My Account of Bipolar and What I’ve Learned | by nikolai reed | Aug, 2025

I’ve always been an insomniac. As a baby, I never took naps and my mom tells me that as a child I took forever to get to sleep. Literally hours. She would hear me reading at night, watching TV, counting, singing, playing games on my DS; you name it, I was doing it instead of sleeping.

This habit has followed me into adulthood. But it got really bad around seventh grade. I was twelve and I couldn’t sleep at all. I would stay awake for hours, sleep very little, and be exhausted by the time I woke up for school. I would cry every morning on my way to school. My mom, who drove me, was oblivious — for about two days. It continued for about a week until I was randomly called out of class and told by my mother we were going to the doctor because she knew “something was wrong.”

In her defense, something was wrong. She was right about that.

A fun fact about bipolar disorder: oftentimes, the first episode that ever presents is major depression. Mania doesn’t tend to appear until late teens to early twenties. Sometimes it’s earlier, sometimes it’s later, but a lot of people see their first manic episodes in their late adolescence to early adulthood — the DSM lists the average age of onset as eighteen.

I didn’t know this episode I was having was major depression. I thought it was just from lack of sleep. But as I’ve come to realize, my depressive episodes come with a bad bout of insomnia. My mom presented my symptoms to my doctor as such:

Not sleeping, crying a lot, apathetic, isolating, distant.

Obviously their diagnosis was depression. I got medicated.

Citalopram, is what it was; known as Celexa. And it did nothing. In fact, I don’t really remember anything from this period in my life — and I’m not blaming that on the depression, I just have a shit memory — but from what I recall, citalopram might’ve made the depression worse.

I was thirteen when I first felt like life was worthless — that I wanted to die. I wasn’t medicated anymore. I wasn’t on medication again until I was fourteen; it was imipramine. Again, there was no effect.

Remember what I said about mania presenting in late teens to early twenties?

Yeah, well, another bipolar fun fact: SSRIs can induce mania.

I was sixteen and put on Prozac.

The reason I never really told anyone I’m bipolar, until now, was because I didn’t want to be seen as crazy.

I didn’t want people to see me as an Ian Gallagher from Shameless. However, Ian Gallagher is a damn good portrayal of bipolar disorder, and my mania is strikingly similar to his.

Side note, if you haven’t watched Shameless, the U.S. version, I do suggest it. It’s one of my favorite shows.

In season five, they tackle a manic episode. I haven’t watched the show recently, but there are two things I remember from the season that resonate heavily with me and my mania.

One: Impulsivity. Ian’s impulsivity is shown by him stealing his boyfriend’s baby and driving recklessly. Now, I’ve never stolen a baby, but I have flown ninety miles per hour down a county road where the speed limit was fifty-five. I remember slamming on my brakes at a stop sign.

Two: Paranoia and paranoid delusions. There is one specific scene where I remember Ian being paranoid the FBI was after him and frantically searching windows with a baseball bat in his hands. My paranoia is very similar; I get convinced I’m being followed or watched. During my first manic episode, I once tore my room apart looking for cameras.

All this to say, I am an Ian Gallagher. But that’s okay, because that’s the reality of mental illness. I’ve learned that some people will think I’m insane and there’s nothing I can do about that. I just have to know that no matter what anyone thinks, I am not insane.

The first time I saw someone who actually practiced psychiatry, a psychiatric nurse practitioner, I was put on Prozac. I don’t exactly remember what Prozac did to me, but I know I went basically insane on it. I would ask my mom what happened when I was on Prozac, but her only response would be, “You went crazy.” So when that made me worse, I was put on Pristiq, a serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor (SNRI), and Abilify, an antipsychotic

My new psychiatric nurse practitioner gave me a fun fact about Abilify: they use low doses adjunct to an antidepressant as a booster for that antidepressant. It’s used in the treatment of major depressive disorder. When used for psychotic disorders or bipolar disorder, the dose is usually 15–30 milligrams — I was on 5. So instead of acting as an antipsychotic, Abilify gave me that boost for the Pristiq. It made my manic episode, that I was already unknowingly in, worse.

It landed me in the hospital.

There are specific types of bipolar disorder: type I, type II, cyclothymia, and the diagnosis can stretch further beyond that — it describes what the current episode is, what the most recent episode was, if the patient is in partial remission or full remission, and delves into features. Extra tack-ons like with psychotic features or with mixed features. I am lucky enough to have the official diagnosis of bipolar I disorder with psychotic features. Basically, my mania torments me. There’s something my therapist calls my command hallucinations, and they only happen when I’m manic. There will be this voice in my head, that is not my own, that will feed me bad idea after bad idea and because there’s already not a rational thought in my brain, I’ll listen.

Psychosis is a term that is used to describe a break from reality. It involves positive symptoms, such as hallucinations and delusions, and negative symptoms, such as a flat affect. I don’t believe I was ever in full psychosis — I never experienced any negative symptoms of a psychotic episode. I for sure experienced hallucinations and delusions, though. This voice in my head would tell me to do things like hurt myself, that I was immortal, that everyone hated me, that there were people after me, that I was being watched — etc. This eventually led to me ripping my room apart looking for cameras, hallucinating my bloody teeth in sinks, hallucinating faces in windows, and hurting myself.

I don’t remember much from this episode — and I am blaming that on the mania, not my aforementioned shit memory — but I remember taking a pair of scissors to my neck. It left a huge scratch. It wasn’t deep, shallow enough that there’s no trace of a scar there. It was as though a cat clawed my neck; raised and red and angry for about two weeks, and then healed. It did bleed, though. And the blood freaked me out. I called my mom for help, and I don’t remember her response, but I’m sure she was horrified. My therapist wanted to hospitalize me; I refused. I went to school with this huge scratch on my neck and I had a friend who sat me down, looked me dead in the eye, and told me, “If you do not go to the hospital, you are going to kill yourself,” and, honestly, that kind of snapped some clarity into me. I was hospitalized later that day.

While in the hospital, they thankfully recognized that I should never be on antidepressants and took me off of the Pristiq and the Abilify, and put me on Seroquel.

Seroquel would kind of be a miracle drug if it wasn’t for the horrific weight gain. I gained forty-eight pounds while on that pill and I wasn’t even on a high dose. It goes up to 800 milligrams and I was only on 150. But, for as long as I was on it, I was barely symptomatic. And I’ll always be grateful for that.

I’m nineteen now, and I’m not on Seroquel anymore, but remarkably, I’m on a road towards stability. I’ve found the right meds, I’m in a dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT) group, and I really, really try to get better. I’ve stopped stewing in my misery and have actually been taking care of myself. And that’s my one piece of advice here; take care of yourselves. Boring as shit, dreadfully common advice is, but the truth is that medication only balances brain chemicals. With mental illness, and this does suck, you have to do the rest. Try to get better. It does get better, but you have to put in the effort.

If you read all of this, thanks. I probably won’t post again until something else comes up in my mind. Or maybe I’ll post some of my poetry, who knows.