If life gives you lemons, make lemonade.

Albert Einstein is credited with saying that the definition of insanity is to do the same things over and over and expect different results. So I have been doing the same things over and over and yes, you’ve guessed it; expected a different set of results. I have let my bipolar disorder rule my life to such an extent I feel at times enslaved by it. I determined through pure strength of will that ‘the next time’ I would not be as bad on each up or down. But strength of will either deserted me altogether leaving me feeling morose, miserable and depressed or left me feeling so full of myself I became a bombastic, arrogant, verbose, pretentious, angry idiot: in other words I just repeated the same old cycle year after year. Expecting that with each ‘recovery’ some miraculous curing would happen and the next time round things would be different, but not actually doing anything other than wishing it, is I suppose the definition of insanity according to Einstein (or whoever!!). But I know I am not insane. Why then, has it taken me over half my life to decide that I can’t continue to do this? I can’t continue to expect different results but change nothing. It seems so simple. Change something, DO something else, try out something else. And yet, year after year, I continued to do the same old things and lamented the fact I was doomed to repeat the same old cycles, blaming it all on this “all encompassing” bipolar disorder.

If I am to be brutally honest, I don’t know what scares me more; trying something else and it not working, or trying something else and it actually working and then having to take ownership of the fact I left it so long to alter things. My new therapist said to me recently that in the small time we have been working together she has gathered from our conversations/sessions that I ‘pour myself’ into helping people when they are in need. I actually thought that was a very good way of describing it. I go into overdrive when people around me are in need. I do that for everyone except myself. With me, I surrender: I give up without putting up a fight. I am not okay with the fact I have bipolar disorder, my rhetoric will lead anyone to believe I fight against the onslaught of this illness, but when I am ambushed by its symptoms, I don’t do much to help myself because in that moment I can’t. In the ‘in between’, I haven’t done much to help myself either. I certainly educate myself and try to keep abreast of new treatments, but when I am feeling well, I am just that – feeling well. So I put all thoughts of doing other things on the back burner. I know that eventually a swing will come, but life has a way of taking over. My time is filled with other things, other people, places to go, people to see and lots of things to be done – shitloads of stuff to be done. Somehow, I end up way down the priority list.

I would certainly say that life has given me a lemon. Bipolar disorder is a bitter, bitter illness that, if I let it, will rob me of everything that is unique and wonderful and special about me. But I can’t change that fact; ever! I have bipolar disorder, it is incurable, lifelong. For now. So I can continue to rage against this illness in word only, or I can try something different. This therapy is something different. Wonderwoman (nickname for Therapist) is of the opinion that emotional intelligence will stand me in really good stead for all of my life; for all of my dealings with everyone in my life. I happen to agree. Emotional intelligence (EQ) is the ability to identify, use, understand, and manage emotions in positive ways to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges, and defuse conflict. I am learning to use emotional reasoning to deal with my anxiety levels. I am learning to come at an issue from the point of view of assertion rather than aggression. I am learning the practical differences between the two and how to cope with my own feelings rather than push them deep down inside of me. I cannot continue to be low on my priority list. Ultimately that is not helping anyone, least of all me.

Instead I am endeavoring to make lemonade with those lemons. I am attempting to do something different. Because staying the same isn’t an option any more.

More answers to some Questions: Bipolar Disorder 101

Starting and then finishing anything these days takes a huge effort. My mind wanders and goes off on little journeys all its own, flitting from topic to topic as others either talk to me or I simply sit quietly on my own. Following any ‘train of thought’ to a conclusion is challenging and the harder I try to concentrate, the more I appear to meander. So lets see if I can manage to answer the next five questions without heading off on a tangent all my own!!!!

 Question 21; Are you content with it being called bipolar affective disorder, or rather revert to manic depression or rename it completely? Why?
‘Manic depression’ has, in Ireland anyway, a very negative history. Those who struggled with bipolar disorder (formerly known as manic depression)(think prince!!) in this country were historically horribly mistreated, placed in asylums with very little medication and lots of cruelty.   While things have changed drastically in terms of services and treatments, the name still holds negative associations to this day. At the end of the day, it is what I suffer from – I have a manic depressive disorder. The fact that there is still so little really understood about the illness, still so much stigma attached to the condition for those of us who suffer from it and so much discrimination and prejudice shown to those of us with mental illness (and also accepted by us) is a disgraceful indictment of a modern society. The label won’t matter as long as those prejudices remain. The label doesn’t matter as long as medications to counteract the symptoms remain expensive and access to mental health services continue to be inadequate or elitist. I am lucky I can afford both the medications and the specialist psychiatry care. On average a months worth of meds and a doctors visit costs about $300 dollars or 3,500 South African Rand, with the medications costing more than half of that figure. Every month. I could attend a public clinic, but would get less care, less often. All things being equal, I don’t care what it’s called. I just wish lots of things were different – the name is not really one of them.

