It's just a mood (disorder)

The therapist has convinced me I have a mood disorder. It's slight, the therapist says, but it's real. What's mood disorder? It is something that falls between BiPolar II (less manic than Bipolar I, but with the cycling between moods), and more serious than occasional depression. Mind you I first heard about this one week ago and went loony at the thought. What began as ADD is now a diagnosis for a mood disorder. It makes sense. My whole life I have suspected that I had some kind of chemical imbalance. It just seemed odd that I could be in a room of people I liked and who were having fun, and just feel this dead, lifeless, boring, non-stimulated feeling. I felt it at weddings, on simchas torah, and at times when everything was just super. I'm not sure if it's related but I could cry after seeing a touching McDonald's commercial of the cheesy end to a feel good movie that went straight to video, but cannot cry on hearing of terrible tragedies or sad events. I did cry when my grandparents died so I know I'm capable of the emotion. But I digress. Wherever I have gone my entire life, I have experienced this disconnect to the current mood. I have a hard time feeling happy, though I have felt many, many moments of extreme happiness, joy, optimism, and confidence. Yet, these are always counterbalanced with moments when none of those feelings apply. So it's a mood disorder, aggravated by ADD, and exacerbated by what the therapist says are genuine areas of genius. I never heard that one before, but I've shown the therapist some of my writing and the therapist feels the genius is definitely there. Not that you can tell, by the way, from this meandering drivel. What's the answer? The therapist and my psychiatrist have a conversation and they decide a mood stabilizer is the answer. I'm already taking Welbutrin, an anti-depressant, but the consensus is, it isn't working. Mood stabilizers come in all types and flavors. The point is to allow ME to control my moods and emotions, not the arbitrary levels of brain chemistry at any given time. With the mood stabilizer in my system, I don't have to worry that my response will be to a particular event or situation. Although I didn’t have the vocabulary or insight at the time to understand, I was worried on the way to my wedding that I wouldn't smile enough or feel happy. Fortunately, everything was fine, which put my marriage off to a happy and thankfully continuing start. so the answer is a mood stabilizer. The drug of choice is Lamictal. Supposedly this is a wonder drug. Reading some of the online commentary supports this claim. Benign and effective, Lamictal is usually used for people with seizure disorders. It's also one powerful mother f-er drug. Supposedly, if I am to be staying in this drug for a prolonged period of time, I would need to carry some type of ID letting medical personnel that I am taking Lamictal in the event that something happens to me and renders me unconscious. Pretty scary. Also, a very serious side-effect is a type of rash that can be life-threatening and cause physical debilitation if left untreated. Fortunately, I've been on the drug a few days, and although I feel nothing yet, it hasn't given me the feared rash. I'm still taking the Wellbutrin, though I'm being eased off of it. The Lamictal is supposed to cause nasal congestion, which i have, nausea, blurred vision and motor coordination problems , which I do not have. On the message board, a few people mentioned that it could impede verbal acuity and articulation, two side effects that to me would be completely devastating. The dr. told me he/she has heard no such thing. Relived at hearing that, I've been taking it the past few days. It's too early to know what if any effect there will be. Another side effect I heard about is vivid dreams. This is a typical side effect of SSRIs, and evidently is common with Lamictal. I have been having weird dreams the past few days, though I'm hesitant at this time to blame it on the drugs. I frequently have weird dreams. I hope this is all going somewhere constructive.

Good times. Bad times.

A few good weeks...then a really bad one. See for yourself:

Dear Dr. XXXXXX,

Shavua Tov. I really do want to speak with you, though I haven't had the time to return your call. It may just be more efficient to write down what I'm feeling.

Forgive me because I do tend to go on, but cutting to the chase, I'm rapidly cycling between depression and relative calm, I am feeling absolutely incensed that I am going through all this, when I feel it was all pretty much in check as XXXX, the day of my first appointment with Dr. YYYYYYYY. I am furious at Dr. YYYYYYY who I feel is completely detached and seemingly unable to see a therapeutic approach that goes beyond the way I'm feeling at the particular moment I'm in his office, I am feeling as if the Wellbutrin is doing nothing and I'm considering going off of it, because....well, why the hell am I taking pills?, and last, I am absolutely furious over my complete inability to respond to the typical, albeit very, frustrating things that happen to everyone else on this planet without becoming completely unhinged and falling into depression.

I'm frustrated, I am very behind on my work, I feel as if all this is going nowhere, and on top of it all, I can't believe that I'm going through this when I was doing so well until the day I met Dr. YYYYYYYYYY and started taking pills.

If you want to know, and if you can stand to read through it, allow me to present this introductory narrative of the events, which bring me to writing this email. I'll ultimately get to the point I've just made above:

This morning, I came home from shul approximately 7:15 a.m. and went down to my home office and noticed along one of the basement walls, water was streaming down from the ceiling. Long story short, I find the source of the leak, realize I need to call a roofer, and do what it takes to catch the water at the source so it doesn't destroy my house and office. In the midst of my frustration and strong irritation over the damage, thinking what it would cost, blah, blah, blah, I yell at my 8-year old son.

He chose the wrong moment to mouth off to me.

My son is very (very) smart, very independent minded, and extremely volatile. He's sensitive, serious, and very detail-fixated. Evidently, me screaming at him set him off. A short while later, after waiting for 15 minutes at a bus stop with my oldest son for a bus that never came, I return home to learn that my 8-year-old is having a meltdown for several reasons, among which he wanted a water bottle that was A) unopened, and B) cold, when we were only able to offer him one or the other.

