One night in 2007, I started a new antipsychotic. It was to be taken at dinner time. I did as told and took it at the universal dinner time of 6 pm. By 7 pm, I had mostly lost touch with reality. I was suddenly so tired that my eyes wouldn’t open but I was far too anxious, scared and twitchy to go to sleep. I felt incredibly ill. I was frantic, terrified and panicked. I was thrashing in a sharp, steel cage between sleep and wake with no way out. I cannot express to you the horror of that night. Bipolar medication side effects suck.

I am one of the people who hate to see their doctor. If it were up to me, I would never go. (OK, it is up to me, but it doesn't feel like it.) It's not that I have a bad doctor, or a mean doctor, it's just that nothing good ever happens there; so why would I go?

On Monday, I talked about what to do if you’ve just been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and if you’ve read that piece then you know, I recommended a lot of breathing and thinking. I notably did not suggest decision-making. Well, you can’t live in a yoga studio forever.

Being diagnosed as bipolar is a scary thing. It can happen in a number of ways, but if you’re like most of us, you probably didn’t know what was wrong for a long time, then you were misdiagnosed and then sometime later, you got the moniker of “bipolar”. Few of us go right from episode to bipolar diagnosis. But regardless of how you got here, what do you do next?

Okay, I admit it, I don’t like doctors. At all. In fact, one might suggest I downright hate them. I hate going to their appointments, I hate being in their waiting room and I hate talking to them.