You Have What?

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, bipolar disorder is a brain disorder that has a biological origin. It used to be known as manic-depression and causes extreme shifts in a person’s mood, energy level, and ability to function normally. Everyone has normal ups and downs but with a person who has bipolar disorder these are dramatically pronounced. A person who is in the midst of a bipolar cycle can have distorted thoughts and moods, abnormal behavior, inability to form rational thoughts, and, frequently, due to the sheer frustration of it all, seriously considers suicide.

The average person would simply say that someone with bipolar disorder is crazy. Or depressed. Or emotionally and psychologically immature. People with this disease frequently have substance abuse problems, an inability to choose and follow a definite course in life, seem to be unable to concentrate, or make up their minds on how they really feel about something. They are described with words such as flaky, shifty, indecisive, lost, wandering, retarded, confused, etc, ad infinitum. To the person with bipolar disorder, while it is still undiagnosed, it is an area of intense frustration, embarrassment, and feeling of desperation.

My personal definition of bipolar disorder is that the filter on the camera lense keeps changing. I am not sure which version is real because it all looks and feels real. Things which are exact opposites both feel real, at different times of course. So I have become unstuck in reality. There is nothing that is really real. Anger over something that happens is just as real to me as happiness over that same thing happening. So which one is the right one? The anger or the happiness? How do I really feel about something? Well, that depends on what swing of my bipolar is in effect when you ask me.

So, how many people are there that suffer from this affliction? The latest figure is that about 1%, or 2 million people, have bipolar disorder. 2 million people! That is a whole lot of people! With 50 states in the United States, that means that there are about 40,000 people per state; if they were evenly distributed. And with, say, 5 major cities in any given state, there are about 8,000 people with bipolar disorder in every major city in the country. Chances are someone on your block has the disease.

The problem with both of these supposedly reputable and reliable figures is that there are a lot of people out there who have bipolar disorder and don’t know that they have it. Or people who have it but, for whatever reason, are not getting treatment. If you don’t have the right medical insurance, you are not going to be able to afford the counseling and medication. If you have found something that helps you cope with it, like alcohol, or grass, and this seems to be working for you, you are not gong to seek treatment. If you just don’t want to admit that there is something wrong with the way your brain works, you are not going to seek treatment. Denial of one thing or another is a common trait.
[BB]
Depression is very misunderstood in America today. Tell most people that you are depressed and they think you are just indulging in self-pity. "Get over it", they’ll say. "Quit being so self-centered". Even the people who are afflicted with this disease sometimes feel that it is a sign of personal weakness and that, were they to have enough sheer will-power, they could live like everyone else does. People will tell you that you need to just snap out of it. What they don’t realize is that it is no more possible to snap out of depression than it is any other disease; like diabetes, or heart disease. There is a biological cause for depression that will exist in people afflicted with the disease regardless of what "positive mental attitude" books they read.

The following is what some bipolar-afflicted persons have had to say about their disease:

"One day this, a couple days that, a couple more days back to this ... back and forth back and forth. My boyfriend now, well, he can't handle me. ... Sometimes I feel like I will never be able to have a relationship because my feelings keep flip-flopping. Well, that's what is happening now. I think I have worn him out."

"This is an illness that lays waste to the body as well as the mind."

"When major depression finally swept over me, it felt like being caught in a huge wave, unable to get my footing any longer, unable to understand which way to the surface, and just helplessly and hopelessly thrown about, powerless to do anything about the hostile world that was coming down around me. I stayed curled up in the corner of a couch, unable to answer the phone or the doorbell."

[BB]

"All sense of hope had vanished, along with the idea of a futurity; my brain, in thrall to its outlaw hormones, had become less an organ of thought than an instrument registering, minute by minute, varying degrees of its own suffering."

In my own case, the dissolution of my personality started back in adolescence when it became apparent that my emotional and psychological responses were significantly different from those of other people. At first I just wrote it off as my being weird; an individual; a uniquely constructed person. I didn’t want to think that I wasn’t as complete or as capable as anyone else. So I had a tendency to rationalize the reactions that were obviously different. Of course, even with the first incident, there is a little anxiety that something might be wrong. But it was easy to live in denial and go on pretending that I was just like everyone else.

Once a track record starts to become apparent, though, it becomes a little harder to ignore. It starts to sink in that whether your like it or not, you are different than everyone else. So your next reaction is begrudging resignment. You tell yourself "Oh, well, so I’m different. I can still have a normal life". And you still don’t want to admit that you are "broken". You have taken the first step and admitted that there is a bona fide problem. You still think you can be normal, though, in spite of this minor setback.

So you then go on with your life, trying as hard as you can to behave normally, convince others that you are normal, and most of all, convince yourself that you are normal. It never really works. And I still suspect that everyone knew that better, and long before, I did.

Well, as I grew from adolescence through initial adulthood, the disease became worse and so it gets harder and harder to ignore. Eventually I gave up trying to lead a normal life and settled for just trying to cope with the symptoms. I accepted the fact that the whole world knows I am not like them and what’s even worse, most people think I am somehow inferior.

My disease went untreated for long enough that eventually the I succumbed to the control of the disease. I knew I couldn’t fight it; willpower alone is not near enough. I knew I couldn’t explain myself or rationalize my behavior any more. I finally admitted defeat and accepted the fact that I am not normal and absolutely cannot have a normal life. I don’t know how or why this curse has been dropped on me but it has and there’s nothing I can do about it.

You’ve heard the children’s nursery rhyme:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men,

Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

Well, I am Humpty Dumpty.

So, what do you do?
[BB]
You change your expectation level. At first, naturally, you expected to have a life very similar to your family’s and friends’ and peers. In the end, you know that those things are not, and never will be possible for you.

Imagine how you would feel if all your family and friends packed up and went to the county fair and left you at home all alone. You are without food, water, and company. Everyone else is out having a good time and you are at home alone with nothing to do. Welcome to bipolar disorder.

When the disorder kicks in with a vengeance you feel like there is no safe place in the world that you can go to. You feel like there is no person, place or thing you can derive pleasure from.

Then one day, decades later, voila! You are finally diagnosed by a psychiatrist as a person suffering from bipolar disorder. Suddenly, you are not just randomly insane anymore. Suddenly you are not the freak of nature that you were sure that you were. Suddenly there is a reason why things happened the way they did. It wasn’t just your own unmitigated madness that screwed it all up. It is all due to a disease. A disease that over 2 million Americans have. A disease that is treatable. You’re not crazy after all. You just have bipolar disorder.

Now, in retrospect, I consider myself very much like my wife, who has diabetes. I have an incurable disease that I am managing with medications. It is not fair, it is not right, I didn’t do anything to deserve this and I sometimes complain until I’m blue in the face. None of that matters. What does matter is that I accept my condition and proceed to live my life in spite of it all. I now know that not every emotion that arises in my mis-wired brain is real. I now know that not every "logical" conclusion I reach is real. I now know that there is definitely more than one way to define reality. So, I work hard at figuring out which reality works best for me and I follow that course in spite of all my disease does to convince me I’m wrong. It’s not the life I wanted. It’s the life I’ve been given. And there is really nothing left to do except to deal with it.

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