I am new here. I am 51 and I am in recovery from complex long mental illness. I am feeling good and positive today, so this is why I have joined this site, and I am posting this, and I am reaching out to connect with the world. I can appreciate that I feel good today, even though I can’t explain why. Today I am grateful, I am interested in doing things and I wanted to get out of bed. I am relieved I feel this way again after feeling flat and depressed for the last 10 days. When I feel good it feels so good not to be depressed. Everything is different for me when my mood is good. I have more thoughts, my thoughts are positive, normal, enthusiastic, I am curious, interested and wanting to engage in the world around me and with people, everything is easy to do, showering is easy, cleaning is easy, preparing food is easy, shopping is easy, and I have ideas of so many things I might want to do, and I talk more, my brain is awake and active again and I want to talk, I notice the world around me that I wasn’t noticing when I am depressed, and I am engaging in normal activities. When I am feeling depressed, I can't think of anything to talk about with people and talking is difficult and everything feels hard to do, having a shower is hard, going to the shops is hard, every little thing is hard. Today I now hope that I can continue to feel good like this and I don’t get flat and then depressed again, but I know I will. I have been monitoring my mood over the last year and trying to gain insight into why it changes, but I can’t find any. I wish I knew what causes my mood to feel so good for a week or two or three or even 6 weeks at a stretch, but I haven’t been able to find the reason, and then I seem to get depressed again for no reason that I can see. At least I know now that I can say that my depressed mood ends up improving again, even if I do nothing and I have weeks of lying in bed doing nothing and disengaged from life, that it will get better eventually even doing nothing, if I just wait it out. I also appreciate that in the last year I have had more periods of time where my mood is good compared to when it is depressed. It might be close to 60:40 in proportions of time spent good/normal/better than good compared to flat and depressed but this is better than being flat/depressed all the time. I feel that this is an important thing to pass onto other people that are suffering from feeling depressed, is that it eventually gets better, even if it doesn’t seem like it will at the time, and it can get better even if you do nothing or nothing seems to be working, your mood will change with time. Change is inevitable, nothing stays the same in life.
I have a long lived experienced of mental illness that culminated in a period of psychosis that lasted for about a year and ended about 2 years ago now. The psychosis was during a time of high stress and difficult life decisions. I had lost my career, my job and my financial independence. I have had mental illness since a teenager. The diagnosis now is Bipolar 1 due to the time I spent paranoid, delusional and in psychosis. Prior to that it was Treatment resistant depression, Unipolar depression, Bipolar 2 (medication induced hypomania). Whether there are also labels of ASD or ADD as well, I am not sure as it is all so complicated.
I know I am in recovery now and I appreciate this. I am not sure what the future holds. I have tried a few things this year to build a life for myself again. I tried to study but that didn't work out and I am ok with that. It helped me realise that getting a qualification isn't going to help me get my confidence back and get a job or reintegrate with the world again. It also helped me realise that my mental illness has actually caused me some disability that has significantly affected me and that getting back to normal has been taking quite a long time and that the new normal may need to be different to the old normal, and that I may have to lower my expectations on myself during recovery. I discovered that the way forward is to reconnect with family members that I stopped interacting with during my illness. I carried a lot of shame and guilt related to my behaviours while I was unwell with delusions and psychosis. My behaviour was influenced by the delusions I believed, and I am not sure how I could have changed it. I must acknowledge the progress I have made this year compared to last year and the year before that. I am not ‘mentally well’ yet, but I am doing better this year than last few years. 2022 and 2023 were ‘bad’ years where I was delusional, paranoid, manic, depressed and psychotic. After the psychosis resolved at the end of 2023, I was flat and depressed until August 2024 where I experienced about 6 weeks of being good or ‘too good’ which started with hypomania. I went into hospital after a week of hypomania because I was worried that I wasn’t sleeping much at all and I feared becoming psychotic again if I didn’t sleep enough and I wasn’t sleeping much no matter what I tried and I had a few abnormal thoughts that worried me that my thinking might become unreal. I spent 3 weeks in hospital to try and improve my sleep which eventually it settled, and my mood become flat and depressed again. In the last year I have had periods of hypomania which feel great, but then there is the disappointment when it doesn’t last, and I become flat and depressed again. I feel like I am waiting for my mood to change again, like I have no control over it and I can’t pinpoint what causes me to feel better for a week or a few weeks and energised, interested, enthusiastic and then why I am flat and depressed for weeks where I can’t think of anything I want to do, nothing is interesting, and I just lie on the bed, I don’t even want to listen to music or watch tv, and it is an effort to do simple things like prepare a meal and have a shower or go to the shop, until it then changes again and I feel good or ‘better than good’ again.
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