Raising Bipolar

Guest Post:

I was severely depressed by the time I was ten years old. Below average in terms of my weight and always athletic, I decided in fourth grade that I was too heavy to wear sleeveless shirts. Throughout middle school, I felt ostracized and it affected me in a very devastating way. I wanted to be alone most of the time and while I excelled in the academia world, I failed socially. I was binging as well, which lended no hand to my fear of being overweight. Then into my high school years, I wore pants and sweaters all year long. I was so severely depressed that I graduated with the maximum amount of sick days possible. I was accepted into an Ivy League university and it meant nothing to me. Life was dismal and unbearable on a daily basis.

I have been a human guinea pig since as I have tested every medication available. While in high school, I was given Serzone, on which I became hypomanic, but at that time I didn’t know what these terms were. I had no vocabulary or self-diagnosis terms to describe only a slight “high”. My psychiatrist tried me on every medication and we found Prozac to be the only one that worked. For several years it helped to improve my mood, but its efficacy was short-lived. When I attended university, my diagnosis was changed to Bipolar II. At age eighteen, I was put through the wringer of mood-stabilizers and anti-depressants. Years went by and by that time, I had to drop out of school due to the tremendous depressions, constant binging, inability to focus, anhedonia and cutting. Medications didn’t touch what I was going through and my doctors were faced with much frustration. For  years and years, my diagnosis remained Bipolar II, yet medications did not help and my symptoms were seemingly a straight depression. Elevated moods seemed as if I were just feeling good after being so consistently suicidal and depressed. I didn’t exhibit signs of pure mania, so the doctors began treating me with anti-depressants only. On high doses of medications that didn’t work, I became utterly hopeless. I even tried ECT and TMS.

I have recently moved to Florida where I have found a psychiatrist who does nothing with his free time but read medical journals and studies. Much like Kay Jamison, he believes that bipolar patients should never be treated with an anti-depressant despite symptoms of depression. Anti-depressants (and this quoted in research literature), either make a patient manic or have more irritable and frequent depressions. He was also able to help me decide as a patient whether I thought I was bipolar or suffered from depression. After all, my moods never quite peaked as the “classic” bipolar patient might. Due to my irritability, racing thoughts, irregular sleep patterns and early onset of depression, it was clear that I was Bipolar II. As of right now, I am being treated with only mood stabilizers and while they did not yield the quick elevation of anti-depressants, I’m slowly starting to feel like a balance is coming over me. After eight years of perhaps unnecessary struggling with an unclear diagnosis and treatment, I’ve found a true expert in my current doctor. If only I had found him sooner.

Being bipolar is a blessing is the disguise of a curse. I have been close to death more times than my stomach can handle to think about. I have ruined relationships and dreams simply because my brain chemistry could not handle stress and defaulted to depression mode. My sensitivity, however, is not something that most people do not have. I am able to pick up on subtle things in others that allow me to help them. I have creativity that one cannot learn in school. I have a highly organized intellect that most people categorize as “unusually high”. I’m always asking myself, “if I did it all over again, would I take this disease back?” The answer is , “I don’t know.” If I were able to eliminate some suffering by having had successful intervention earlier on, then a resounding “yes” would have been my response. I am 26 years old now and I’m hoping that the rest of my life will help me with confidence be able to say that without my illness, I would have just a mundane life. I truly believe that once I am able to harness my talents and abilities that only bipolar people have, there will be no limit to what I can do.

My advice to others no matter where they are along the road, is to become fully educated on the disease. When a patient goes to a doctor and does not communicate while understanding what the doctor wants to do and why, the level of care is drastically reduced. Therapy was a huge pillar in my life: not talk therapy rather Dialectal Behavior Therapy. It has allowed me to take control of my emotions instead of going to talk therapy where nothing truly gets solved (in my particular case). A strong support system through my parents, a couple of dear friends, extremely caring doctors and of course, my own resolve, have been instrumental at helping me from eight years ago to my progress today. Now I have options. Now I have more hope than ever before. Most importantly, I have acceptance that I have many virtues that I would not otherwise had if I were simply “normal.”