The unthinkable has happened. In June of 2014, I was sent a packet of forms by the Social Security Disability department. It was the warning flag thrown to alert me to a medical review of my benefits. A medical review?!?! I never applied for benefits for any medical condition. I applied for benefits for mental health reasons. Why is it that mental health is so stigmatized and underground yet when it comes the Social Security office, it suddenly becomes a “medical” issue? How, exactly, does that happen? I have Bipolar Disorder not a heart condition. My medical (read: physical) fitness for work was never the question. My mental state has always been the basis for the claim that I cannot work. My mental state has not changed all that much from my last review.
Last Monday, I received a letter in the mail from the Determination Department. It was a letter of cessation of benefits; to be stopped effective March 2015. My reaction was not one of a “normal” person. No, I viewed it as 
the end of my world, and immediately called my mother. I told her that this was the end, and I was going to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription, and that upon returning home, I was going to count my pills to see if I could end my life. She told me to call my therapist. Which I did, and landed in her office for an impromptu appointment.
I was still suicidal when I returned home, and had picked up the prescription at the pharmacy. I decided to play “pull out all medication and see how much is there”. Its a “game” I play when feeling suicidal. If there are enough pills, I go to the hospital, if there are not, I get angry that there aren’t enough and stay depressed and suicidal.This time I had 1.5 prescriptions of Abilify, one prescription for 150 mg Welbutrin, one for 300 mg Welbutrin, a full bottle of 120 2 mg Klonopin, and a full 60 tablet bottle of Seroquel. I had more than enough to kill myself. I sat and looked at those bottles for what seemed like hours trying to decide what to do. Now, I ask you, is the first thought you have after receiving very bad news that you might as well just kill yourself and get it over with the workings of a rational mind? No, it is the workings of a mind that cannot handle stress, a mind that is fleeing the scene, a mind that is dysfunctional.
I am still having a hard time not just killing myself and getting life over with. 
Life has always been so difficult, and it just got a whole lot worse. What am I supposed to do? Go get a job that I hate just to pay the rent? I realize people do that every day. I do not take supervision well; especially people who micro-manage you and are in your face all the time wondering why you aren’t getting the task done sooner. Well, gee, maybe if you’d quit interrupting me every fucking few minutes, I might have the time to complete the task. Why do managers not get this?
I have been waiting on pins, needles and eggshells for the outcome of the review. I have waited nearly 7 months to be told I am fine now. Go on ahead 
and go back to work. What am I supposed to do when the bone-crushing depression comes along and bites me in the ass? Call in for however long it takes to go away? That’s what happened to me when I melted down due to the high level of stress and the Department’s manager’s inability to think we could work with two men down. Therefore, she made it her personal mission to make our lives as miserable as possible by being in our office every hour. How the fuck do you get anything done with someone interrupting you every hour on the hour? Just leave me alone; I will work and I will get it done.
However, between the overall stress level of 4 people doing the job of 6, and the micro-managing style of the “lead” manager of accounting, I just one day tried to get up for work and couldn’t do it. It went on that way for 11 workdays. Yes, I called in sick for 11 workdays. In the meantime, recognizing that this was unlike any depression I had been through before caused me to seek out a psychologist. She diagnosed me with first, Bipolar Type II, and then quickly “upgraded” me to Bipolar Type I with psychotic features. Boy, was I happy to graduate from one less severe level to another much more severe level.
I have been hospitalized more times than I can count, I have attempted suicide more times than I can count at this point. I know my first serious attempt was at 16. I swallowed a bottle of aspirin; learned later on that is an extremely effective way to kill yourself. Between 16 and nearly 44, I cannot count how many times I have tried to end the pain, the boredom, the 
isolation, the depressions, but I am still as fit as a fiddle and can go right out there and get fired…….again due to mental problems. Employers take a dim view of people who call in sick for extended periods of time. They tend to fire them which has been my experience my whole working life. I have only quit one job that I have held; I got fired from the rest. However, I am fit to work medically; I have questions about that since the brain runs the body, and my brain is prone to serious depression, delusional thinking, and overall dysfunction. I wouldn’t hire me. I am not a reliable employee. Sure I’ll work my ass off……when I am there.
My house of cards is falling. If I lose my benefits, I lose Medicare. If I lose Medicare, I lose my insurance. If I lose my insurance, there will be no doctors and no medication as it is cost prohibitive. If I lose my meds and my doctors, there is a very good chance I will also lose my life because I will once again be an untreated Bipolar with PTSD, Panic disorder with and without Agoraphobia, and Adult ADD. I know exactly what happens when I am not treated; I turn to alcohol and methamphetamine to try to balance myself. The Social Security Administration is trying to kill me or force me back into addiction just to save a few bucks. I also discovered that my student loans which were discharged for total medical disability can be reinstated if it is determined that I am medically able to work by the SSA. So, that $30,000 debt may very well come back.
