Bipolar Support. Org

Shake's Bio

Winston Churchill once said that if you want your history written right you’d better write it yourself. So here I am, writing the closest thing to a memoir I will probably ever produce, mostly because I can’t even be sure if certain events in my life really happened, or happened the way I think they did, or if certain things transpired that I wasn’t even aware of. So, here is the best I can do.

I was born to a poor family in 1979. My mother was only seventeen, and my father, who grew up in Mexico, was only twenty. My mother has battled depression all her life, and my Dad has almost always been a hardcore alcoholic. I was within a hair’s breadth of being aborted, but my mother changed my mind at the last minute.

We barely scraped by and were even homeless at one point, until my father got a well-paying job when I was about eight years old. At this time I was already in the GATE (Gifted and talented education) program, and I was a model student until about the age of twelve. For reasons I can’t remember or perhaps never knew, I became very alienated and depressed a good deal of the time. I started getting an inferiority complex due to my upper-middle classmates. It was here that I was prescribed Prozac, which mitigated the depression but seemed to have strange, even violent side effects. I became very rebellious, talking back to teachers, instigating fights. I would write Satanic symbols on my arms, I once wrote the word “Death” on my folder in my own blood. I did not have a girlfriend until the end of my junior year. The relationship only lasted a few months, I broke up with her
because I felt I needed my space. She was talking about marriage and kids; it was too much too soon. I was turned 180 degrees from this when my parents divorced. I tried to get her back to no avail, and it hurt. At one point it got so bad that I threw up in the lunchroom.

Not long after I graduated I drifted into alcohol and drug abuse. At first it was just beer and then it went to whiskey, weed, cocaine, meth, acid, pretty much everything short of heroin and PCP. My friends and I were like those guys In Trainspotting, we partied as much as we could, and hated white middle-class normalcy.

In July of 1999 my uncle offered me a job at an Internet software company. I worked there for a year, probably the best year of my life. I was on salary and still had enough time to party on the weekends. I even met and fell in love with an amazing Indian girl, But she was about to enter an arranged marriage so the relationship was basically doomed from the start.

It was about this time that things really began to unravel. I started drinking more and more, often alone, I would work for a few weeks and then quit, I wrecked a couple of cars and got into fights, and eventually, I found myself homeless. The only way out I could see was joining the military. I enlisted in the Air Force, mostly because my dad was
in the Air Force (until he got into a drunken fight with some MPs and was discharged) But I simply could not make the transition. I had become accustomed to do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. So I told them that I used to take Prozac, was given a Separation, and returned to my hometown, homeless again. This part of my life is still hazy to me, I know that I drank and drugged a lot and had trouble keeping a job. I had my first manic episode while I was in Job Corps. This was in 2002 and I was Diagnosed with Bipolar I for the first time.

Then I reverted to form, went on a two week drunk in Reno, sleeping in an abandoned car. I eventually moved in with my mother, started going to AA meetings and fought depression and the increasing number of mixed episodes I was having. In 2004 I got a job as a janitor at a hospital, and it was at this time that I had the most hellacious manic episode I had ever experienced. I would go into detail about it but to do so would take up far too much space, Suffice to say it was a very, very intense time in my life and several times I barely escaped with my life. I was hospitalized twice.

The second time my mother now says that I ran into oncoming traffic but I have no memory of this.

I then went back to school, living with my Dad, and for a full year the BP was in remission, until my Dad and I got into yet another fight. In this one he gave me a bloody nose, and as the blood ran down my face into my mouth I would spit it right back at him. I ran away, homeless again. I lived in a group home for a few weeks, then a rehab center for about a month, and after that in a homeless shelter. Needing a place to live, I moved in with my mom in North Carolina, and that pretty much takes us up to the present.

Yet again, I am starting over, but this time I know myself better, know my limitations, my values, my vocation. I have a plan: I’m going to save money for the next two years, while concurrently learning Spanish, and move to San Diego, where I have family who might be able to get me a good job. Regardless, I will continue writing my novels, poems, and essays with an eye toward publication. I do not have much in the way of material things to show for these past thirty years, my fortune is on the inside, along with the scars that have finally healed.

BLESSED with BIPOLAR

(Excerpt from my recently published book, BLESSED WITH BIPOLAR. www.bipolarman.org)

      I cracked up - for the first time - on June 4, 1988, three weeks short of completing my Masters degree in Psychology. Some would say I had a nervous breakdown. The psych ward doctors said it was major depression. I say that I saw just how evil my sin is in the eyes of God and it scared the hell out of me.