Questions 22. What meds gave you the worst side effects, how did/do you treat it/them, and do you still get any side effects now?
When I was first diagnosed, I was prescribed a drug called Fluanxol. It is a thioxanthene medicine, diagnosed for both schizophrenia and those of us suffering from depression. I was on this for about five years and I developed a shaking and weakness of the hands which was fairly difficult to deal with. I also had restless legs and would unconsciously move my legs all the time. I didn’t quite rock back and forth, but I wasn’t far off it. My doctor at the time, weaned me off fluanxol after about five years as he said that there had been cases of patients being left with face tics after prolonged use. I was put on tegretol which is a carbamazepine medication. The side effect of this was to give me what I called a ‘cotton wool’ tongue. It made my brain fuzzy, it made me feel like I had a swollen tongue and I was ‘tripping over it’. Sounds strange – how can you trip over your own tongue, but that is the closest description I can think of. It wasn’t until I was put on tegretol retard that this symptom mostly went away. Presently I take 1500mgs of this daily (just before bed actually). I was also put on Lexapro (an SSRI) about ten years ago and 18 months ago, that was changed to 60mgs of mirtazapine.

One of the greatest side effects of these medications for me is weight gain. I have over the last ten years put on a significant amount of weight, which I find extremely difficult to shift. I comfort eat as part of the depression itself, so of course this doesn’t help. Because my brain won’t ‘shut off’ I also take 15mgs of Zolpidem every night. But I don’t sleep well, even taking two tablets every night, my sleep is fairly disturbed – certainly not what I would call ‘restive’.  I deal with the symptoms/side effects as best I can.  That’s all I can do; it’s not ideal, but it is what it is.

Question 23: Why do I blog about bipolar?
I blog to quiet and clear my thoughts, to make sense of what I am thinking, how I am feeling and try and sort things out for myself. I write to have a record of my ups and downs so that I can track how I am actually doing. Sometimes it is difficult to gauge that for myself. I also blog to share with others who struggle and suffer as I do. There is strength in numbers and great support on the blogosphere. I like to feel that, to feel that I am part of a bigger group, to feel I am understood completely without having to explain myself.

Question 24. How much of your life has been stable/euthymic, depressed and hypo/manic?
Well that’s a tough question… to which I actually don’t know the answer.   I am a rapid cycler. I have distinctive high and low episodes regularly.   But I’ve also had a stressful life.  I had three children under the age of four, a fairly stressful business to run, a home to run, and a husband who is a workaholic and an alpha male. I put a lot of pressure on myself to be all things to all people because I am also a bit of a perfectionist. I worry about things more than I should and find it extremely difficult to delegate. Of the last 20 years, I can say that probably half of it has been somewhat balanced, while the rest has been cycling either up or down. That is as exact as I can be.

Question 25. What state are you in right now, when did it start and what are your goals and hopes about it?
I was diagnosed as clinically depressed in March of 2014. My doc said that it was not related to my bipolar disorder.   I had spent about five months before that wanting to put my car under a truck so that I could just “stop” everything. When I almost did it one morning on the way to work, I knew I was in trouble. Since March of last year, I’ve been battling to get out of that ‘valley of shadows’. The medications have been tweeked and upped until I felt at least I wasn’t getting any worse. I feel like I’m coming back to myself now. But anxiety has become a factor for me. Doc says it is like I am having a bit of a crisis, that life is just a bit difficult for me at the moment. When I feel too much stress, I get panic attacks, anxiety attacks and I shut down. But I’ve come a good way already . When I look back on how I was this time last year, I know there is a huge improvement. I just have to make sure that I keep that up, that I get control of the anxiety and I can have somewhat of a normal (or at least what passes for normal) existence. That’s all I can aim for – more good than bad days. I’d settle for that.

31 Questions on Bipolar. Question 1 – 4

I’ve only come across the 31 questions to be answered if you are bipolar that is doing the rounds on the blogosphere recently. “Where have you been,” the voices in my head ask?   “I’ve been gone, gone, gone,” I answer, to the rhythm of the song of the same name by Phillip Phillips. (I kid you not!) – and yes, I had to look that one up!!

