 Have you, at some point in your life, been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, an experience where you flip between various intensities of mania and depression? Have you thought to yourself that maybe that is not something that accurately describes your experience? Well, there is a very common misdiagnosis that autistic people get, which is bipolar disorder, amongst other things, particularly in autistic women. So today, we're going to be having a look at our landing crews video all about how they were misdiagnosed with, I was going to say, borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder. Always get those two mixed up. Let's have a look at that. Hello, landing crew. Welcome to another video in my autism series. Sorry it took so long for me to sit down and share this, but I've just not been sure how to share this video. And it's why I've never shared this in the past, because this story isn't just my story. The story is kind of intertwined with my mother. I want to be as respectful as possible and not overshare and not give down too much information, but I am the queen of oversharing. So it leaves me in this really weird place. So I'm going to try to do the best I can and realize if this seems very vague. Before even going further, I want to just say guys, I'm not really sure why people would think that I would suddenly like make up being diagnosed with autism to cover up that I'm really bipolar. I literally on video had the doctor telling me that I'm diagnosed as autistic and I don't have bipolar disorder. They went through a very, very thorough evaluation with myself and way more thorough than the doctor that diagnosed me with bipolar disorder did. I'm really, really sad to when I hear stuff like this because there is a lot of people out there who seem to have certain opinions about people being diagnosed, particularly with autism and ADHD seems to be that people online think that it's somewhat of a consequence of social media and TikTok in a negative way. So you know, people are wanting to jump on it because it's like a fashionable thing. It's not like that for the majority of people. And it's sad to see like people trying to discredit the neurodiversity just because they feel certain ways about diagnoses. Diagnoses? Diagnoses? Diagnoses. It's not, I think that's the plural. I cut out the part where she said it's very common for women to be diagnosed as bipolar instead of autistic. So look, I know it's hard when you've created your own narrative up in your head of, oh, Stephanie acts this way because she's manic or she does this because of her bipolar disorder and suddenly that diagnosis is taken away and your own narrative about me is squashed. But I went through the proper channels to get properly assessed. You're just adding to the stigma. I'm here to offer support to other females or males that have been wrongly misdiagnosed. It's essentially very, very common to be misdiagnosed as bipolar or borderline personality disorder. Sometimes ADHD, but that one gets a little murky. But bipolar and BPD are the two biggest ones that autistic women are diagnosed as incorrectly. I should have. I think there is two reasons to why autistic women seem to be more regularly like diagnosed with like BPD. I think one is obviously like gender stereotypes, I would say is quite a big one. Perhaps men would be more likely to be diagnosed with anger issues. I think there's a lot to do with overwhelm and meltdowns. Maybe with bipolar, you can imagine periods of burnout as perhaps being quite depressed So it can kind of seem like there's different sort of diagnoses within that umbrella of bipolar. You have type one, type two, so I think you have like cyclophymia, various sort of intensities of mood swings as they characterize it as. And obviously the same could be said with the gender stereotypes around bipolar. Perhaps some people might have certain stigmas or stereotypes attached to that. And I suppose with all of that combined with the lack of awareness and knowledge about autism and masking and how it appears in sort of late diagnosed, undiagnosed individuals, I think it can all culminate into making misdiagnosis particularly of women a little bit more common, I would say. Should have never had a bipolar diagnosis. Like I never actually truly met the criteria. I'm not saying I'm autistic to be cool. I don't get cred points for being autistic. I get more and more people questioning me and me having to defend another diagnosis. No one questioned when I was bipolar. I mean some people did. It gave other people a narrative to use against me. Okay, let's get to the story. When I was a teenager, my mom was diagnosed with bipolar disorder type one. She has openly talked about this before. So I don't feel like I'm like outing her or anything like that. She had... I do believe that type one is usually like pretty extreme states of mania combined with pretty extreme states of depression. I think that's what type one is. I think type two is sort of... It's got a subtle variation to it. And I think that psychophymia is sort of states of... I think type two... Don't quote me on this. I think type two is sort of similar states of depression but perhaps periods of hypomania. Which is like sort of a... I think like a medical term for like mania but maybe not as intense. I don't know. Psychophymia is sort of periods of... sort of equally sort of hypo