So I had to go to my shrink yesterday. I have to check in now before he will refill the antipsychotics he put me on. I haven’t been so sure about them anyway. I’ve had some side effects that I don’t like, mainly the nervousness that I feel all of the time. We discussed it, and after an hour of going over everything in my history and what has been going on medically at this point, he decided to up my dose to twice a day with the Klonipin. Now, at first he wanted to wean me off of that all together, that was in the beginning though. Then he talked about going off the new drug (Abilify) all together, but then I’d just be right back to where I started, Lamotrigine, which seemed to have stopped working. So, now I’m taking anti-anxiety medication at 9am in the morning!
Back to the nervy feelings though. After much talk, in which I did reveal that I was even nervous to go and see my therapist, who I do like, he came up with an interesting theory. Abilify is designed to make one focus more effectively. If, for the past two years lets say, the Lamotrigine was not working effectively, then my mind was operating on a rather scattered arrangement. Like, having several projects going on at once that were all in the “incomplete” state. Many different ways for my mind to go at all times throughout the day perhaps. Now with my mind clear, settled and able to focus on one thing at a time, well… that in and of itself could be making me feel uncomfortable. Too much clarity, especially since he thinks that I personally have more of an awareness of my bipolar anyway.
That theory could also be carried over onto my therapist and those four walls as well. I tell him I feel uncomfortable because he knows too much about me and I’m a very private person, but what if its more along the lines of me now knowing that he knows. Like being more aware of what he thinks about all of this, of me, because he is just a person as well, he has ideas….My shrink said we were probably just getting into areas that I didn’t want to talk about and when I denied that his response was, “well you are uncomfortable just having him view your mood chart.” That was as close to a joke I’ve ever heard out of a psychiatrist, but it was an effective one.