I’ve decided to answer the questions too, in ‘bite’ sizes. I have to think back a good few years for some of the answers and so I am approaching this the way I am approaching everything these days, with absolute honesty, otherwise what’s the point?
Question 1. What flavour of bipolar are you? What does your diagnosis mean to you?

My ‘flavour’ of bipolar is a Rapid Cycler Bipolar 1, with mixed states thrown in for good measure. I am a frequent, persistent rapid cycler, with way more than four distinct episodes per year, certainly in the beginning and again in the last few years.  What does my diagnosis mean:  its shit!  I feel like I’m damaged, broken somehow – not whole – not trustworthy.  Not trustworthy!!
Question 2. What is your baseline mood/state? How does that impact your life?

My baseline mood/state? I had to think about that one. That seems like a stupid statement, but I haven’t been baseline for at least 26 months and I forget. I forget what it’s like to feel ‘normal’. Looking back on my life though I have been successful, for the most part, in my working life. I have been mostly successful at rearing a family. I worry about the long-term effects of having an individual struggling with bipolar as a mother on my children, but for the most part, they seem to have come out of childhood relatively unscathed. I have been in a relationship with the same man for the past 27 years (married for 23 of those years) and he’s still here so that is something. We have had our ups and lots of downs, so whether it is a ‘successful’ relationship I’m still trying to work that one out. For a long time I viewed myself as ‘broken’ and was amazed at the fact that he stayed in the relationship. I had to count myself lucky that he was still here. Lets face it, who else would be able to love me, or put up with me, or put up with my moods, my anger, my depression. So the fact he stayed was ‘yah’ for him and a relief for me. So, back to baseline: I think my baseline allowed me to be high functioning, possibly more on the manic side of normal than the depressive side. The last two/two and a half years, that graph seems to have flipped and I have been on the very low depressive side of normal. In fact I’ve been so below normal, I scared myself sometimes.

How did that impact my life? Well I suppose I answered that with some of the above. I was high functioning. I worked hard in a full time job, I mothered three kids, I ran a home, I was a wife. When my children were diagnosed with dyslexia one after the other, I did what I do, I went into overdrive, learned about the condition, got them help, helped them myself, became the epitome of a pushy mum at their school and pushed and pulled them through their schooling fighting for them every step of their way.

I had few friends though and I mean in the ‘real’ sense of the word. I had two friends during the time my children were really small. Relationships were and are still not easy for me. Now, acquaintances and ‘casual connections’ they were easy. They didn’t really ‘know’ me, or have to get to know me and all my issues, so they were easy; kept at arms length. Despite being in an industry where I had to talk to people regularly, I kept myself and my personality wrapped tightly, protected, away from others.

How does it affect my life now?

The fact the graph has swung down to the depressive side is harder. It’s harder to fight off slight depression than to cope with slight mania. My default seems to be pessimism, ineffectiveness, lack of energy, lack of any sort of motivation. My get up and go has got up and gone! So that’s hard. It’s actually really hard. And it’s really hard on family relationships and dynamics.

Question 3: How old were you at the onset? How old were you at diagnosis? How were you given the diagnosis and are you satisfied with the way it was handled?

Well, now, how old was I at the onset? – That is what I am actually still trying to figure out? I was ‘diagnosed’ at 26. I went to my doctor nine months after my son was born thinking I had post natal depression and he’d give me Prozac and everything would be fine in a few weeks! He listened to me and said ‘Weeelll, its not only pnd, so I need to send you to a specialist, which he did. I got an appointment fairly quickly and went (as a private patient) to a psychiatrist who at the time (unbeknownst to me) was one of the foremost specialists in Bipolar disorder in the country. He diagnosed me within one session with a ‘rapidly cycling mood disorder’, and that as they say is that; I was 26 years old – petrified, unsure of what it really meant and what would happen from here.   Despite being a foremost specialist, my psychiatrist never really explained what the diagnosis meant, what it would mean for me, for my life and where we (or I) should go from here. I went off and on my meds like a yo-yo in the early years thinking I was cured and was not really aware of what would happen if I did this. I did research, read up on the condition, but never really associated what I read with myself and lied like a trooper to my psych whom I couldn’t for some reason bond with. Was I happy with the way things were handled back then? Absolutely not. First and foremost I would have loved more information, more knowledge, more everything. Now, having been with another psychiatrist since 2003, I have come to realize that I had ‘events’ in my life way before the diagnosis in 1995, when I was 26, as far back as my mid teens. Does it really matter at this point ‘when’ it started? Not to me. Not at this point. Too much living has happened in between.
Question 4: How do you feel about people who diagnose themselves online and then treat themselves for bipolar?