kind of depressive periods and manic periods. Don't quote me on that. I'm just trying to think of the lectures that I had at university when I was doing them on the brain. We're learning about the sort of the medications that are used and such. I had a very tricky journey with the Sata Texas. The Sata Texas where we specifically lived was not really big on mental health especially back then. In the end, it scared me to ever want to get help. I knew that bipolar disorder, it could be hereditary. I could end up with it. Out of my three sisters, I'm the one that looks the most like my mom and the one that acts the most like my mom. So it was just the scary thing that I felt like was like hovering over my head since I was a teenager. And because of the experience she had with the Texas mental health system it made me terrified to ever seek out help, to ever get on meds. So after I had the kids, I started to just kind of go out with friends because of the thing that I take someone and like I act like them. I started hanging out with these people who would party all the time. And so I became that person as well. I became what I thought that that's what I was supposed to do at my age. So that's what I did. And it's hard because like these things I'm going to talk about, autism is intertwined in it. But it's really, really having to do with a young girl who didn't have the best childhood went through some really rough things and now she's trying to find her way in the world. But she's married and she has three kids. I knew I needed to seek out help. I knew I needed help that I was scared to. I was petrified that I was going to have the same experience because when you're younger, you can't differentiate between maybe your mom had other things going on. Maybe they got the meds wrong. Maybe if you went to a private psychiatrist, maybe it would have been better. You do not compartmentalize those things. I would say we're on 22, 23. I realized that I had some unresolved things that needed to be resolved, but I was scared to take care of them. So instead I became this person that I thought I was supposed to be and I didn't make the best choices. I would say age 22 to 24 is the years that I wish I could delete from my memory. This is a hard story. The thing is I've always been like I've always been a kind of person that didn't really give into social norms within a group. If I wanted to do something, I know I'd do it. If I didn't want to do something that the group was doing, I wouldn't do it. When I was in Thailand, I decided to step out of my comfort zone a little bit and try and be with the group a little bit more and have a little bit more group thinking sense just to see what it's like. I did have a very good experience and I did find myself, as she was saying, perhaps going out quite a bit when it's not really me, I guess. And that was positive in some respects. And I think in other respects it was not necessarily good for me because I didn't really have that sense of stability and control over what I was doing when I was sort of agreeing with the group and going along with things. I think it was good for me in a certain sense. Same as you, Yona. Story to tell. In this one year, it was 2009 and this was the one year that always made me believe that I must be really bipolar because I made some not great decisions. It's really hard because I couldn't look back and see that I was dealing with some unresolved issues and I was trying to find myself and of course I'm undiagnosed autistic. I don't realize that I'm trying to find myself by being what I feel like everyone expects me to be instead of just finding my own self and my own niche. They aren't things I'm proud of. I'm not going to go into detail because that's not really what this video is about. But I made enough poor choices that I was concerned about my mental health as well. I ended up losing a job that I worked out for about four or five years. Lonnie and I were actually separated for a year. It was just a lot on my mental health. Lonnie and I married when I was 17. We barely knew each other. We knew each other for three weeks before we got engaged two and a half months before we got married and we had three kids together. One wasn't biologically his and then we moved across the country. It was just a lot. A lot to process. I was young but I didn't feel like I was young and I felt like I knew everything and I didn't. It came to a point where I basically had an emotional breakdown and I just didn't know what to do with it. I didn't understand why I made all these poor choices. I wanted to understand it better. Everyone kept telling me that I must be bipolar like my mom. Everyone would tell me that constantly that I was bipolar, that I was bipolar. And so with time I just believed that that's what was going on and clearly I just was in denial and I needed to get help for it. A few months after I lost my job, Lonnie and I ended up getting back together. We moved back in together and being a stay-at-home mom again and getting constant time with Noah I immediately knew something was up. By a month's time I was like something's going on and with that, knowing that Noah had some things going on I knew he needed his mother to be at 100%. I was like if I have unchecked mental health issues if I am bipolar then I need to know I need to get on meds, I need to get treatment so I can be the best mom I could be. So