My Journey with Bipolar and ADHD

I was treated on and off for bipolar disorder for 4 years and for ADHD for 3 years. I gained and lost a lot of things during that time. Parts of it were enjoyable, but the rest weren’t so much.

That period of my life feels much blurrier than huge portions of my earlier life. I was taking many types of medicine - some were helpful, but most weren’t.

Now, whatever is in me is the result of whatever past that has already happened. That is enough consolation for me.

Reflections on My Past

I feel most portions of my life weren’t as kind as I remember, at least until now. It’s kind of weird that I used to feel that way. Especially nowadays, things have calmed down and I’ve been able to stabilize my life.

The Left-Hand Discovery

It all started with a weird discovery that I am somehow a southpaw (dominantly left-handed). I had always believed I was right-handed since birth, but it seems that I didn’t know myself any better. This revelation came from a huge list of accidental situations and an EEG brain scan as a final verification of my suspicion.

Childhood Experiences

Sewaktu aku kecil, aku merasa agak sedikit berbeda dengan anak seumuran; cara gerakku awkward, sering hilang keseimbangan, cara pikir yang berbeda, tulisan yang jelek (sangat jelek), kesulitan berbicara (agak pelat), hiperaktif (yang setiap kelas berputar-putar mengelilingi kelas), sering tantrum (nangis berjam-jam tapi emang ga bisa berhenti).

Pikirku waktu kuliah, melihat ke belakang, “Kukira aku autis ataupun ADHD dan atau ada kondisi lain.” Berjam-jam kuhabiskan untuk membaca riset soal autis dan ADHD. Hal yang paling mendekati deskripsi yang kusebut di atas adalah ADHD, maka aku ke dokter jiwa dan mendapatkan preskripsi untuk ADHD.

The Impact of Medication

Obat ADHD sangat membantu hidupku; pikiran yang meracau dan lari kemana-mana itu tiba-tiba jalan dengan tenang, hati yang khawatir tanpa alasan yang jelas itu kembali bisa menenangkan dirinya sendiri, muka sad-boi yang sedikit lama menempel di mukaku akhirnya tak lagi bertengger. Pikirku, “Dengan diobati ADHD banyak masalahku terselesaikan, maka mungkin aku memang ADHD.”

After continuing medication for 2 years, I wondered if it really was ADHD. Sometimes a medication can cure more than one disease/disorder. Thus, thinking that ADHD medication resolved my issues doesn’t necessarily mean I have ADHD.

After moving to a new city, I needed to find a new psychiatrist. During my session with the new psychiatrist, she suggested me for having a brain scan (EEG) neurofeedback. The session is okay-ish I guess. It does somewhat treat my condition better than before. But when I read the EEG map, I got curious over the result.

EEG Report

The Summary

yes, it’s as horrible as the deviation implies

brain map

The brain start braining

So anyway, during my college years I was curious what it would feel like to be Algernon in “Flowers for Algernon,” is it really that scary or is it a delightful experience? Apparently it wasn’t, at least it was not in my experience.

Knowing how I can be bored over nothing, I decided to put my report into an LLM and ask it to find visual patterns, but before I did it I had my own educated guess when I was reading the report. And for sure the LLM spewed the same thing as I expected: ADHD, PTSD, Sensory overwhelm, anxiety, depression, stuttering, language difficulty.

I had my own guess, one of which was that I am left-handed and yet didn’t notice, so I tried to write using my left hand. Oddly enough, my schizoid symptoms were suddenly gone, and after a few days my ADHD prescribed med was no longer working for me but I was more focused than ever whether taking the med or not.

Why? Honestly I feel it is out of place to suddenly feel that way. I think that every answer is somewhat one Google away so I tried.

Handedness and schizotypy: The potential effect of changing the writing-hand

One interesting finding in this table from the paper is that students who had been required to change their writing hand tended to score slightly higher on tests measuring “cognitive-perceptual dysfunction”, that means they reported a few more unusual thoughts or odd beliefs compared to students who weren’t forced to switch.

The case provided from the research paper somewhat described my issue, luckily things are resolved (somewhat). In the paper discussion hypotheses that mixed handedness and forced to change writing hand leading to changes in dopaminergic potentiation in primary motor cortex and it does correlate with development of schizophrenia.

As a phenomenon, my personal experience is that I am talking to myself from not so where I feel myself reside: if you talk to yourself there is a sensation where it came from whether it came from the left side of your head or right. In my case before I try to reverse forced handedness, it came from left side of the head, and at the same time there’s other voice that came from right side of my head that I was thinking it is a psychosis experience. But after changing my handedness my internal self-speech came from right side of my head and somewhat the previous experience that I label psychosis aren’t really registered as alien part of self but from myself. It just not registered as my own voice due to location differences.

this post is still a draft, please bear with me.