One word: Idiots

Seek professional help. Get a proper diagnosis. Get a medical plan. Get support. Just don’t go on online diagnostic tests. They will have you having everything from cancer to brain tumors. They are not reliable!!!!

Okay, I’m exhausted. I think those four answers are enough for today’s ‘session’.  I’m leaving the couch now!!  Be back soon though……

‘It’s my bipolar’ – ‘No, it’s not’….!

I have spent 21 years of my 47 years on this planet living with the label of being bipolar. My life has been seen through the veil, the threat, the symptoms of bipolar. My moods have been described and dismissed as being bipolar symptoms. My whole identity has been so intertwined with being a bipolar sufferer that I don’t at times know where it ends and I begin.

This new psychotherapy is playing havoc with my knowledge of myself.   I am having to re-evaluate things, episodes, events, what’s inside me and my reaction and interaction with people that for my whole life to date I have dismissed as being a ‘bipolar’ reaction. Now, I am very aware that the ‘illness’ of bipolar has no personality, but it feels like it has and it’s been grafted onto mine – or that my personality, my frustrations, my anger, my upset my emotions have been attributed to my bipoloar and not given legitimacy in their own right. My feelings have been dismissed and instead they have been commandeered/hijacked/usurped and labeled as a bipolar rant, a bipolar low, a bipolar anger, a bipolar anything and everything. I have spent a good majority of my life apologizing for my mood swings. I have spent a good majority of my life having my ‘upset’ and high emotions, my anger, my frustrations, attributed to my bipolar. I can’t talk about my life in any substantive way without mentioning himself. He’s been a part of it for the past 27 years. We are longer together than we were as separate individuals. I was diagnosed after I was married ; after my first son was born and he has lived my illness with me every step of the way.

But what happens to an individual whose very emotions are called into question and/or dismissed as illegitimate because of that illness. What happens when the person doing it is the one who has supported you every step of the way? Can illnesses like mine turn the very relationship that has been of vital importance all my life into a toxic one? And is it too easy to blame the illness!!

I have spent the majority of my life feeling lucky. I have felt lucky that I did a job I really enjoyed (most of the time), I had three lovely children whom I adored and still do (though they are almost fully grown now), and a husband who stood by me throughout my illness. That is how I describe him. He’s wonderful, he stood by me. He’s amazing, he stayed even though I was a raving lunatic at times. He’s so good to have put up with me all those years. But in putting him up on this pedestal, I threw myself down to the bottom. I became unworthy somehow. My illness became this ‘huge’ thing that no one else would put up with and boy isn’t he great because he did put up with it, how lucky am I.

Don’t get me wrong, I do actually love my hubby, but it’s not an equal relationship we have. And it’s not equal because of how I view myself and how I view him. I view myself as Damaged. Sick. Mentally ill. Broken. Not Worthy. It is those feelings of being inadequate that the psychologist is pulling away at. She’s pulled at a few strings and I can feel everything unravel, but it’s happening at a pace that is hard for me to adjust to – after all I have spent my life feeling this way. To be asked to address the root causes of those feelings is difficult to do. And to be honest I’m not sure whether I want to see the man behind the curtain, or whether I can just stay in Oz, running from the wicked witch of the west.

I don’t embrace change well. I don’t know if I can do this……

It’s been a while………..

It’s a while since I picked up a pen, or danced my fingers across the keyboard to do anything other than check my bank balance (depressing) or see who sent me emails I don’t need/want/require/or are of any benefit. Although I probably could do with the diet pills, I certainly don’t need a penile enlargement, to find out if my partner is cheating on me, a Russian bride, to claim the lottery prizes (of which there are quite a few) that I have won (but never entered!!) or any of the other asinine stuff that comes to my inbox every day.

Digression over, it’s been a while….

It’s been a while since I had any time to myself. It’s been a while since I felt able to string a coherent set of thoughts together. It’s been a while since I have had any sort of peace within myself. And it’s been a while since I simply felt like putting down on paper/screen/(out of my head) my thoughts; because once I do that I have to confront what is there before me. And that’s the difficult part….. The thing with bipolar is I never really trust my own feelings. Are they real? Is my anger justified? Why am I really sad, or frustrated, or discouraged, or upset? Is what I am feeling real at all? I have started sessions with a psychologist and she’ll be teaching me the techniques of cbt, but before any of the good stuff that will actually help is talked about, she’s brought me back to places I’m not sure I want to revisit. She’s brought me back to a time in my life I wanted to just forget, wipe from my memory as if I can just ignore its very existence. She is making me dredge up things I either wanted to ignore, or forgot about in some sort of self-protection approach. She’s a lovely psychologist, but I have left the last three sessions with her in tears by the end. And then I’m upset for the week. I’m facing issues about myself and others around me that I don’t particularly want to face. Because facing issues like that means that action must then be taken. Without some sort of action, this will all be pointless.