at that point the thought of going through something similar to what my mom did wasn't as scary as my kids not having the mom that they needed. And so I just kind of squashed down all that fear. I'm the type of person that if you tell me something enough times I kind of believe it that's just kind of how I am. With time I just believed that I was bipolar. You couldn't have convinced me otherwise. Yeah and I think it's kind of bringing up some similarities from the last video that we watched from the fourth spot. You know that idea of ego sort of disillusion. I wouldn't say ego deaf, I think ego disillusion is probably like a better word for it but very much you know a case of unintentional gaslighting. People telling you something that you're not. That doesn't necessarily match up with your experiences but you don't necessarily have sort of a stable ego, stable identity enough to be able to counteract that. It's interesting. This person has a knack for speaking without breaks. Every time I think about pausing it and making a comment it's kind of like onto another little thing. The summer of 2011 I started the process to get help with my mental health. It was also when we were starting the process for Noah. I went to the same clinic that my mom was. My mom was a patient there. I actually got the same doctor. I don't know how they let us see the same people. I told the doctor that she was my mom. There was an assessment at all. She asked me a few questions and ten minutes later I'm walking out of there with a bipolar one diagnosis and a script for depico. And some others I went through a lot of meds they just never really worked for me very well. The depico caused me to gain a bunch of weight. That's how I actually ended up gaining a lot of my weight. I'm just thinking like I've had conversations with others who had misdiagnosed bipolar. It was I think one of the podcasts that I did with Autisticly Bee. It was a very informative podcast and I was kind of thinking about all the ways that particular meds that you might be prescribed might exacerbate some of the difficulties that you might have as an autistic person. You could think of medications like Mood Stabilizers sort of things that are designed to squash your made profile to a certain extent, I believe. If you're autistic and you're lexophymic and you struggle to notice and identify emotions particularly when they're not peaking and becoming intense enough it's going to make things a lot more difficult. It's going to make it a lot more difficult to identify how you're feeling when you're also on a mood stabilizer. You know what I mean? That's what... I'm not a pharmacologist. I had someone make a comment recently saying I think about one of the podcasts that I did saying that I need to display my credentials because I gave misinformation about I think about stimulants for people with bipolar or something like that and I was like, okay, I'm sorry. Sorry. I was just very crafting. So now I feel every time that I'm talking about my ideas about things that I need to say, I'm not a doctor. I should probably have it like plastered on my forehead. You are right with... You are right. There is no medication for autism. I mean, there's medication for things that are common to autistic people. I would argue that perhaps medications which target oxytocin might be considered to be medication. Like the podcast that I did with Dr. Miyabi Shields on sort of medicinal marijuana. Apparently she was researching a particular mediator for oxytocin which is activated through the endocannabinoid system through THC and you could argue that definitely increases someone's response to social reward. So I guess you could argue that perhaps that may be considered to be a medication maybe. It's definitely not for overall functioning but it might be for life satisfaction to some degree. Or what they tried on me. It just wasn't successful. I stayed with them for about six months just trying to figure it out because I did a lot of research as I do with anything and the research said that bipolar people didn't want to believe that they were bipolar and I refused to be that person. I refused not to be the mom that my kids needed. And so I said, nope, I'm bipolar. I will take the meds. We will do it. And there were sometimes I would go off of meds because they made me feel so, so, so horrible. But overall I wanted to be as compliant as I possibly could. And so I did try to get on different meds. And finally I felt like the doctor wasn't listening to me because I told her I'm like I have ADHD traits but she's like, oh no it's just part of your bipolar diagnosis. It's not ADHD. And so she just kept pumping me up with meds and not really addressing the fact that I still hadn't found a therapist. The best therapy I could do was group therapy which was not good. It was like 10 to 12 people. I feel like it helped me like see a different perspective of like depression and things like that but it didn't help me personally. And so I kept saying like I need therapy and they just kept disregarding it. They didn't have the staffing for it. And so when I started working at a job in collections I got private insurance and I went to a private psychiatrist by the end of our second... It's not for everyone's side and I think it's definitely like especially in the UK like I don't think there's many arguments for that although you can get you can get