Current State of Affairs

Behaviors: depression; no motivation; unable to be stimulated; hypomania; anxiety; inability to focus.

I’m in a healthy state of mind approximately >1% of the month.

Current medications and past treatments: Geodon, Seroquel, Klonopin, Adderall, Trintellix; received TMS

Myers-Briggs: INTJ

I’m rapid cycling. If I’m not depressed I find myself to be either slightly hypomanic or fully hypomanic. I phase through having motivation and not having motivation; in either case because of the recurring depression or hypomania I’m unable to pursue stimulating and impassioned ideas or activities that I know from the core of my being would make me a happy and mentally healthy person.

My teenage and young-adult life were filled with passions for literature, film, music performance, and the pursuit of knowledge. I’d spent innumerable hours, literally all of my waking hours, reading, performing music, delving into films, and pursuing knowledge because I found all those activities to be greatly stimulating. Starting around the age of 25(plus/minus a year) when my disease became fully formed, the desire and more so the exigent need to feel that passion and stimulation was still there — I believe(I hope) — but it was and still is sunken deep beneath a storming sea. My ostensible-insidiously fluctuating states of anxiety, depression, borderline hypomania and even full on hypomania, and this alien lack of motivation and inability to focus precludes me from attaining any kind of stimulation and therefore goals that I desperately require. I was once upon a time driven, motivated, ambitious, a seeker, a dreamer, an affable quasi-optimist; but now I find myself overwhelmed by my disease and I can’t overcome it. I’ve tried many varieties of medications and combinations of medications, which on the rare occasion alleviate my symptoms, but soon my symptom-free state of being becomes ephemera and I’m wickedly thrown back into a severe and long lasting depression.

I gravely need to experience stimulation and motivation sans the symptoms birthed by my disease, but I just can’t find them. It’s as though I’ve mentally transmogrified into a person that is not me — an empty shell.

I don’t know what to do anymore. I’m not suicidal or experiencing suicidal ideation, but I can’t bear this burden anymore. It seems I’m treatment-resistant in regards to medication. I think ECT is my only hope…but what if it doesn’t work?