I don’t know why I was reluctant to undergo this type of therapy. Strike that, I think I do. – My psych told me at my last two sessions with her that my recent ‘issues’ were not bipolar related – that she feels I am instead having a bit of a crisis and an inability to deal with the stresses of life – for which she cannot prescribe any medication because I’m at the highest limit for my particular meds (we just recently changed the anti-depressant anyway – but she says its not related to my recent anxieties!!); hence the psychology sessions!! The first time she said it, I passed it off as her having a bad day, because surely I can’t be “not able” to cope with “life”. That sounded ridiculous to me. I’ve coped with bp for so long, how can it now be that ‘life’ is getting in the way… how can it be that it is simply the stresses and anxieties of life that is now making me feel this wretched. The second time she said it however, I had to take notice. She suggested the psychology sessions and organized them fairly promptly which brings me to the last month. It’s so easy to label everything that goes wrong in my life as ‘bipolar related’. It’s easy to pass off feelings of insecurity, anger, despair as being the symptoms of the illness I have for so long shouldered. In labeling them that way, then it becomes easy to avoid doing anything about them because the root cause is not of my making, well not really – it’s in my head – its only my ‘illness’ talking. Except sometimes it’s not in my head. That is what this psychologist is making me face. She is making me face myself and my decisions and my actions or inactions in a very cool, calm way – but its wreaking havoc on me. I come out of there a snotty mess. For the last few weeks she’s shook my hand and said it will get better. But before that happens we have to go back….. Go back and dig up stuff I don’t want to. Go forward and deal with stuff I’d rather label as bipolar related, go and look myself in the mirror and say ‘yeah, but how do you really feel’..

And I’m terrified.

I’m terrified of what I will see.

I’m terrified what I will find out about myself

I’m terrified of what I will have to then do about it.

I’m not sure if I have used my bipolar as a crutch my whole life or as an excuse, or as a shield. Perhaps it’s a bit of all three, perhaps its none of those; I really don’t know. And that’s the terrifying part. That and what’s now going to happen.

Shit, I hate the unfamiliarity of all this….

I think, therefore I am: I can’t think, therefore I am sick?!

Sick: definition:
1. afflicted with ill health or disease; ailing.
2. affected with nausea; inclined to vomit.
3. deeply affected with some unpleasant feeling, as of sorrow, disgust, or boredom: sick at heart; to be sick of parties.
4. mentally, morally, or emotionally deranged, corrupt, or unsound:
a sick mind; wild statements that made him seem sick.

Being sick in actual terms to most of us simply means being unwell. But for the purposes of this post, for me it means being cognitively impaired (unable to think!) in some fashion. As the title says: I can’t think, therefore I am sick!
Day to day I am able to function, but I find myself functioning ‘slower’ than I remember myself doing when I was younger. (I remember a vibrant, outspoken, cocky, self-assured, ‘I can take on the world’ 20 year old who thought she had the world at her feet, ready for the conquering.)
Now, I just seem to think slower, take longer to recall information, forget things/conversations/events/promises altogether, take longer to make a decision and just simply seem to operate slower altogether across all spheres of my life. I notice it, others might not. It annoys the hell out of me, especially the recalling of information. (Ever have the feeling that something is on the ‘tip of your tongue’, a word, phrase, an event… just out of reach of your working memory.. yep, that’s me too…)

The medical profession have, for years, understood that cognitive impairment goes hand in hand with psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s. It is only in the last few years that the idea of lasting cognitive impairment in those of us struggling with bipolar disorder is being given any weight.
We all know that during spells of mania or depression that cognitive impairment is part and parcel of our dysfunction/spell. But lasting cognitive impairment even in euthymic/stable individuals is a new train of thought for the medical profession. I don’t for the life of me see why it took so long for neurologists to even think this. As someone who struggles with bipolar I could have told you I had some sort of deficit.; but no one asked!!?

