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Dealing with Fear and Anxiety in Bipolar Disorder

Posted by Natasha Tracy | Oct 18, 2013

Tomorrow I’m flying off to see some family I don’t know at all. Oh, and my dying father. I won’t get into the specifics but suffice it to say I’m scared of family in general and my father is in a very bad way.

So at the moment, I’m being eaten up with fear and anxiety.

My mother says to me: “But I know you know how to handle that sort of thing.” And I say, “Yes, it’s a wonderful drug called lorazepam.”

I was only half joking.

Overcoming Bipolar Disorder at University

Posted by Natasha Tracy | Mar 28, 2012

The Bipolar Burble welcomes guest author Daniel Bader, Ph.D of Bipolar Today for today’s post on dealing with bipolar disorder in university. Bader proves again that you can do anything you want to do with bipolar disorder, you may just need to make adjustments.

I was a student for a very long time, having just finished up my doctorate after nine years of study, not counting my two years of parental and medical leaves. It was quite a challenge, and most of those challenges came not from the program, but from my bipolar disorder.

However, having gone through it, I wanted to discuss some of the challenges of being a student with bipolar disorder and some of the tricks that I picked up along the way. Hopefully, it can help others who might be presently in university or considering going there.

Challenges as a Bipolar University Student

There were a lot of challenges with being bipolar as a university student, but there were definitely three issues that dogged me through most of my program:

Isolation: Studying is an isolating experience. There’s endless research, reading and writing that is done entirely by myself. I found being alone with my moods was rarely a pleasant experience.
Fluctuating Self-Esteem: It’s hard at the best of times to evaluate the quality of our writing. With bipolar disorder, my work would often seem incredible or terrible, making it hard to do revisions.
Depression: Depression is awful, and it just crushed my ability to work efficiently. As a result, I often found myself falling behind.