So I'm attempting to calmly negotiate a settlement with him, at 8:20 a.m., he's supposed to be at school already, I had just stood on a rainy bus stop with my other son for 15 minutes for no reason, my wife is on edge because she is not eating due to a medial appointment later that day, and our Spanish speaking cleaning lady is in my kitchen yammering into a cell phone because my wife had been unable to communicate to her the schedule for the day and needed a translator. Meanwhile, I desperately needed to start working, and on top of everything, still upset about the roof and rain in the house.

Mind you, I'm not actually thinking about any of these things at the moment, but my son takes it one step too far and I absolutely lose it. I throw a water bottle across the kitchen, which explodes and soaks the counter.

This is the big no-no in my life. I have a long history of absolutely losing it. I embarrass my wife and she gets extremely upset when this happens. Although I have almost completely ceased such outbursts since last XXXXXX, all has resumed since early XXXX when I began the treatments for ADD. In fact, my wife brought this up to me the other day in the context of: “I think about how wonderful you've been all year and I think, 'That was nice.'"

In the throes of my fury, my wife extricates me from the situation by inviting me to go downstairs. I quietly apologize to her and then stomp down to my office in an attempt to begin my day.

From there, my day is uneventful, even relatively pleasant, until much later. A 1/2 hour before Shabbos, I had just bailed gallons of water from the bottom of a clogged shower so I can unclog it with Draino, on the recommendation of the hardware store guy (only later, after reading the label, did I discover the bailing was entirely unnecessary and the guy was wrong), and I go down to the kitchen to overhear my wife mention to one of my daughters that there are no potatoes in the cholent because she ran out.

In that split second I think: I've been home all day, you could have told me to go and buy some potatoes...cholent without potatoes tastes like industrial sludge. I stupidly stand there with a look of amazement and say out loud, "Why didn’t you tell me. I can't believe it. That's a total waste." My wife hears this after, unbeknownst to me, the children had just harangued her dozens of trivial complaints after a long, difficult day for most of which she hadn't eaten, along with dealing with a number of other things. She starts to cry and storms upstairs.

This is the worst possible thing that can happen. I try as hard as I can to never piss off or insult my wife and would go to any length to avoid making her feel bad. Making her cry is the absolute last thing I ever, ever want to do and have a fantastic track record. But now I've made her cry and there's nothing I can do about it except run after her apologizing. She wants to be alone and goes to take a shower.

Here's where my point begins:

I get angry. I'm pissed. It gets bigger and bigger. Soon I'm running around the house yelling and screaming for the kids to pick up all their things. I go back to my room and I just feel incredibly furious. Essentially at this point, I'm slowly becoming non-functional.

This is what happens to me: I feel this fog, almost a weight descend into my head. I feel burning mad and can barely bring myself to talk to anyone. I slow down. I can't get ready or dressed at any semblance of a normal pace. It's painful. It just feels like intense emotional pain inside accompanied by a numbness in my senses that doesn't go away.

Even though my wife is out of the shower and already over it, I'm not. I’m not talking because I can't. I can't think coherently and everything to me is just terrible. My thoughts center on, "You're a loser, you can’t do anything, your business is a disaster, your professional life is pathetic, you're pathetic, everything sucks, etc."

My wife is talking to me and I grunt or reply in monosyllabics. Ultimately, I get dressed, very long after Shabbos began, and my two youngest kids essentially drag me to shul. Even then, they're talking and I can barely process what they're saying let alone respond.

This continues until I get to shul. To my surprise, I discover that I’m not as late as I had imagined and actually get to daven ma’ariv with the minyan. I feel much better, so much so, that when I get home, I ask my wife if she's my friend and she cryptically answers, "Am I YOUR friend??" I have no idea what she means, we have company for dinner, and the meal goes off just fine.

I go to shul the next morning, with a sort of neutral feeling: not happy, not depressed, Daven the whole davening and do all the things I'm supposed to do. My wife and kids are in shul, there's a Kiddush and my wife asks me if i want to go. I really don't. I'm not feeling social and defer to her. She says she doesn't care so and I say, “Fine, let's go home.”

While we’re walking, she says to me, "What was going on last night?" I have no idea what she is talking about.

To avoid having to write the entire dialogue, my wife tells me that I'm always pissed, she tries as hard as she can to anticipate what is going to set me off, and that I just seemed all angry last night and she had no idea what she had done.

.....OK. Tachlis. I can't be this person. I'm have not always been this way. Yes, my life has been rife with these mood episodes and I'll concede I may have a slight mood disorder. But this is getting bad. It has been this way, excluding the months of XXXXXX to XXXXXXX, since the fall of XXXXX.

The cycling back and forth, the depression, the wheel spinning. I can stand this anymore.

Though at this moment I’m sort of OK, I do not feel as if I am not in control of my moods and emotions ever since I started this whole stupid ADD thing. I feel as if no forward momentum is happening, while I just fall deeper and deeper into dysfunctional behavior.

It is not good. I am not doing well. And I am at an absolute loss. But it is getting bad.

I’m afraid things are falling apart and my life was far from falling apart four months ago.

Please let me know what to do.

Thank you,
addingyears