How long do you go between sessions?

When I first exited the hospital in 2008 after starting on clozapine, I was seeing my therapist once to twice per week. Eventually this developed into a meeting every two weeks and then every month. Now I am on a frequency of every 6 to 8 weeks for seeing my therapist. During this time post 2008 I saw my psyche doctor every month or every two months. Now I see him every 3 months for meds management.

It is important to note that these elongated timeframes happened for me after years of work with my therapist and with my meds. It feels good to move to longer timeframes between visits, but it is true that pre-2008 I used to “play mind games” with myself regarding my psyche visits. I would deliberately schedule doctor’s visits every three months out to tell myself I was doing “fine” when in retrospect this should have been monthly. I was not doing fine and I was on a drug that wasn’t working. In part, this was because I was not maintaining the proper dosage of the meds.

I feel like today I am honest with my therapist and my psyche doc about how frequently I need appointments. I used to have to have a therapy appointment lined up for the next time when I completed a session so as to be able to “see” what was upcoming on the horizon. Now I basically see how I am progressing and schedule a session every 6 to 8 weeks or so as needed.

Any thoughts on your session frequency with the therapist or the MD?

My Experience with CBD Oil

Caution: this post involves the use of CBD oil. The post in no way suggests that CBD oil should be used for mental illness. Rather, the post suggests that the lack of prescription amount and dosage is a real problem that makes CBD oil unsafe or unreliable to use for most people.

About two years ago I started using CBD oil with buy-in from my therapist and my psyche doctor. It was very effective at reducing anxiety — my biggest problem remaining from the bipolar I have had since college. When I bought the CBD oil from a New Age Health Vitamin Store, they failed to tell me to shake the bottle with each dosage. So when I got to the last several doses particularly the last one, the CBD was so concentrated it did me in for a day.

After that episode I became somewhat suspicious of the process of selling and administering CBD oil. I later bought another bottle but I found myself to be too circumspect about the proper dosages for my condition. Even though the CBD oil had helped me there was no place to go for getting the right levels and the right amounts in my daily routine. While my therapist and MD said I could try CBD oil, they never prescribed a certain amount for my condition. This was not their purview.

Even though CBD was somewhat beneficial for me, my lack of trust with the process of buying and administering CBD won out. I have not used the new bottle – I am not even sure how that dosage compares to the dosage I took with that first bottle. There is concentrate information that varies from brand to brand and from bottle to bottle. For me, I need to be working with a professional to get the right dosages on a daily basis. Experimenting with the use of CBD oil is not something I am happy to do. Right now I don’t have that person in my life who could prescribe dosages.

Have you ever used CBD oil? Did the lack of information on dosages and strengths leave you feeling suspect about the process of using CBD oil? Do you wish there was more data about CBD oil including dosage information for people seeking its medicinal qualities? How do you think that additional dosage information might come about?

My Sojourn through Bipolar Illness – Airports Then and Now

Follows Fear of Flying post

As you may understand, for years if not decades after this event at the airport (see Fear of Flying post) , I have had an intense fear of flying. Every time I go to the airport I feel the original anxiety of that day in February 1985. The intercom voice announcements seem to echo off the walls and the floors in some surreal fashion. The lack of windows to the outside leaves me feeling claustrophobic always. In the early years, this meant I had to be escorted by family to the runway gate if I were traveling alone. (This was before the days of post 9/11 security checks.) Years later even if I am traveling with family, I tend to be hyper aware of safety issues at all times when I am at an airport. My thoughts become more elevated and I am prone to high anxiety. Strangely (or logically) enough these fears largely take place at the airport itself and seldom revolve around safety issues pre-flight or mid-flight while on the plane. I am not very fearful once I am on the airplane or in flight. The anxiety is almost always associated with being in the airport and feeling unsafe. Gladly, my husband is also not fond of flying, so we tend to make marathon drives for our summer and family vacations.

As a side note on airports and airport travel, I tend to have a very hard time with changing time zones when I am flying. When I am traveling by car or by train this is not so much the case as the time change is gradual. Because of this time zone change difficulty, I largely avoided flying to Europe for almost thirty plus years. Even a flight from Baltimore to San Francisco was difficult in that I would experience a three-hour time change and all the difficulties associated with that, particularly impacts on sleeping. In the last few years, I have progressed through my fears and my sleep issues of changing time zones and have traveled to Europe twice – once was for a conference in Zurich, Switzerland in July 2012 and once was for a wedding and a conference in the United Kingdom in July 2013. Thanks to Melatonin as prescribed by my psycho-pharmacologist, I was able to make these trips with relative ease in the area of jet lag and adjusting sleep cycles.

I am very thankful that my psycho-pharmacologist as an MD was open to prescribing a relatively non-traditional form of medicine for jet lag. This option worked beautifully for me and has given me hope that overseas travel is no longer a huge worry or huge hurdle to overcome. In general, I am very blessed to have care givers for my bipolar illness who bridge traditional medicines and their prescription with alternative medicines such as Melatonin.