Mental Illnesses Intersect

As awareness and knowledge about different mental disorders becomes more common, it is easy to forget that many people suffer from more than one problem which makes it harder to isolate any individual one and more difficult to predict similarities across people. Among other things, this forgetfulness makes it harder for people, myself included, to understand their own needs, treatment, and progress.

For instance, between my bipolar 2 and anxiety, I feel that serotonin reuptake inhibitors actually reduce, rather than exacerbate, my hypomania because my anxiety feeds into irritability and how wired or excited I may feel, and that medication type significantly reduces my anxiety. On the other hand, there are negative interactions that happens between my success with bipolar disorder and medication and with my attitude towards drugs. I used recreational drugs before ever being on medication, so it's harder for me to be patient with medications- to wait before making judgments, to not think I should just take more if it's not working yet or enough (even if the medication is an SSRI or antipsychotic). I also probably have the attitude I do towards drugs because of how often I get depressed (as well as because of impulse control issues due to ADHD), and I chase the "high" of hypomania as if it were a drug; it's hard for me to see hypomania as the problem it can be.

Other problems include not being able to tell whether an antidepressant isn't working well enough or whether I just have such bad self-esteem issues that they will continue to put me in a low mood regardless of any medication, and being vulnerable to relapse into self-harming, even if I'm only mildly depressed, because of impulse control issues.

There’s also the issues with treatment. If I say I use drugs I can be denied treatment not just for my ADHD, but possibly altogether. This makes it hard to be open about things like sometimes hearing voices while high but still not wanting to be sober. And there just weren’t any resources for me when I was somewhat traumatized by a bad “candyflip” trip. Combining acid and a molecule which is just methamphetamine with extra steps in an unfamiliar forest with a lot of acquaintances and strangers while in a questionable mental state, it turns out, is a bad time. Everything was covered in bugs and I thought I may have murdered a very large spider everyone was keeping an eye on (although later on I believe I confirmed it was just mud). I also felt compelled to keep talking to people so that a peripheral-vision “presence” entity, which I could NEVER successfully explain the terrifyingness of, would not reappear, but I must have been a pain to talk to because I’d stop many of my sentences halfway through due to thinking suddenly that people already knew what I was going to say, so there was no point in saying it. This experience fucked me up for months and either triggered or worsened my bipolar disorder. But to professionals it’s just a bad trip, of course drugs fuck you up, so what did I need help with except not doing drugs?

Another issue with treatment is that it means I need both therapy and medication in the best case scenario, which can be expensive and time consuming; it also means I likely only have time enough to talk about a few of many things that need addressing at any appointment. When shit hits the fan, that can cause a lot of backup and build up extra distress.

These issues might be familiar to some people. But they might also not be for many others who still have interacting mental health conditions, and that’s part of the issue too- with so many different disorders and presentations per disorder, there are so many different kinds of combinations that it can be equally difficult to understand each unique situation. Ultimately, neither the mental health institutions nor outreach and awareness efforts are adequately addressing the people like us who suffer from multiple interacting mental health problems, and it causes a lot of people to struggle more than they need to.

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