Mania: a mental illness so inexorable that it makes you experience periods of great excitement, euphoria, delusions, and overactivity. In my case, I experience excitement when I buy clothes, shoes, and cameras online. By then, my mania is manifested only by mental and physical hyperactivity, disorganisation of behaviour during which I cannot perform all my tasks well, if at all. During these episodes, I lose the drive to study and fail my subjects. My elevated mood gives me an air of intimidation. My promiscuity turns to nymphomania, specifically a manic phase of someone with bipolar disorder.
I was once diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder caused by a bad breakup that led to failures accumulating not only academically, but also mentally, emotionally, spiritually and socially. From an outgoing person who always hangs out with her friends to someone who goes home immediately after classes just to lay down and do nothing until she falls asleep. Vortioxetine, my antidepressant, was just a drink away to alleviate the feeling, at least for a while. A month with vortioxetine passed and I stopped taking it altogether. I became noncompliant. Why do you think so?
Well because “we didn’t click.” I felt like it wasn’t helping because depression began to turn into mania.
I started asking for money from my parents saying I needed it for my checkup, meds, even laboratory tests. Little did I know I already spent almost a hundred grand just for clothes, shoes, cameras, and stuff that I don’t really need instead. Another part of my mania is my promiscuous behaviour. Now it turns to nymphomania, which only started with the installation of simple dating apps. Then a friend encourages me to meet at least a person I got matched with on Tinder. One guy became nine in just 4 months.
It was both an exciting and a pleasurable experience that I pegged down to human nature. But behind these episodes, there was this emptiness I felt, a magnetic void so strong that keeps on pulling me into it.
This void keeps me from being functional, from attending classes, from studying for my exams which even made me experience anxiety and skip some of my block examinations. Everything inside my mind goes on so fast that I don’t know what to do anymore. Instead of studying all night like my classmates, I just lay in my bed swiping through profiles of different guys until I get matched to hundreds of them. I was so addicted to this tinder app, craving sexual pleasure, that I couldn’t really study anymore.
I experienced tons of pregnancy scares that made me a suki (frequent/ patron) of Watsons and Ministop’s pregnancy test kits. I started to become the tinder queen of my class after my classmates knew of my sexcapades.
I know it was not right. I know it is wrong, but I don’t know why I keep on doing it.
I started looking for another psychiatrist–a woman–I thought, maybe it is with the gender why I and my former psychiatrist didn’t click even though I’ve been telling him all the truth. I never regret my decision of finding a new one, she has this motherly figure feeling even though she’s been single for almost the rest of her life. It was around 3 AM in the morning during my block examinations when I saw her and she told me that it was not MDD I was experiencing but was bipolar disorder.
Aripiprazole was my new friend then, but I guess it was just all me. All I can say is that if you don’t help yourself and just rely on others, you’ll end up just like me, broken and confused. Thanks to my psychiatrist and to some people who never left me during my darkest days, I am on the way to recovery.
So why am I writing this article? I want people to understand people with Bipolar Disorder when they’re at their manic phase. It’s not pretty. But I don’t want people to judge us for being moody, and hyperactive. Just like what my psychiatrist always reminds me “Do not blame yourself, because you are not the one at fault. It is the disease that is making you that person.”
I am not my disease, and I am not always manic. I am learning that I can’t blame myself for doing all that stuff. It’s the disease that’s responsible.
Next, I want people to see this as a warning signal. If you don’t really help yourself and still try to control your mania on your own, you might experience the same thing the way I did. Embrace your meanest friend/s for they will never fail to lecture and scold you when something is not right.
Get help!
