As you might have realized, it’s two days until Christmas. Because of that, I’m up against deadlines and and trying to get oodles done before I take a couple of days off.
Long story short, I don’t have time to write an original article this week. But, don’t worry, all is not lost. I have written quite a bit about bipolar and the holidays over the years and I thought I’d pull it all together for you here:
I hate you.
Or, perhaps, it might be more accurate to say my bipolar hates you. Or my bipolar makes me hate you. Or something.
I feel this pervasive negative, black, dark, inky hatred spread atop my “Natashaness” that seems to affect how I feel about everything. Theoretically, philosophically, intellectually, I know that I don’t hate everything. In fact, I know that I don’t really hate anything. But I sure feel as if I hate everything.
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Someone recently reached out to me for some recommendations of mental illness resources as she was concerned for her sister. Unfortunately, the feedback I received from her afterwards was that her sister felt, she was “beyond help” for bipolar disorder.
I understand the feeling of being beyond help. I have felt that way so many times. I had so many goes at medication roulette and I had two doctors give up on me completely so I absolutely felt (and was pretty much told) that I, and my bipolar disorder, was beyond help.
Here’s the thing – those doctors were wrong and so was I.
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So many people come onto this blog and say, “the answer to curing bipolar disorder is . . ..” Their answers range from magnesium to religion to talk therapy.
And all of them tick me off (as I ranted in Stop Telling Me How to Cure my Bipolar Disorder).
Because your answer to curing bipolar disorder is nonsense.
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A couple of weeks ago, Brendan Anderer, Vice President of Programming and Executive Producer at HealthiNation, contacted me. HealthiNation has created a series on their site (an overall health video site) for who they call “True Champions.” These are people who are extraordinary advocates for an illness and live with the illness themselves. Brendan said he wanted to film me and make me a part of their series.
Now, in all honesty, I didn’t take it overly seriously. I get a lot of offers for a variety of things and, often, once people are told that I’m all the way on the West Coast of Canada, they are no longer interested.
But, surprisingly, HealthiNation still was.
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The Bipolar Burble is extremely honoured to introduce today’s guest author: Ross Szabo. Ross and I met when he introduced me when I won the Erasing the Stigma Leadership award earlier this year. Ross is a past recipient and an inspiring mental health speaker and, well, human being. Read below how he has learned to calm his bipolar depression by recognizing anxiety.
I was an anxious person before my diagnosis of bipolar disorder with anger control problems and psychotic features. Needless to say after my diagnosis, my anxiety did not improve. It took a lot of years of extreme alcohol abuse, broken knuckles, sleeplessness, hallucination-filled nights and dangerous behaviors until I was able to find ways to balance my disorder.
Anxiety seems to be at the root, or heavily tied to, every mood I have with bipolar disorder. One of the most dangerous cycles I have gone through is when anxiety swings in to contribute to constant thoughts of death and suicide. Overwhelming anxiety or crippling depression are hard enough to face separately. When they combine the results can be tragic.
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When someone breaks a leg, people “get” it. They understand it. They empathize with it. They’re compassionate about it. The same thing is true when people get cancer or undergo surgery for a heart condition or even get the flu. And yet when someone has a mental illness, people just don’t “get” it. And in spite of spending more than a decade educating about my mental illness, bipolar disorder, sometimes I feel like they never will. This tends to make people with mental illness feel alone.
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We all know (or all should know) that psychiatric medications can’t fix a broken life. Psychiatric medications are designed to treat the symptoms of a specific disorder, such as bipolar disorder. That means that psych meds can treat things like depression. This is a huge win for anyone suffering from depression and is miracle enough, trust me. And although some symptoms of the disorder, like bipolar or depression, may remain, (ideally they won’t, but most of us don’t live in an ideal situation) there are still many positive things that psych meds can do for you and one thing that psychiatric medications can do for your is increase your resilience to things like life stressors.
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Garden variety bipolar disorder consists of moods that typically last weeks to months if not treated. People with bipolar experience a mood and settle in for a long ride. However, people with rapid cycling bipolar disorder experience moods that typically only last weeks. People with ultra-rapid cycling bipolar disorder have moods that only last days to weeks and people who have ultradian bipolar disorder may have moods that last from hours to days.
[It worth noting that when severe moods last only for a few hours this may be considered a mixed mood episode rather than a cycler, per se.]
So, if your mood cycles quickly and spontaneously, how do you live with it?
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