Mostly people who have personal problems, try to help other people with personal problems because they know how it feels. Music has helped me a lot and I started playing the guitar. Luckily, I'm 52 and I'm getting more stable with time. Good luck on your coming yourney.
Wow Ben, I'm feeling like looking into a mirror. I grew up in a conservative Christian family and also had episode in which I felt as if my family (my mom and brothers) were in the wrong path and that they were going to hell. That caused in me extreme feeling of sadness and anxiety and I eventually left church because I felt they were not really helping at all. At 14 I was diagnosed with unspecified bipolar disorder cause I was too young to know which type I was. So they sent me for the first time to a mental health hospital. We had a sort of volunteer that played the piano and every week gave us Adele's songs to sing along. We also had the opportunity to share the music we liked so it was kinda dope.
That was my first contact with music therapy but I wasn't that interestelar by that time because I was struggling with a heavy major depression, so I enjoyed very few things bout that time. I recovered almost fully 4 years later, but suffered from insomnia as a leftover. The thing is, last year, around November I had a break up with someone I was talking online and only lasted like a month, but it made me have a major depressive episode all of the sudden. Then it started to morph slowly into a maniac episode, first with some days very euphoric, and then going down again, and then start all over with mania. When a full maniac episode happened I started to sleep only 2-4 hours and my mind was started to tell me things to write.
I was so surprised because I never in my life expressed myself in that way. And one day I started to write music, the verses came easily, the chorus too, I was so euphoric, only focused on writing and listening to music. In a month I had around 150 lyrics and ideas. I was so happy with it and I thought like, wow, this is my path. The problem was that I had to be hospitalized cause I started to get irritated and some days screamed and cried a lot so the police took me to the ER. They started giving me sodium vaproate straight away, and in a week my mind slowed down and my ideas started to decrease too. My psyquiatrist then told me that these ideas were possibly dissapear if they started with the episode. And I was like, nah, it's something I really enjoy, I'd never stop doing it. The episode lasted 5 months, I went from dreaming with lyrics and had constant new verses, to hardly finish or even hardly start a new one. That made me wanted to quit valproate, but I know the consequences, I have an appointment next week, so I hope my doses can be lower, or a less strong med to try to be creative again. Sorry for all the text I needed to get all that out of my chest
Wow that was a lot of text!!! But music can be so powerful in this state, and can influence so much change. Glad music has been helpful and hopefully you can get the right dosage of medication figured out with your psychiatrist so you can get back in the swing of things 👌🏽
