I'm new here.

I was diagnosed with BP1, rapid cycling type about a year and a half ago. I'm really lucky I think as I responded well to medication pretty early on, although I did have a lot of trouble with the meds I didn't respond to, because they made my symptoms almost impossible to live with. The worst was Seroquel, I became so suicidal/depressed that I was hospitalized. Up until that point my symptoms had been hypomanic. In the hospital I was put on Topamax and Neurontin, which literally saved me. I had been crying for four days straight.

After that I began my search for a true mood stabilizer in the sense that I still had some underlying mood swings, angry hypomanic ones. I would become grandiose and think I was better than everyone else, and then fight my boyfriend, my coworkers. I was just smarter, faster, and they were conspiring against me. A healthy dose of Lithium has made me pretty ashamed of all of that.

The only thing I have left are some funky delusional-lite symptoms. Sometimes a song feels like it has an untapped deeper meaning I just cant get at, and sometimes a piece of lint might be a bug at some angle. It gets really troubling only when I'm stressed, but as I cant control my stress always, its a big issue. For that my doctor wants me to take Invega, but I'm terribly scared, because I took Seroquel and I know they're chemically related and I'm afraid I might end up as sick as I once was whereas now I have a pretty good sense of stability, except for the little symptoms of delusions.