Unlike patients who are schizophrenic, those of us with bipolar do not have to deal with IQ deficits, but we do have to deal with difficulties in attention span as well as short and long term memory difficulties, – at least I do. I can recall events from twenty years ago with a crisp clarity, but ask me to recall an event that happened two months ago and I will ask you what month that was?

Bipolar disorder/illness is really the ‘poor relation’ among psychiatric illnesses. We are the ones whose ‘illness’ appears not to matter as much as others, whose symptoms are not worthy of being studied or not studied as much, and despite being on the WHO’s radar in sixth place in the top ten causes of disability worldwide in the 15 – 44 year age group, it is only now that neurological/psychiatric studies into the long term effect of bipolar illness on memory/cognitive functions are taking place.

There is no doubt that some of the medications from the myriad of meds out there can actually exacerbate the problem of memory loss/recall and perhaps it is for this reason that we have been left behind in the field of long-term studies. It’s been seen as a ‘med thing’ and not a ‘symptom thing’. Or perhaps it is because depression of any kind has for so many years been brushed under the carpet and ignored as were/are the people struggling with it. Any sort of medical treatment is expensive. Specialist treatment by expert professionals is even more so, so perhaps it is a matter of cost that hardly enough study has been conducted into the side effects/symptoms of long term depression. It has been ‘bean-counted’ and we have come up as disposable or not worth the risk – until now.

At least the sands appear to be shifting. At least now, more research is being done – it’s better late than never I suppose. And it’s not too late for me. I have a tendency to write myself off – hey, that’s a symptom of my bipolar, but I’m not dead yet and until that happens there is always hope – an anticipation that things will improve for those of us struggling with bipolar and an expectation that better medications will appear and more studies will be done so that one day, perhaps, we can be symptom free – completely- for the rest of our lives. Now wouldn’t that be wonderful?

Crapshoot, Fate and Genetics!

A few months back, I wrote a piece about having children and the genetics of bipolar. I had my children before I fully realized what my ‘illness’ was and how it would affect me, and those around me. I was almost 27 when I was diagnosed, my firstborn son was nine months old. It started as postpartum depression that just never went away. I have to say I am lucky (if you can put bipolar and luck in the same sentence and not hysterically laugh), but I am lucky that I was diagnosed quickly. I didn’t have to wait years for a definitive answer; I didn’t have to flounder my way from doctor to doctor or specialist to specialist either. I didn’t go through the torment of broken relationships, self imposed and/or inflicted isolation from friends and family, hospital admissions and misdiagnoses galore. I went to my family GP, who sent me to a specialist who diagnosed a ‘rapidly cycling bipolar disorder’ as soon as our first session was over. The fact that he was head of the main Psychiatric Hospital in Dublin at the time probably helped – that and the fact I had a healthy medical insurance plan! It was however, to be a further five years before I actually had a psychiatrist I trusted. (Just because someone is recommended doesn’t mean you have to stay with them. I finally learned this and sought a referral to another psychiatrist from my family GP and have been with the same Psych ever since.)

There is a long and somewhat ‘dark’ history of mental illness on the maternal side of my family. It’s all a bit deep and mysterious! For sure schizophrenia is in there, for sure so is depression. As I am sure happened the world over, bygone members of my family were locked away in what was then termed ‘lunatic’ asylums, (a more offensive name than lunatic would have been difficult to come up with) to while away their sorry existence doped up to their eyeballs. This at the time was cutting edge treatment. So mental instability is inherent in my genes. I didn’t quite comprehend all this before my own diagnosis. The subject never really ‘came up’ and my uncles’ illnesses were spoken of in hushed tones. I certainly didn’t understand the gravity of my own diagnosis – not for years really.

So I had three children. Three wonderful, relatively well adjusted children. And all was well in our household.

But last year, wasn’t the best of years, not for me and not for my eldest, who turns 21 this year. At the tail end of last year, my son came to me and told me he was in trouble. What comes to mind when a son says that to his mother is all sorts of random things; pregnancy, drugs, problems with girlfriends (or boyfriends) or pals, anything but mental illness. He went on to explain that for the past few months he had considered jumping off a bridge he has to cross every day. (He both crosses the bridge every day, and every day he thought of jumping off.) The fact that he came to me and admitted he needed help was a minor miracle all its own. He tends to internalize things, like most young men do, but over the years I have talked to them all about my ‘condition’ and made them promise if they felt they needed help they would ask. And he did.