      I cracked up, broke down, and de-pressed. I cobbled together some mad reality and blew a fuse. I despaired, decompensated, detached, and derailed. I lost my mind, never to be the same again. Thanks be to God! Praise to You, Lord Jesus Christ!

      One year later, during my second tour of duty as a psych ward in-patient, i completed my Masters degree in Psychology, taking my final class on three hour passes from the hospital. I woke up in the psych ward, went to class at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, and returned to the hospital for the rest of the day - and night. Now that's bipolar! Psych grad-student by day. Psych ward patient by night. Two weeks prior to completing my degree, I kicked, thrashed, wrestled, clawed, and bit - literally - to keep from being restrained. I ended up strapped to a bed with a thorazine needle in my arm.

      On February 2, 1980, I signed a letter of intent to attend Georgia Tech on a football scholarship. Six months later I left Atlanta, never to return.

      I did not know it until years later, but I was steeped in depression from the time I checked in at Field dormitory for Georgia Tech's training camp until the day I boarded a red-eye flight back home. I was sad, scared, guilt-ridden, and disconcerted, all while trying to compete at a level of football bigger, faster, stronger, and more complex than any I had ever played.

      The anguish over the decision to leave Georgia Tech did not get resolved for twenty years. It hurt. I had busted my butt since I was twelve years-old to earn that scholarship. but without treatment, without some understanding of the disorder that I did not then know I had, leaving, drinking, and/or cracking up were my only options. Toughing it out would have resulted in all three.

     Did I make the best choice by leaving Georgia Tech? Maybe not. A full-blown crack-up in 1980 might have speeded my recovery. It was going to happen sooner or later. Leaving Georgia Tech may have simply delayed my inevitable and necessary crack-up by eight years to the aforementioned 1988 hospitalization.

     So why did I leave? Why did I throw away the profound opportunity of a full football scholarship? Why did I give up on my boyhood dream just as it was being realized?

     Fear. No, not fear of college football or Georgia Tech or the streets of Atlanta. I was afraid, in 1980, to go face-to-face with myself - alone. I was afraid to deal then with the sin God moved me to confront in a psych ward eight years later.

      In December 1999, I was granted a full-tuition, merit-based scholarship to attend St. Thomas University School of Law in Miami, Florida. On March 23, 2001 I was immediately expelled without a hearing, without due process, and without notice of any charges against me. It happened within hours of the Dean of the law school learning that I have bipolar disorder.

      St. Thomas University claimed to have received allegations that I had made threats against the school. I had not and never did.

       Further, when I later represented myself in my federal lawsuit against St. Thomas, there was no one to come forward to say that they had heard me make the alleged threats against the school. In fact, the woman whom I expected to be the school's star witness against me filed an affidavit staing that I had never made any threats and that she never alleged that I had made any threats. I lost anyway. I was a resident of Pennsylvania suing a Florida law school in a Florida Court.

       I have looked at the above events, cried, cussed, and called it all a nightmare. A tale of wasted potential and opportunities blown to pieces. It is now a tale of God working in all things for the good of those who love Him (Romans 8:28); a tale of amazing blessing in the extremes. Blessings - all of it! The dizzy joy, the mad energy, the intensity in everything and the depression, despair, anger, failure, and lost opportunities. All of it - Blessing.

Bipolar Adults at Increased Risk for Cardiovascular Disease

TORONTO, ONTARIO, MEDIA ADVISORY--(Marketwire - Sept. 10, 2009) - A new study suggests that adults with bipolar I disorder are at increased risk of developing heart disease and hypertension than those without the disorder.

Led by Dr. Benjamin Goldstein, Psychiatrist and Academic Lead in the youth division of Sunnybrook's department of psychiatry, a team of researchers examined data from the 2001-2002 National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions, conducted in the United States. The results of the study were published August 11 online in the journal of Bipolar Disorders. After adjusting for age, race and gender, the team found that adults with bipolar I disorder had a 4.95 times higher prevalence of cardiovascular disease than those without the disorder. The bipolar I disorder patients were also more likely to have hypertension than those without the disorder.

"We know that adults with bipolar disorder have a markedly reduced life expectancy which is due primarily to a high prevalence of premature cardiovascular disease," says Dr. Goldstein, who is also an Assistant Professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto. "Our study took a closer look at the association between cardiovascular diseases and bipolar I disorder. We believe our findings have important implications for the way we assess and monitor youth with bipolar disorder."

