Attached is a PDF of a summary I wrote a couple of years ago with the help of the NHS. It’s mainly just a generalisation but it does include some personal experiences. As it was potentially to be used for distribution to other patients, all bases needed to be covered and not too specific or focus on just one part of the illness.
Please feel free to share, comment or re-blog if you wish. Hopefully It can be of help to someone somewhere 👍
I said maybe, you’re going to be……
This is a line from a single by the greatest band ever. For my American friends, just enjoy it as they’re better than Nirvana. Please can you like, comment or share the post if you want to.
I recently finished my book about living with Bipolar Disorder. It’s the third book I’ve written about it. The few people who have read it have all been very complimentary about it. I’m going to post on here a chapter at a time, if you want to check it out you can. Today’s post contains the list of chapters and why none of them are even numbered and also the prolapse log (prologue) and chapter 1.
I hope you like it and you enjoy reading my account, which is not graphic but honest. If you would like a link to the book then please comment on this post and I’ll send you a link 👍
Firstly, is Bipolar an illness or a disease? You generally get over illnesses but diseases are more sinister. Bipolar kills more people a year than cancer. Fact. It’s not a statement to be proud of but it underlines the severity of the situation.
Going to bed at say 10pm and then getting up at 7am when you set your alarm sounds trivial and easy. Not with Bipolar. You are in bed at 9pm to get to sleep and then you just stare at your ceiling until 5am or so. Nice one 👌. Eating becomes a battle, you know you need to eat but you are either overindulging on carbohydrates for three days straight or abstaining from everything apart from a slice toast for the next three days.
I’ve self harmed and I did it because I was numb. Numb to emotions and numb to life. I was trying to instigate a bit of feeling and response in my body. Do you want to know what? It actually fuckin’ worked. Before you go mad at me I’m not promoting self harm. It’s something that I haven’t done for three/four years now but it’s something that I learnt from.
Making plans to do something are a no no for you too. What’s a good idea Tuesday afternoon is a bad one on Wednesday morning. I avoid planning stuff. Fuck it and live for the moment.
Then there’s the elephant in the room, medication! Apparently it carries a mortality risk of circa 20-30 years off your life expectancy. Lithium is the most effective medication yet the medication that has to be monitored the most. You get a card in England, a ‘Lithium Alert Card’ which you are meant to show to someone when your buying over counter meds and to show your on it if you have a incident and paramedics or ambulance arrive. Atypical antipsychotics are another black hole of psychiatry as no one really knows what they actually do. Clozapine was administered as a typical antipsychotic, was responsible for the death of a multitude of people in Finland, recalled and research in to it stopped, then it’s been re-released as an atypical antipsychotic, as a last resort for people who have Schizophrenia. Crazy
So, if you are reading this and you suffer from Bipolar Disorder you will be able to understand. Please don’t think I’m being condescending but if you don’t then you’ll have to take 5 minutes to get your head around it. However, I’m just going to write about what it is like for me, and this will be different for everyone but it’s still relatable.
I take three different medications each day. An antidepressant, an antipsychotic and a mood stabiliser. Fluoxetine (Prozac) is my antidepressant, Olazapine is my antipsychotic, these two work well together, and then I have Lithium to stabilise my mood. So the Chemistry behind this is that I take one to stop me dropping into the deep depression and one to stop me going to the highest echelons of mania and then one of them secures my mood In the spectrum of 4-7 or so of my mood. To explain what it is I mean, Bipolar has a scale. Imagine 0-10 with 0 being the deepest depression and 10 being the highest high. These extremes are uncomfortable, uncontrollable and impossible to find anyway to live productively with. The medication enables me to get mood-shifts that don’t dip below a 4 or go higher than a 7. Don’t get me wrong, the mood shifts are still different than the norm and they have an impact on the way that you can live. However though, the mood shifts are really difficult to manage.
I have questions. A multitude of questions in fact. I have had a period of self harm (be aware that there’s a picture of my scars below this paragraph). I’m a Catholic, I told my Health Professionals that I understood from a community for Mental Health called the Mighty, that self harm could be attributed to the fact that the Devil gets into you via your weakest side. I’m right handed, yet I cut my right forearm with my left hand. Please let me know what you think?
I don’t have any routine. I get some semblance of one for about a week or less then I’m back to square one again. Firstly, sleep. I have a great deal of trouble getting off to sleep. I take Olazapine at night so you would think it would help. Also I’m coming off Lorazepam slowly as I’ve got a dependence but I’m thinking that it isn’t working as normal due to me being on it for three years on and off. I have stages though. Thursday just gone for example I felt really tired all day. I was up at 7am and went to the shop to get my parents their newspapers and bits they needed from the supermarket. I got back and went back to bed to watch TV, and I woke up at 7am this morning. That’s nearly 48 hours or so of sleep. I’m going to be honest, I felt horrendous when I woke up today.
The above picture may seem lighthearted to some but it’s not at all. I’m well aware that you have to adapt your demeanour to suit certain situations and then interacting with people. But also, you are managing the different personalities of yourself that you have when you’re in your own company.
Sometimes I find myself having a full blown conversation with myself that is one version of myself talking to another version of myself. “Please don’t do that again, I have to sort it out!?!”. It’d be nice to have an understanding about the situation from people that being in a situation where you have a conversation with yourself isn’t the crazy person’s action or something like that that is classed as weird, but it’s just something that makes me who I am.
Furthermore, I have multiple conversations with myself in my own head that happen every time I’m in the company of others but I don’t share these. I’m just hoping that you realise how it is the same as you do, it’s my imagination that’s just a little bit more prominent in my head than yours.
I’ve had people brand me as a nutter, weird, fucked in the head, not right etc etc and the best one – “it’s because of the Cocaine”
I’m the first to admit I absolutely love Cocaine. I have used it chronically from about the age of 20 until I my late 30s. I never had a feeling of being myself or completely comfortable from anything else. I have social anxiety too, I didn’t know this at Uni but when I was there I needed a pint of beer to relax. One to two to three to four then that wasn’t working for me. However, university is awash with anything you want. I tried Weed, Speed, Ecstasy and Cocaine. Cocaine worked for me. I worked out in my own experiment what it’s critical point was (the amount that it’s the most potent before becoming abused). It levels me out. Look it up, it’s an SNDRI, type that into Google and see on Wikipedia the chemistry of what it does.
Regards my medication. I have to take them every day. Does this make me an addict?
You fall and break your arm and the doctor puts it in a cast to make it as close to what it was as you can do. I go to the doctor and I’m given pills that make me into someone who looks like me, but in reality, it’s not me.
My Bipolar Perspectives of a Unipolar World 