It’s very hard to explain how I felt when he opened up to me. There was a part of me that was extremely grateful that he had come to me and not done something stupid, that goes without saying. There was another, a much bigger part of me that was filled with pure white terror. Of course Mammy mode went into overdrive, so I arranged an appointment with the family doctor, sent him there (because he’s an adult and no matter how much I would have wanted to bring him I couldn’t) made him tell me word for word what the doctor said and then phoned the doctor afterwards (yep – that mammy thing again) because a referral to a specialist was necessary. I think this is as much to do with my family history as anything else. So I arranged for my son to attend the clinic of my psychiatrist. I trust her therefore he gets the best. Luckily, luckily, my son is only depressed. (That almost makes me laugh to write that!!) What I mean by that is he is not bipolar!

Terror = fear, horror, dread, fright, shock, panic

I don’t know how I would have felt if he was diagnosed as bipolar? Its genetic, therefore it would have been my fault. I would have been responsible for this person, who I love more than life itself, having to take a much more difficult path through life. I suppose my own experience could have helped him, but I know that ultimately, you are alone with your head and in your own head a lot of the time. While others can support you, they can’t really help you.

Fate = providence, destiny.

Don’t tempt fate = believing that events are predetermined and can be changed/altered negatively by the mere mention of them.

It hasn’t altered my opinion of whether to have children or not. It’s all a crap-shoot in the end, the odds are just slightly more weighted. But I don’t think I would have been as blasé about that decision as I think I was, if it even factored at all.

Living in Hope

There are times I would feel quite at home putting up a poster with these words “Help wanted to find missing person”. Of course that missing person would be me, or at least the part of me that is, at that time, gone. During depressive episodes I feel the real ‘me’ the part of me that enjoys and embraces life is literally just gone, lost and forlorn. We all know the state, its where all hope has departed, where instead of positivity we have the other demons on our shoulders, hopelessness, desolation, anxiety, profound sadness and all their lovely cousins…
It’s a grim state, the depressive element of bipolar. I’m not entirely sure which part of being bipolar I hate the most; the highs or the lows. Each has their own fascinating and treacherous ‘side-effects’! I say fascinating because despite all our medical discoveries, we are no closer to a ‘cure’ now than we were a few hundred years ago. We have made breakthroughs and invented drugs to keep the symptoms of mental illness at bay, but a cure? – Nah! Not yet!

It is however fascinating to realize there is nothing more resilient than the human psyche. I have come back from the deep and come down from the pinnacle and while I can’t and won’t say ‘unscathed’, I have survived. The consequences of my illness mean I’ve lost friends, I’ve alienated those I love, I’ve done many things I wouldn’t even begin to write about. At the same time, I have an unquenchable desire to understand my actions, to comprehend my emotions, to recognize the pits and pendulums so that I can do better, be better.

Nowadays the medical profession prefer to use the term ‘mind’ instead of psyche. Mind, psyche, cognizance, perception they are pretty much the same when dealing with a ‘sick’ psyche (sorry -mind)!! My perception of things is askew because of an imbalance in hormones somewhere within my brain. It could even be a teeny tiny imbalance, the medical profession doesn’t quite know for sure yet! In the past, I’ve been vocal about the lack of understanding, research and treatment for people with mental illness irrespective of the category. But the treatments that have been available up to just quite recently (as cutting edge medicine!!!) were barbaric.

Mental illness was once mistaken as demonic possession. In an effort to ‘cure’ the infected, holes were cut in their heads to force the demon out! This was called trepanning or trepanation. What’s weird (or weirder perhaps) is that practice is alive and well today, I kid you not….

Trepanation is the practice of making a hole in the skull in order to improve the brain pulsations and hence the overall well being. A trepan is the instrument used for making a hole in the skull bone. It is sometimes spelled trephine. The idea is to pump up the brainbloodvolume. It’s known that one’s level of consciousness is directly related to the volume of blood in one’s brain. As a result, trepanners say, one feels happier and more energetic.

For more on this wonderful technique see http://www.trepanationguide.com

Hydrotherapy was also another wonderful treatment thought to ‘cure’ mental illness. Some patients were mummified in towels and soaked in freezing cold water for hours on end. Other patients were strapped into freezing cold baths (sometimes for days on end) and only allowed out to the toilet. If that wasn’t bad enough, patients who didn’t respond were subjected to hosing from high-powered jets! Needless to say, this type of treatment was discredited for lack of tangible results.

