My body is sluggish, my mind is fogged. I’ve been asleep, off and on, for the past 12 hours.
I think something is going on with my medication. The Lamictal was upped to 300mg about two months ago, but in the past couple of weeks I’ve been having . . . mental disturbances. It all began on Monday the 16th of February, a couple of days after I missed a dose of Risperdal. I began to have what I call “rational suicidal” thoughts . . . that is, thoughts about suicide that are not accompanied by a depressed mood. They came because I started to think of myself in some form of cost-benefit terms related to my family and friends. I couldn’t think of very much that I brought to the table with them, for various reasons I’ve detailed elsewhere in this Journal. I thought perhaps I would remove myself from the world, so that people could reminisce fondly about me rather than deal with the reality of my flawed self.
I obsessed on this subject for a couple of hours. I couldn’t put it out of my mind. I tried to research the most efficient, least messy and disturbing way to off myself. Eventually my Brother woke up to prepare for work, and although I didn’t want to say anything, I felt I had to tell him about it since that’s what all the Medical Professionals tell you to do when you’re experiencing such thoughts. So I did and he became extremely concerned. He made himself late for work trying to talk me down, explaining once again that I was of value to friends and family not necessarily because of my material benefit but because of emotional ones. I told him I had considered that, and I also considered the trauma it would cause if I actually did anything to myself.
He went to work, and checked in on me on and off throughout the day, and Bill came over in the afternoon. Eventually the thoughts subsided as I distracted my mind with other things. Since that time, I have had recurring feelings of “Unreality,” like I described in a previous entry. It feels like the world, the very nature of Reality itself, is about to go “mad” in some fashion. Past experiences have taught me that reality typically doesn’t go mad, a person does, but I know from human history that the things people do en masse sometimes cause the world to seem as if it has gone insane. Combined with
this are feelings of “Separation from the World,” as though I am viewing it on a screen. Sometimes I have the feeling of being heavily drugged as I felt last night and this morning. I googled “mental illness unreality” which led me in a circuitous fashion to a pair of Wikipedia articles, one on “Depersonalization” and one on “Derealization,” both of which are common to Schizoid Disorders. I’ve never had them before, though, so it makes me wonder what is wrong.
My mood has been unstable too. I typically feel very alert and engaged before the sun rises and through noon, cool off during the day, to enter a sort of “funk” in the evening after the sun has gone down. I have no idea what this could be. My personal belief is that missing one dose of Risperdal severely fucked with my head (which I doubt since I’ve gone without it before) or the dosage of Lamictal is a little too high. I Googled for both of these possibilities but couldn’t find anyone with experiences similar to mine. Oddly enough, my ARNP didn’t seem to be too concerned about me the last time I went, telling me to “remember your Risperdal” and scheduling an appointment with me in three months. If these strange feelings persist though, I may schedule an appointment with her sometime next week.