The Beginning

This is only part one to my mental health journey. I’m currently 32 years old. Have been actively treating my brain since I was 27.

I feel like I will leave out important things and the story is too long for just one post.

Where do I begin?

Just a brief summary of my childhood, although I do not remember much. I moved around a lot the first four years of my life and my biological mother was not in my life. I feel I get a lot of my issues from her hereditarily but we will never really know. In second grade, I was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder. My parents immediately started me on medication. Adderall, Cocerta and Ritalin did not work. They found Strattera worked best, the only non-stimulant ADHD medication on the market at the time. I will do a whole post on this medication, but it’s important to remember the stimulants did not work; we will circle back to that later.

My life leading up to finally seeking out help was a mess. I was on Strattera until I was about 20 and in college because my dad told me, “You can’t be on that forever.” Naturally, I got majorly depressed, started skipping classes, eventually dropped out of school after 5 years of bouncing around majors and ended up being a barista in Grand Junction at the end. Of course at the time, I never aligned this with going cold turkey off my meds. I partied a lot and became a high functioning alcoholic to temper my brain’s overactivity. There will be a detailed post about my sober journey as well.

I would say going sober is what started my healing. I was married at the time and I chose to go sober because of him. Shortly after that, I got back on the Strattera I took for so many years before. It took 3 tries for my sobriety to stick because of me trying not to be on the medication. My first relapse was when I decided to treat my ADHD naturally (without doing much research at the time) and was off my medication and decided to be a wine sommelier (it was an excuse to drink, come on Ashley.) Second relapse was because of my divorce. I have been sober for 3 years now, but more on that later.

I got an evaluation done in 2019. They literally see one patient at a time in this big building and do all sorts of school-type testing. They barely asked me about my history. It was all very analytical. I was diagnosed at the time with ADHD, Unspecified Major Depressive Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Highly Sensitive Person. With these in mind, they had me take a true/false test called the The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) Test. It is about 500 questions, and they had “run out of scantron sheets” so I wrote down numbers 1-500 and did the test. The results came back inconclusive. Gee, I wonder why. I probably missed a number or two. But this test mostly helps diagnose bipolar disorder I & II, schizophrenia, depressive disorders, anxiety, OCD, etc. If you want to learn more about this test, you can read about it here. 

I didn’t do much with this at the time. But I have given that report to every provider after that. I started seeing a nurse practitioner in Grand Junction, CO at Mind Springs. With this report and the extensive history I gave her, she proceeded to diagnose me with bipolar II disorder. I am summarizing my journey and can get into the logistics of these diagnoses, but Google would be happy to do that for you too.

As with most providers, the first line of attack with any bipolar diagnosis is Lithium. Lithium messed me up big time. It didn’t do much for me, almost made me worse. I got very sick because it destroyed my thyroid. Took me almost a year to get back to normal once I was off of it. Side note: my current therapist (Shawn, you will read about him a lot in all my posts) says that the bipolar disorder diagnosis is thrown around so much these days, and most of the time not accurately. After my divorce and moving out of town, I was bumped up to bipolar 1 disorder and schizoaffective disorder. I was a mess when I first moved back, but I was on Prozac so I LITERALLY did not care about anything. It was great. My parents disagree, stating I stared at a wall most of the time and then would panic out of nowhere. I don’t know, I don't remember this and it was only about 3 years ago. It was bumped up because I had an episode of not sleeping for almost a week and my hallucinations were worse. Yes, I have had hallucinations and “distorted vision” since I was 16, I may share that later.

Jordan is my current nurse practitioner managing my medications and diagnoses. With my insurance, it is hard to find a clinical psychiatrist that can evaluate me, someday I will have to do that out of pocket but we are trying to figure it out together. She doesn’t think I have ADHD, she says all of these together can be textbook ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder.) She would call it Asperger's, but that diagnosis does not exist anymore. Hence why the stimulants didn't work (remember that part?) Strattera is prescribed off-label for autism.

Counting up the "diagnoses" they have given me over the years, we have:

• ADHD

• Generalized Anxiety Disorder

• Unspecified Major Depressive Disorder

• Bipolar II which evolved to Bipolar I Disorder

• Highly Sensitive Person

• Schizoaffective Disorder

• Autism Spectrum Disorder

Do I think I have all of these? Absolutely not. Shawn calls me neurodivergent. I HATE THAT WORD. I don’t know why, I don’t know if it’s because of social media glorifying mental health disorders but I absolutely hate it. I would like one answer and treat that, but I'm not in that wheel house right now. For now Shawn, Jordan and I are working it out ourselves and not using a label for it. I am on the maintenance dose of Strattera for now and taking supplements and making lifestyle changes to help with my mental health. I will be documenting here the research I have done and when I do get off big pharma meds, how well that does for me. 

See how bouncy and out of control this post was, that’s my brain! Part of this documentation is for me but I hope I can help others understand themselves too and that it will all be ok. I have been doing amazing for about a year, only a small depressive episode here and there. I will share all my secrets of what I have learned through my own research, what I have learned from others, and what I continue to learn along the way.

If you are willing to put in the work, it will get better.