it medically prescribed I'd recommend looking at the podcast if you are sort of interested in sort of alternative medicine I guess. Definitely very interesting. It was interesting for me. I get the Pryadel lithium for BPD and it really did nothing for me. It's jaded me against psychiatrist, yeah. I think they can be quite sedating as well if I'm not mistaken. Like the anti-psychotic meds specifically. I'm too scared to try it for my depression. Yeah, well there's a lot of stigma around it I would say. And definitely only if you can be prescribed it medically I would say. I mean, Miyabi was saying about how it should be sort of legalized recreationally but I'm not 100% sure on that. I do definitely think that medically it has a lot of benefits but it has to be within it has to be a medical system you know that sort of mediates that 100% you don't want to be getting stuff from all sorts of random places and you want to be able to have like the tailoring of the doses just like any of the medications would if that is something that you're going for but don't listen to me I'm not a doctor. Second meeting she was like I just don't understand how they labeled you as bipolar like I'm really trying to understand and I explained to her the year that I felt like I went off the deep end and things like that and she's like yeah but have you had that happen again and I was like well no I mean after that period I was pretty stable I had moments and stuff I'm also diagnosed with complex PTSD which causes all kinds of issues and none of them ever address that they all knew about my past so I don't know why it wasn't like address why it wasn't taken into consideration but it was always pushed to the side so in my head I always thought it wasn't important like it wasn't a part of who I am over it I can talk about what happened without getting emotional or anything like that so I'm over it and it doesn't affect me I didn't realize that those kind of things just are kind of like woven into you in a way Definitely woven into you if you're autistic the prevalence of elexifamia is real 100% and it's also pretty pretty well documented to be sort of an aspect of PTSD as well the idea of CPTSD although not specifically described and diagnosed within like the psychiatric systems I think it has been explored to quite a significant extent and it does seem that neurodivergent people specifically autistic people I would say do have a tendency to developing like that kind of complex PTSD stuff I think it's to do with like sensitivity I would say yes each to their own 100% it puts a blanket over your sensory issues and emotional issues that's how I got into it ended up really being bad for me well the thing is is that it has to be like it depends on whether you use it as like a medication or whether you use it as escapism and that sounds somewhat like escapism to me I guess not trying to be a cute story I think you can get that with anything you can get that with prescribed medications like common one like benzodiazepines helps some anxiety 100% great, good for panic attacks good for like intermittent like acute anxiety also can be used recreationally and very detrimentally in terms of like escapism addiction things of that nature I think it depends on the context I would say you got paranoid maybe it was the setting I was in no I think it's a pretty pretty common side effect I would say from what I've looked into best way to process your emotions as an autistic person is physical exercise and he needs to talk about emotions doesn't benefit us in the same way I do agree that exercise is good 100% it can be incredibly regulating I wouldn't say that that's necessary really processing it I'd say that it's probably a healthy way of regulating yourself I wouldn't say that it usually when you process emotions it's kind of the tying of your experiences and understanding how you feel about it and trying to dissect that in a sense it can be somewhat difficult due to alexophymia when it comes to talking about emotions but it's definitely beneficial if you manage to kind of get over that alexophymic haze if you take melatonin I do not have metazepine helps with my sleep and anxiety it would take a long time to figure out my emotional state in various moments me too even now I mean I can sort of to a certain degree but it depends if it's a very complex thing maybe not so much and so anytime I would do anything I'd be like oh I must be starting to get a little bit manic but oh I'm fine now it was just such a strange experience when you have everyone around you saying oh yeah you're definitely bipolar because your mother is bipolar but then you have professionals saying I don't know like this doesn't quite fit what we're used to she put me on lithium and prozac prozac definitely helped a lot the lithium didn't really affect me whether I was on it or I wasn't but the prozac did the prozac helped me a lot I've learned now that it actually helps with anxiety too so that's kind of what happened that's the met I stayed on for a really long time when I was pregnant with alexander about a month or two before I gave birth I went into the psychiatrist's office I was like hey I'm about to have a baby I just want to make sure I have the med so as soon as I have them I can start meds and like a few months after seeing her she was like do you know what I don't know that you're actually bipolar like I just