From “normal” to Bipolar

Before the diagnosis of my illness, it was already apparent to those around me, in my later years, that I may suffer from manic depressive, or bipolar disorder.  I’ve always been a more emotional person, and was seen as just that.  Angry one moment, seething with rage, and the next extremely apologetic.  Labeled as nothing more than a highly emotional teenager, I like to feel that my illness was untreated for years.  It wasn’t until a triggering event that the true, more severe symptoms of my illness became colorfully apparent, which leads me to the belief that triggers cause the illness to escalate.

My wife had an extremely debilitating pregnancy, to make a long story short, and we became more distant with one another, but I still cared deeply for her.  I had a feeling in the back of my head that something was off with her though, even though she acted like her normal self would.  Doing what I still regret, I violated her privacy and snooped through her email, to find interchanges of an adult nature between her and an old time friend.  Overcome with emotions I had never felt before, I immediately confronted her.  She was stoic in her response, which made my emotions that much more volatile.

She left the room, I asked her politely to stop, she didn’t listen. I grabbed her shoulder, she shrugged it off.  I “lunged” at her, using her words.  In that moment, emotions shifted, I collapsed down a set of maybe 6 stairs, completely bawling my eyes out at what I’d done.  This was the moment I think I truly realized that there was something truly wrong with me.  Wrong may not be the right term, but at the time that was what I felt.

I suffer from rapid cycling in my bipolar disorder, my moods can go from manic one moment, in this occurance also referred to by some as black rage, to extreme emotions on a completely different spectrum. It has lead to mixed episodes (a mix of both mania and depression simultaneous), to hypomania, to severe depression, all throughout the period of a day.

I immediately sought out help for my condition.  I tried a plethora of anti depressants, but they all had an adverse affect on me.  When my psychiatrist finally put me on a mood stabilizer called Lamictal, that’s when I started on the path to treatment for my disease. After it started to take effect, I noticed more control over my moods.  I still cycled through various moods, but I could recognize that my moods were off from my baseline.

Now, I’m currently on a combination of Klonopin for my anxiety, and Lamictal and Abilify for my Bipolar Disorder.  It’s an ongoing battle to make sure that my medication properly treats my disorder, and I have to keep track of my moods and communicate with my doctor, to make sure we appropriately adjust my medication as it becomes less effective.

But as time goes on, I feel like I’ve come to understand my illness better, and that makes it more manageable.  However, the illness never goes away.  I still experience shifts in my mood, however light.  Some days are more severe than others, but I’ve learned to cope with a combination of my medication and the help of my peer support group.  It’s a hidden struggle that everyone with Bipolar Disorder battles in their own way.  As for myself, I’m still carving out my own path.

The Disease Didn’t Do It — You Did

Many people in bipolar support groups counsel the newly diagnosed not to feel shame for things they did while they were in episode: it was the disease that did it, not them is the reasoning. This cleaving of the self, I think, does not help us get a handle on the illness and its effects on others in our life. In fact, it strikes me as downright irresponsible: you never have to make amends for anything you did.

Denial of the damage we cause is linked to this exculpation due to mania. Some say that making amends has nothing to do with apologizing. Warped logic causes it to mean nothing more than admitting to yourself what you did without making restitution or apology to those we harmed while addicted or in the throes of mental illness. I find this cheap recovery and I am suspicious of anyone who flaunts it.

Too often, I have seen people who insist that their sickness absolves them relapse repeatedly. Perhaps it is due to the fact that they do not understand the seriousness of their disorder. Or maybe they desire license to act on impulses that they would reject on moral grounds if they were in their better minds.

I take a different approach: I am responsible for my actions even when I do not remember them. Because of my denial of my illness, I harmed others. Therefore I either make peace with them or avoid them so they are not disturbed or shocked by my return to their lives.

(Families might find it better for their sanity to forgive things done in episode for the sake of their sanity while expecting the patient who now knows better to take proper steps to minimize further recurrences.)

But there is a bonus: because I am accountable, I get to own the good things I did with more resolve. I get to own the steps I have taken towards resilience.

Here is the grim truth: if I do not take ownership of the bad things I did while in episode, I cannot own the good things I accomplished. To claim otherwise invokes an irresponsibility that case workers and other mental health practitioners best not encourage.

Bipolar Steals Your Life

Life begins at….?

They say life begins at 40, well for me it was two years earlier at 38. Two months ago, as I type this, I had my 40th birthday which was rather a dull affair – no party and just me, my fiancee, four cats and two dogs at home. This was my decision not to have a full on fortieth party like I have seen my school friends have via Facebook. I suppose I should explain why.

Bipolar diagnosis

At 38 years old I finally went to see my GP (General Practitioner) after constantly breaking down in tears one minute and then feeling on top of the world the next. The GP diagnosed me as textbook bipolar, especially as my mother has bipolar, and her mother was thought to have committed suicide due to manic depression (manic depression is now named bipolar affective disorder). Thus started the cocktail of meds I am now on. Although now I am said to have rapid cycling bipolar it is actually ultra rapid (according to my own research) but my doctor doesn’t like saying that for some reason. I can cycle between the two poles of mania and depression up to three times a day which is quite exhausting. The big problem in treating rapid or ultra rapid cycling is finding the right medication solution.

Bipolar medication

At the moment i’m taking an antidepressant, mood stabilizers and antipsychotic daily, with an occasional benzodiazepine when required. Now, this sounds like one helluva cocktail and you’re right, so how did I cope with an illness I most probably had since my early teenage years for 25 years?

