Yeah except each acute episode is typically compounded and they’ll steadily get less and less of themselves back after each one. More people really need to compare “I feel robotic” to the three patients we’ve had inpatient over a year (even a week was too much for me) who need nursing home level of hygiene care because they’re constantly covered in their own bodily fluids but no nursing home will take them because they’re too confused to safely tolerate anyone touching them without being heavily medicated.

One of them will fall asleep with a hoard of papers they stole from other patients in the dayroom, then be too confused to get out of bed to go to the bathroom. So they just soak the entire bed and pile of papers in urine then scream at you when you try to get them out of bed or take away the urine soaked papers. The skin of their genitals will go through stages of red and peeling until we can keep them medicated enough for a few days to let us keep them clean and apply barrier cream until it heals, but we can’t keep them that medicated all the time because they’d fall and crack their head open. If we try to clean them without medication they scream hit and try to wrestle with you while soaked in their own bodily fluids.

More people need to know that that’s their future if they keep letting manic and psychotic episodes burn their brain out like an overclocked CPU. idc if the lamictal makes me feel a little flat, it’s better than being so far gone I can’t toilet myself OR even let someone else help me.