Bipolar is an illness of workarounds. As in, I constantly have to find ways to work around bipolar disorder. In fact, if there’s one coping skill that matters most when it comes to dealing with this serious mental illness, it’s being creative in finding alternate paths. So let’s talk about bipolar workarounds — how we can find them and how we can use them.
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Have you ever wondered if you really have bipolar disorder and not major depression? Did you know there are signs that can point to bipolar disorder outside of what we normally consider to be the diagnostic symptoms of bipolar disorder? And did you also know that few doctors take these types of signs into account? If you feel like you have bipolar disorder but have been diagnosed with major depression, you’ll want to know about these signs because diagnosis directly affects treatment, and treatment directly affects you getting better.
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Bipolar Burble blog welcomes guest poster Bob Krulish. Bob has bipolar type 1 and today, is talking about living through mania and living with the mania monster.
I became symptomatic with bipolar disorder when I was about 16 years old, after my dad abruptly left in the middle of the night, never to return. My mom and I searched endlessly for him, driving the streets at night, shining a flashlight into dark corners of our tiny Florida town, looking for him like a lost puppy. I knew he wasn’t there; she knew he wasn’t there, but looking gave us a sense of control. That’s when my bipolar symptoms started to peek through. At first, the signs of mania were small and quiet, knocking around inside my mind like a tiny, restless mouse. There was cyclical thinking; there were obsessive tendencies, and, of course, there were delusions of grandeur.
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I have a lot of experience with bipolar depression, and I hate it when people tell me to “cry it out.” I find this one of the most useless pieces of advice you can give a person who’s upset, particularly one that’s already crying. It’s built on the idea that you can cry out a sorrow of some sort as if there’s a beginning, middle and end. Well, I can’t comment for people without bipolar disorder, but for people with bipolar depression, “crying it out” isn’t an option.
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Doctors often don’t listen to people with bipolar disorder or other mental illnesses. In fact, most people with bipolar disorder know, the instant a doctor sees “bipolar disorder” on your chart, you’re screwed. Now, don’t get me wrong, not every doctor is the same, and I have had some doctors treat me with the same care I suspect they would offer anyone else. That said, on the whole, doctors don’t listen to people with bipolar disorder. Here’s why, and here’s how to fight it.
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Today’s guest post is by Curtis Hier. He is a 34-year public school teacher with bipolar I disorder. Today, Curtis discusses how we should strive for bipolar pride over just ending bipolar stigma.
Literature calling for an end to mental illness stigma has been abundant for the past 20 years, to little effect. It has been abundant online, too. End the Stigma was a popular blog with 36.4 K Twitter followers and 42,609 Facebook likes. The blog apparently had more than 17,000 hits. As a new bipolar blogger, I can only hope to reach stats like that.
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There’s a myth that people with bipolar disorder are brilliant. There’s a myth that people with bipolar disorder are geniuses. There’s a myth that bipolar disorder has made us “special.” None of this is true. People with bipolar disorder are just people with an illness. And like any other person battling any other illness, the illness may affect us, even greatly, but it does not define us entirely. People with bipolar disorder are just regular people and that’s okay.
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There are websites that welcome suicide. Sure, they say they’re “pro-choice” when it comes to suicide, but, really, they’re welcoming the choice of suicide. And I think that when a site is welcoming of suicide, it is encouraging of suicide as well. When everyone on a site is suicidal and pressing forward towards suicide, it’s hard not to see it as a viable option, especially if you’re depressed or in distress already. I’m not sure I have an answer to the existence of pro-suicide sites, but I do have some information for their visitors.
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Everyone experiences emotional pain, and sometimes that pain can be very difficult to bear. However, I posit that people with depression experience exaggerated emotional pain. Depression causes emotional pain in and of itself, of course, but what I’m talking about is regular, everyday emotional pain being exaggerated because of depression. This is similar to how depression worsens physical pain, which I have written about before.
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