I have appealed this decision. I think it is wrong on so many levels. First of all, they relied solely on reports from my psychiatrist (my psychologist forgot to send in her report; this may not have happened if she had). I have my medical records. I have read them. I see no progress at all. Progress is always written down as “average”, month after month. To me, that is a plateau. I am neither getting better nor am I getting worse. I have stagnated. How can they see that as progress? Because I can paint my nails, and wear makeup and appear like I am not ill. Obviously, I am ill otherwise I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble to not only eyeball the pills, but actually count them. Not rational thinking; that is the thinking of a sick mind. And, I have been this way as long as I can remember. My flight impulse has always been stronger than my fight reflex. And, I really want to flee right now. My house of cards is crashing to the ground.
Oh, this is so much worse than the dreaded “mixed-episode.” I am relatively stable there. Depressive episodes make me unstable and sick, and this one came out of no where, or so I would like to tell myself. I do know the why’s of my depression. I have no car in a city where public transit sucks (when it is operating right), I have become a total recluse, am isolating, and just all the way around not feeling quite right. I spend too much time sleeping, I do not have an appetite (except for cigarettes and coffee.) And, then we come to the emotions: the feeling worthless, the feeling unloved, the feeling of being unwanted, the feeling purposeless, the list goes on and on in my head, and I can’t seem to unstick these ideas about myself. 
But, that’s not what the illness is telling me right now; it is really hard to silence those thoughts that are so despairing, detrimental, and not good for me. I know I am supposed to be using positive “self-talk” but it is not forthcoming. 
This was, perhaps, one of the scariest and most insane places I have ever been mentally. I had not been sober in about 4 years. Literally not a day had gone by that I was not completely high on something since I was 16, and I was now getting ready to turn 20. I do not think that I would ever like to be in that “headspace” again. I had to write the fearless and soul-searing moral inventory of myself, who I was, who I had been, who I had started out as. I had to write every nasty thing I had ever done to another human being while in the throes of my substance abuse. I even shocked myself, though I should not have been shocked. I have always been a kind of gun without a safety. The first 2 months of sobriety found me depressed, scared, unsure of everything, and begging to get high again. If I fought with my mother with whom I was living, all I could think was that just a little morphine would fix everything. All I wanted were my pills and my needles. I thought I had gone insane. But, nope, not insane, just sober and looking at the world and my place in it with an uncloudy mind and clear eyes. I made it through about 9 months of the rehab’s therapy groups until I was reassigned to one that was full of drinkers trying to get clean. I wasn’t a big drinker. I was a druggie, a junkie. I couldn’t understand their dislike of me until one night a man said to me “Well, at least what I did was legal…” Then, I figured it out. What I had done was against the law and, therefore abhorrent, but somehow being an alcoholic was okay because drinking was legal. So, I asked him how many times he drove home drunk, and how many people had he managed not to kill while driving drunk. He shut up, and I left rehab. I did relapse a couple of years later, but that is a whole different post. This was painful enough remembering all the things I did and said specifically to hurt people so they could feel the way I did. I lost a lot of friends and I lost myself in the process.
So, I was born with the genes that predisposed me initially to deep depressions, and finally a diagnosis of Bipolar disorder. My paternal grandmother was a manic depressive who went untreated. Since the first approved treatment for Bipolar was Lithium in 1972, she would have been undiagnosed and unmedicated for about 63 years. One can only imagine the living nightmare that would have been. Well, actually, I can imagine it as I lived it for many years not knowing what was wrong. Or, more specifically what was causing the nightmarish shifts in mood. Perhaps she was allergic to lithium as I am, but I really think she just didn’t know what she had. There really wasn’t a diagnosis for manic depression when she was growing up, getting married, having children, and living her life. Besides I do not think she thought anything was really “wrong”. My grandmother typically would be in the manic phase of the illness, although she and my grandfather did not share a room for whatever reason (perhaps depression or extreme mania that he needed to get away from). She was always flitting around barely able to keep still making sure guests had everything that they needed or could want. She was very social during these episodes. She was also in the early stages of Alzheimer’s which also has a genetic component. That scares me due to the fact that it is her genetics that partially contributed to my mood disorder. The maternal side of my family has it’s own history of depression. So, I got it from both sides.
A Bipolar Journey Through The Rabbit Hole 