Stories that survive the dark… Where girls fight back and nightmares have teeth.
I have put up twenty free copies of Resilience throughout Recovery: A Memoir of My Journey through Mental Illness. It is for LibraryThing members that are randomly selected at the end of the month. So there is still time to put in a request. Hurry up as it ends soon!
Abilify vs. Seroquel: for me it’s a toss up. While Abilify controls hallucinations, delusions, and paranoia, it doesn’t work as well during stressful experiences. Seroquel does work during chaotic times, however, the downside is that I have extremely negative side effects with the Seroquel, such as agitation and anger. I’m not talking rage but more disorderly conduct like getting kicked out of the library because I had a fit when my books on hold were misplaced. The bad side effects from Abilify for me are akathisia (restlessness) and tremors (hands shaking). Quetiapine (Seroquel) also sparked weight gain for me which the aripiprazole (Abilify) does not. All in all, I prefer the Abilify because it doesn’t cause cognitive issues in me the way the Seroquel did. That being said, I keep Seroquel around to subdue myself during the worst of moments. Both drugs side effects bring about social withdrawal because I don’t want outsiders to see the tremors or anger. On the horizon, my psychiatrist says there is Latuda, should things turn downward with my current regimen of Abilify, Gabapentin, Zoloft, and Wellbutrin. He holds out great hope for that one…and it’s nice to know there is always hope.
Distraction can be a good thing up until the point of denial. Regarding my delusional disorder, I figured that if I wrote it off as something else (social anxiety, PTSD, or chronic depression) then I’d be more normal. Plus, my denial protected my immediate family (custody of children); but at what cost. My partition delusion and both auditory and visual hallucinations weren’t simply the result of past abuse or cultural idiosyncrasies: misconceptions by my immediate family which delayed the diagnosis for years. However, I appreciate that time I had with some of my hallucinations for they comforted me in ways that I will try to relay. In the end, it was cognition, memory, and confusion problems which led to psychosis that took me down and brought me to the emergency room, where we sat riverside trying to figure out where it all began and what was or wasn’t a cause.
I’m an enrolled member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate. Thanks in part to fantastic foster parents, sassy social workers, and outstanding teachers, I’m a family-focused parent of four wonderful young adults. I’ve self-published four fiction novels under a pseudonym, Peyton Mathie. Those accounts were based on my life stories. Although I’m a native of the Lake Traverse reservation in South Dakota, I lived in Brooklyn, New York off and on throughout my childhood. Currently, I reside in Eden Prairie, Minnesota with my family. My hobbies include yoga, MBSR, camping, budget travel, and painting.
Note: The pseudonym was derived from the first name of my daughter’s childhood friend and the surname of a coworker at approximately the same time frame. In one I saw signs of my past and the latter, hopefully, my future.
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