What’s wrong with me

I was only 8 when the mood swings began, looking back, that was just the beginning. Doctors put it down to early on set puberty. But was it the warning signs of something more sinister. Then when my periods came, at the age of 11 my moods accelerated, swinging this way and that way every single day and week till the week of my period where my mood suddenly calmed. I’d still have the occasional moods swing, but nowhere near as bad as when I was off my period. Then I turned 16, and the mood swings took a sinister turn, I took my first overdose. I felt so very low and depressed that I couldn’t see a way out of my ever desperate situation, so I tried to escape via an OD. I had already been self harming for a year at this point, just scratches so nobody put two and two together, they were all getting five. Till I got myself to the hospital and admitted I needed help. I was given the option of taking fluoxetine or a 3 day stay in the hospitals mental health ward. Well my parents didn’t know what id done and were expecting me home that night, so I chose the pills. Worst mistake ever.

On fluoxetine my mood swings went lower and lower so they upped the dose, and my mood swings tanked. I took myself off them against the advice of my child psychiatry team, but had full support of my parents who had witnessed the decline in my mood since going on this particular anti-depressant. So I just did therapy for a while, then when I got moved to the adult section of the mental health team when I left home, I got put on a different anti-depressant after barely being listened to by the very same psychiatrist who put me on the fluoxetine. What was I to expect, he was not a listener by nature. Then when he retired, at roughly the age of 19, I got a locum who in one appointment diagnosed me with the biggest diagnosis of my life. Borderline Personality Disorder. Everything finally made sense. Children are rarely if ever diagnosed with it despite childhood environment being a major fundamental key player in why people develop BPD, genetics being the other thing and brain anatomy being the third.

I’d experienced by that point, multiple counts of sexual violence AND abuse of various sorts. So my environmental factors which started at 8, could have been accountable for my mood swings. But no one ever pieced it all together, after all I was the first in the family to be diagnosed with BPD. That and no one had all of the pieces, except for me. Some may have had one or two pieces of the jigsaw, but no one held them all except for me and I didn’t even know of BPD’s existence until I was diagnosed and told to research it.

Then a few years later I got duel diagnosed with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as well. Imagine my state when I learned it didn’t have a cure either, just remission same as BPD. But that remission hope got smashed when I got told by a psychiatrist I would be well into my fifties before I would be in remission for BPD. I am determined to prove him wrong as i am only in my late twenties now but so far its not going so well. My moods are still a roller coaster to this day. And the psychiatrists cannot find a drug to help with the symptoms, other than one antipsychotic from 1965 flupentixol combined with the slightly more modern antipsychotic aripiprazole.