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Mental Illness

Hello, my name is Lauren, and I have bipolar disorder.

Being diagnosed with a mental illness is hard.  It’s not like having the flu— having a mental illness is something you deal with for the rest of your life, up until death.  The development of any particular mental illness may not be apparent until well into adulthood.  I, for example, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2009 when I was 25 years old, but in hindsight, I was dealing with symptoms of the disorder since at least high school, and perhaps earlier.  Bipolar disorder is also a mental illness, like many, that increases your likelihood of suicidal ideation.  I myself have planned suicide multiple times throughout my life.  That fact alone, completely separate from the stigma of my mental illness itself, is extremely embarrassing.  For me, and for many others like me, my planned suicides were not cries for attention, but rather cries for help and a means of escape from the guilt I was feeling for perceiving myself as a burden on my loved ones.  My mental illness made me feel like I was burdening my husband in particular, and that I was dragging him and his whole life down, and I just knew that he would be better off without me.  At the time, it made sense to end my life.  And I am not alone in these thoughts.  

Part of being diagnosed with a mental illness is dealing with the stigma.  Our society is starting to see depression as a real illness to be taken seriously, and as a result, some of the stigma is being removed.  However, many people still do not understand mental illnesses.  I have encountered far too many people throughout the years who see my symptoms as me just being lazy, being weak, being selfish, or any other negative character trait you can think of.  The fact of the matter is, bipolar disorder, also known as manic-depressive disorder, is a stress-triggered disorder.  This can mean that even the smallest amount of stress can trigger a bipolar episode, and the repercussions of that episode can be life threatening, quite literally sometimes.  By definition, people dealing with bipolar disorder and many other mental illnesses simply cannot withstand the same levels of stress as the “normal” mentally healthy individual.  Our brain chemistry and our psychological history and upbringing dictate how the disorder affects us, and this cannot be changed.  Left untreated, most mental illnesses can progressively worsen over time.  Thankfully, there are treatments available now that are very successful for treating these disorders.  But it is important to keep in mind that, as I mentioned earlier, mental illness is not like having the flu— you must seek treatment for the rest of your life; the mental illness itself will never be “cured,” merely kept under control through medication and psychological therapy.

So, I have bipolar disorder.  Specifically, I have type II bipolar disorder.  What this means is that I go through cycles of hypomania, which for me includes periods of high productivity and motivation, high levels of emotional responses including fairly severe and sometimes explosive irritability, and risk-taking behavior, which for me meant extreme spending sprees (no, a few hundred dollars doesn’t even come CLOSE to touching my spending sprees).  Type I bipolar disorder is characterized by episodes of true mania, which includes euphoria, sleeplessness, high energy, rapid speech, and some of the same symptoms of hypomania as well but usually more in the extreme, and can even include delusions (most often of grandiosity) or hallucinations.  Both type I and type II bipolar disorder is also characterized by cycles of depression, which often follows the typical pattern of unipolar major depression.  Bipolar disorder is also often co-morbid with anxiety symptoms and obsessive-compulsive tendencies, both of which I experienced in my most recent very severe bipolar episode.  

Bipolar disorder, as well as other mental illnesses, can be very crippling at times, and it can make it very difficult to make it through even one day.  But other days can be fine, or even amazing.  The only thing that I can count on with bipolar disorder is that I really cannot predict with any certainty what each next day will hold for me.  Will I be depressed and wanting to sleep the day away?  Or will I have too much energy to contain and want to do, do, do?  It makes planning things extremely difficult.  I cannot count on myself.  And that is scary.

I hope that this post has given at least someone some better insight into the world of what it is like to have a mental illness.  If you have any questions, I’d be happy to do my best to answer them.  That said, thank you for taking the time to read this.  It’s difficult putting a lot of this into words, and I am wary that this will brand me as “crazy,” even though the point of this post is just the opposite.  My hope is that someday mental illnesses will be accepted more by society as what they truly are: illnesses, not laziness, weakness, selfishness, or whatever other nonsense.