very unique situation which I hope isn’t repeated. The salience is I had nothing to draw upon from prior experience to help with the severe, escalating anxiety.

With Diane I explored my DBT training and all the years she guided me through painful crises. With Deb I kept on top of my excellent med regimen, including my medication for anxiety. It’s gabapentin that works for my anxiety and had been successfully useful for four years at that time. With this new triggering confluence of stressors spiking my independent-from-bipolar anxiety symptoms, Deb and I had to work together to find something significant to take the edge of the anxiety … before the anxiety could jack my bipolar symptoms into unavoidable reality.

Manifesting dangerous bipolar symptoms is the risk of not treating my anxiety symptoms.