Self medicating

The answer lies unfortunately with the same solution as many other victims of bipolar and other mood disorders turn to. Alcohol was my self medicating drug of choice. When I was depressed I would immediately turn to alcohol to lift my mood. When manic I would use alcohol to try and chill and even knock me out so I could sleep. So,you would think that in the stable times I wouldn’t drink wouldn’t you? Wrong! When I was stable or down I would miss the manic highs so would drink to try and find the euphoria I would feel at the top of my buzz. Although I did drink regularly, I abused alcohol rather than become addicted to it. I was however, drinking daily when I had my bipolar diagnosis.

Abstinence

Since my diagnosis I have had short periods of alcohol abstinence, and today I have had almost two months completely off alcohol even though my doctor did say I could have one or two beers a week if I fancied. Part of my abstinence is willpower of course, but its also the medication negating the need for alcohol, and also having the knowledge of why I was turning to alcohol in the first place.

Advocate and stigma fighter

I have now found my inner voice which enables to me speak openly about my mental illness, and I have even been on my local radio station a couple of times to encourage other people, especially men to seek help. A recording of one of my radio interviews can be found on my blog Latest Bipolar News, be sure to check it out.
Thanks for reading and be sure to look out for the next installment.

As you are, so was I (an introduction)

Perhaps you may be reading this as a fellow Bipolar Survivor, perhaps not, and that’s okay. Before being diagnosed as Bipolar I after a series of unfortunate events, I considered myself a regular person with regular problems, but with extraordinary intelligence and a gift for creativity. I attributed the latter to genes because my dad is also very gifted in many areas. Little did I know how much genes really played a part in my development, but I’ll leave that for another blog post.

I was interned in a psychiatric hospital shortly after my manic episode in 2006, twice: once in Georgia and subsequently in California. Again, I’ll save details for another posting.

After graduating college in June 2008 and getting married at age 22 in September later that same year, I was again hospitalized after experiencing a third and (let’s hope) final manic episode. I stopped taking my meds that time, which is why I had another manic episode. Never doing that again!

All in all, it has been quite an adventure, if you can call it that, since being diagnosed in 2006. I remain married, and to the same adventurous man, have had 2 pregnancies and have 2 little girls, and continue to educate as a profession. I believe myself to be a mental health advocate, and hope to affect change in legislation so that all sufferers of mental illness can become Survivors!!!

How This All Started — JoelS & Bipolar_Blogs

Weekend time on the ward was spent waiting for someone to talk to you. I was standing in front of the nurses’ station, having completed the obligatory morning group therapy, when I was guided to a small room and told to have a seat. Then a large bearded man with a file came into the room and read over the notes that had been collected since my arrival the night before. I had arrived late the previous afternoon after I had texted my last will and testament to my wife and sat on a log studying which vein to cut. A phone call from my psychiatrist interrupted my concentration. We talked for a few minutes and I agreed to go to the hospital. Once I got there, I — the fellow who had been thinking of ending it all — walked up to the nurses’ station and told them that I was diabetic and needed my night meds delivered on schedule if I was going to maintain my blood sugar levels. They nodded dutifully and wrote notes in my chart.

This information was in the manila folder that Dr. Spears brought into the room. After reviewing the annotations, he looked up at me, leaned forward, and asked in a gentle voice “Has anyone ever told you that you were bipolar?”

Many people have told me that they were devastated when they heard the news. Others refused to believe it. I was of that class of people who felt a moment’s pause and then felt relief. At last I had a workable explanation of the torrential moods that afflicted me over the years. I had tried the boot-strap method of getting through my despairs. People had sometimes asked me if I was taking drugs — a question that surprised me because I was the opposite of an addict and a self-medicator — I didn’t touch drugs or alcohol. For 11 years, I had relied on Prozac because it had worked almost instantly to curb my depression. The dark nights of the soul I experienced during that time I wrote off to normal ups and downs. I spent up our credit cards to $40,000, messed up my already fragile teeth by grinding on them, and fought frequently with people on the Net. Was this bipolar disorder? Then, I felt, there was a treatment and I threw myself into recovery.

Bipolar_Blogs arose when I learned that it was possible to set up a special account for retweeting news. I knew that there were many people out there in the world who wrote good blogs about their struggle with bipolar disorder (including me) whose work just wasn’t making it out to the rest of the world. The blogs I knew from my own explorations told many stories about bipolar disorder. I collected a list, set them up at a feed retweeter, and released it into the Twitterverse. What people also missed was recent and reliable information about their disorder. So I added feeds from the various government agencies that provided abstracts on the latest developments in understanding organic brain dysfunctions. When my ADD allowed it, I sought out more blogs, found new news sources, and hand-posted numerous articles that I had found which talked about bipolar disorder and other matters concerning the brain.

But not every voice could be heard via the feeds. Some of them tweeted their concerns directly to Bipolar_Blogs and I made it the policy to retweet them as long as they weren’t hateful, promoting pseudo-science, or simply advertising. When I had the energy, I checked my ever-expanding feed to glean what I could from others. There is only so much one can say in 140 characters even if you are a Twitter master. I kept running into people who wanted their own blogs and didn’t know how to start. The day came when I put out feelers, asking who would like to take part in a group blog. I also asked in some chatrooms and on Facebook. A few people indicated their interest, so I wrote out some rules for the blog and invited those who felt silenced by the circumstances of their illness to take part.

We’ll see how that goes.