Bipolar Disorder is very difficult to explain to anybody who doesn’t suffer from it. There are excellent descriptions on the websites of the Irish support organisation Aware and the British mental health charity Mind. I’m not a psychiatrist and everybody experiences mental illness differently. I can only tell you what it means to me.
I think Bipolar Disorder is typified by exaggerated mood swings. Everybody feels changes in their mood with the passage of time and changes in circumstance. But when you have Bipolar Disorder the severity of these moods can be extreme and the duration prolonged. Sometimes the change in mood can be so severe that it becomes difficult to function. Occasionally, normal function become impossible.
I have experienced and survived many varied moods. The main ones are depression, elation or hypomania, mixed state or dysphoria, mania and balanced or euthymic.
When I get depressed everything slows down. The simplest of tasks become Herculean labours. I eat little and sleep poorly often waking early and struggling through the long day that follows. Loneliness best describes what I feel. I am filled with fear and anxiety. Often I become quite paranoid and convinced that something awful will happen. I withdraw from social contact and sit dark and desolate for hours at a time. Work is hard and it is difficult to remember a time when I didn’t feel so terrible and impossible to envisage that the nightmare will ever end. Suicidal thoughts come and go. But I’m fortunate. Depression, for me, only lasts for a month or two and then it lifts. I believe depression represents a state where my soul is low on energy. I just need to try and remember the ways I can recharge it.
I find the early stages of elation or hypomania can be exhilarating. I have immense energy, periods of increased productivity and little need for sleep. I tend to toy with computers when I’m high, sometimes having two or three booted up simultaneously. It’s also a time I might decide to buy a new car and hence I rarely own a car for longer than a year. But the pleasure doesn’t last and I soon become drained. This often leads to a mixed state.
Mixed state or dysphoria is the mood state that I dread the most. It is a mixture of the energy of hypomania and the darkness and misery of depression. I become irritable and severely uncomfortable often rocking in my chair to find release. It is the time when I become angry and I am most likely to hurt and offend the ones I love. I carry great guilt for things I have said and done while dysphoric. For me, depression is more debilitating but dysphoria is the hardest with which to live.
I’ve only been truly manic once and it was the worst experience of my life. I think things just got so bad that my mind took a holiday and I lost touch with reality. I had crippling paranoid delusions and ended up in a psychiatric hospital for the first time. I’ll tell you more another time.
So that’s my opinion of Bipolar disorder and how it affects me. It’s not going away, I have this for life. The key is learning how to understand it, how to cope with it. How to survive.