don't know about that and this is the kind of story every time I had any interaction with any mental health provider they were just kind of like you know this doesn't quite fit you but here you go and I honestly feel like it's because not enough people but then they can't really like turn around and say well what about this I've noticed some autistic traits here yeah it would take a long time to figure out my emotional states and various moments sometimes weeks but then processing it feels like a whole of a challenge yeah and the issue there is that you've got to in my experience to process emotions alongside events and thoughts I have to somewhat stoke the emotions in myself weirdly so a lot of the ways that I would sort of process what's happening to me like when I was a teenager was was listening to like really sort of angsty sort of teen music like I don't know like my chemical romance you know stick it on and like full blast while I'm like hitting the heavy bag outside and sort of thinking about it that usually helped although not always the most healthy and sort of best place to do it just in my experience being able to like stoke it a little bit and encourage the emotions sort of rise so that I can perceive it and understand it a bit more is sometimes helpful I mean a relatable example might be like a breakup you know perhaps like I didn't really process exactly how I feel about something like this loss in a sense but having music to sort of stoke that in me gives me a bit of it allows me to sort of see it a bit more clearly people are educated in how autism can present in adult females this is why I do this video because we do have doctors and therapists and psychiatrists and psychologists that do watch our channel so I want to tell you if you have a patient that is diagnosed with B.P.T. bipolar something along the lines and they're not just fitting the mold don't just push them aside don't just keep prescribing the meds like try to figure out like I wish that one of them would have stopped and been like hey I'd really like to do a neuropsych evaluation on you I felt really really just disregarded for a really long time it was hard for me to understand because every time I would say well maybe I'm not bipolar I would go back to this year that I made poor choices and that's the thing you can make bad choices you can maybe be struggling with your mental health in an extensive way and not have mental illness no one gets to define you if someone would have said you have some mental health struggles like that would have been different they they were completely right I was struggling with so much I was a really young mom a really young wife Lonnie and I were both dealing with their own things that's why I never tried to tell someone I think you're XYZ because I feel like it could have went a different way just because you have a family member that struggles with something doesn't mean you're going to struggle with exactly that yes mental health a lot of times is hereditary and it is very very very common if you have a mom that's like a narcissist it's very common for you to be a narcissist as well so these things are very common but they don't write everything in stone either and I'm not saying my mom's a narcissist that's not what I'm saying I was just using that as an example that it's very common for it to run in the family and it's not always just like genetics a lot of times it's just environmental so if you grew up with a mom that's like really struggling with with narcissism then that's how you were raised and that's what you saw so that's what you think is okay and so it's very very very much environmental along with genetics that is kind of my story if you have any questions leave them below because again as soon as I'm done with the series so the next video is my last video but the last last video will be my answering all of your guys' questions about everything that I've posted about so leave them below and don't forget tonight I will be doing a one to two hour live stream on Twitch depending on how many people show up it's our Leaning Crew 8 and you can come ask tons of questions and you'll have to wait for the Q&A we love you guys and we'll see you then there we go that was our landing crew capital L-A-N-A-N-D how I was misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder good to hear someone's personal account and I'm sure it's will be very useful to some of you sort of thinking about your own sort of experiences in life I know there's a lot of individuals who do come out and say the late diagnosed autistic they existed most of the life thinking that they had another diagnosis but it never really helped them the stuff that was prescribed to them didn't really help and the therapy that they received didn't really seem very helpful either so the more that this kind of information is out there I think the better because I think a lot of the time we do expect the psychiatric system to be somewhat flawless it's quite often not the case sometimes with a lot of stigma and stereotypes are attached to it so just being aware of that and if you have enjoyed it make sure to check out our landing crew's youtube channel give it a like give the video a like and give them some love I mean they have about 234,000 subscribers so maybe give some other love to me as well maybe shift some of that love to me as well or do both that would be preferred