In the early 1900’s the purposeful infection of a patient with Malaria to induce a high fever to cure their illness was first used. The procedure was hypothesized and carried out by Austrian physician Julius Wagner von Jauregg (who incidentally was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1927).
After that came along came a young Polish neurophysiologist and neuropsychiatrist named Manfred J. Sakel. While an internist in the Lichterfelde Hospital for Mental Diseases, in Berlin, Germany, he provoked a superficial coma in a morphine-addicted woman, using an injection of insulin, and obtained a remarkable recovery of her mental faculties. He then embarked on a coma inducing rampage treating patients with this technique for years. Despite claims of a greater than 60% success rate, controlled studies showed that a long-term cure was not achieved and that improvements were many times temporary. But, since Sakel’s method was the gentler and less harmful of all somatic (affecting the body as opposed to the mind) techniques, it was still in use in many countries until recently.

Up next comes a Hungarian pathologist named Ladislas von Meduna who in 1933 reasoned that, because schizophrenia was rare in epileptics and because epileptics seemed much happier after seizures he hypothesised inducing seizures in schizophrenic patients with the use of drugs would make them calmer. So the drug Metrazol was pumped into patients at varying levels. Of course, inducing a seizure had side-effects including fractured bones and memory loss, so doctors soon turned away from this treatment.

And of course, lets not forget the Lobotomy! Destroying a persons’ frontal lobe is to me a bit like throwing out the baby with the bathwater!! According to Wikipaedia:

“The procedure, controversial from its inception, was a mainstream procedure for more than two decades (prescribed for psychiatric and occasionally other conditions) despite general recognition of frequent and serious side effects. Whilst some patients experienced symptomatic improvement with the operation, this was achieved at the cost of creating other impairments, and this balance between benefits and risks contributed to the controversial nature of the procedure. The originator of the procedure, António Egas Moniz, shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine of 1949 for the “discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses”, although the awarding of the prize has been subject to controversy. The use of the procedure increased dramatically in some countries from the early 1940s and into the 1950s; by 1951, almost 20,000 lobotomies had been performed in the United States. Following the introduction of antipsychotic medications in the mid-1950s, lobotomies underwent a gradual but definite decline.
Lucky us huh!!

So, along with probably hundreds of other ‘treatments’ (I use that term flippantly) tried out on us mental patients over the last three hundred years or so, the above gives a glimpse of what our predecessors had to endure for a cure. There is no doubt that casting a glance backward and seeing how modern treatments were developed, it makes me feel extremely lucky to be alive at this time. Medicine is not perfect, but it’s better than the above. Necessity is the mother of invention. With so many of us struggling with all sorts of ailments, some environmental, some psychological, some physiological, perhaps now the ‘necessity’ for something more lasting and complete than medication will finally come along. One can always live in hope……

Bipolar among the top ten most disabling disorders in the world!

In Ireland the term ‘soft day’, means it’s raining, but not the lashing rain we sometimes get. It’s not quite a mist either – its somewhere in between, what we’d term a drizzle or ‘soft day’ and it goes on and on and on!
Sometimes that is what my depression feels like – not quite bad enough to have me well, depressed, (despondent, sad, melancholy, disheartened, down) but not quite gone/under control either. It’s like an itch I can’t scratch. It just is there, saturating how I feel (let’s keep the rain metaphore going here!!)

It is sometimes hard to explain how I feel. Inside my own head, I know there is something wrong, my thought processes are not right, my ‘feelings’ about things are not right. They are off, but not quite discernable to others. So when my behavior is viewed as something other than what it is, me having a bad day, then problems can start.
I wish everyone could just know what it feels like to be suffering from bipolar for a week. I wish someone else could experience a swing, the highs and lows that tear your mind apart for a while. I wish everyone else could really and truly understand what it is like being ill. Because by going through it, then perhaps there can be more understanding for what we go through.

I didn’t know this, but bipolar disorder is ranked by the World Health Organization among the top 10 most disabling disorders in the world. It was the subject of a study by Javier Ballester, MD, and colleagues.
The study concluded that “BP, particularly during acute episodes, is associated with increased self-reported verbal and physical aggression, anger, and hostility. These results provide further evidence of the need for treatments to prevent mood recurrences and prompt treatment of acute mood episodes in subjects with BP.”

Well, tell us something we don’t know then!!!!!

I didn’t know about the ranking, although I can understand why. But why isn’t this stuff more widely discussed, more widely publicized, more widely understood.

If it was, then those of us who struggle may be less (mis)judged, misunderstood and less alone in our struggles at times.
No matter the support, I really feel we go through this alone. There is no one inside our heads to help. It is a lonely illness this bi-polar.

Lonely and disabling! The WHO says so!!