Sunnybrook researchers examined data collected on 1441 patients with bipolar I disorder, 6831 patients with major depressive disorder (MDD), and 34,851 controls without either disorder. The team discovered that cardiovascular patients with bipolar I disorder were approximately 14 years younger than cardiovascular disease patient without the disorder and six years younger than those with MDD. Hypertension patients with bipolar I disorder were approximately 13 years younger than hypertension patients without the disorder and six-and-a-half years younger than hypertension patients with MDD. Results remained significant after further adjusting for education, income, marital status, obesity, anxiety, smoking and substance use.

"Our findings underscore the need for a more integrated care intervention model - one in which the psychiatric and medical health of a patient are considered simultaneously," says Dr. Goldstein. "We should be monitoring youth with bi-polar disorders for cardiovascular disease so we can intervene before cardiovascular disease develops and treat conditions before they lead to more serious consequences. This may serve to increase life expectancy and improve quality of life for people with bipolar disorders."

The findings of the study will inspire Dr. Goldstein's ongoing work in youth psychiatry at Sunnybrook as he examines ways to prevent youth with bipolar disorder from developing the cardiac issues that so often lead to their decreased life expectancy.

Samplings From The Bipolar Party Platter

Fighting against bipolar disorder is like playing a terminal game of Whack-a-Mole. You smash one symptom and another takes its place just to the side. Even that result is only if your hammer (meds) has any effect whatsoever. There are more ways to treat this than with medicine but that is the traditionally accepted route to go as the fight begins. It’s the path most choose or are even aware of.

I offer a different path and the scenery is better as you travel it. But for now, let’s just see what some of the symptoms and life situations look like on Planet Bipolar.

- Mood swings. Key symptom of course, from which the name is derived. Basically, you’re up, down and all over the place emotionally. The extreme highs of mania are offset by the crushing lows of depression. One moment you are the undefeatable champion of your realm. The next, you are so filled with despair that suicide is not far from happening. It begins to sound like just the ticket for what ails you. The mania can return almost instantly. Back and forth, back and forth you go.

It’s anybody’s guess as to when you wake up each day whether you’ll be on the mountain or down in the valley. It hardly matters. It will probably change throughout the day too. This illness goes through cycles that hold to no one rule. You can be stuck on one side for a great length of time. You may evenly experience both through cycles measured in years, months, days, hours or minutes.

It’s a nightmare the unafflicted can never truly understand. You literally lose your identity or drastically change it at a frequent rate. You are a different person at different times. You lose track of who you even are. Worse, whoever you think you are it usually doesn’t feel like a good person. You begin to not know yourself. Friends and family begin to not recognize you either. You are no longer who you were before this disease kicked in full force and nobody really cares for the new guy/girl you have become.

Through the course of my illness my cycles morphed many times. The doctors have a classification and title for each variation of how fast you bounce back and forth or if you get stuck on one side for any length of time. To me it didn’t matter. The type of pills I got didn’t even matter as over time, I was prescribed dozens and dozens of any pill that might apply. Didn’t really seem to matter what type of bipolar I was. We just kept trying new pills as we steadily verified, the doctor and I, that nothing seemed to be working.

- Failed relationships. This applies to any and all in your life. When you’re deep in the bipolar game very few companions can hang on for long. This is a very, very hard illness to deal with as a witnessing partner. The emotional popcorn machine that is the friend or loved one you once knew is too complex and too far gone for you to do anything with.

This applies to the boss, your significant other, close friends, coworkers, everybody. Nobody knows what to do for you and neither can they tolerate you after awhile. My attitude and quirks got me fired a few times. I lost friends who no longer knew what to make of me or I bothered them too much to keep the friendship healthy. I flat out scared many coworkers as my moods tended to lean more towards violent behavior. And my two marriages evaporated in front of the blast furnace of bipolar.

I needed those jobs. I cared for and depended on those friends. And I lamented the losing of both my wives like I’d lost limbs. The pain of divorce proved for me to be a type of despair I doubt I’ll ever do justice with words. But looking back, I totally understand why each relationship broke. I blame no one. Not even myself. That is important. Don’t blame yourself for these things should they happen if you’re bipolar. You are no longer the right you.

- Hate “The Normals”. It becomes too painful to be you and despair is so ever present that you begin to hate the normal people. They seemingly have no troubles and are capable of enjoying the simple things in life that are no longer accessible to you. Each next step, next thought, next decision no matter how small, next breath sometimes, is agony for you or too difficult to comprehend how to even begin to make happen. You want desperately to be able to go about your day with the ease and delight all around you seem capable of.

You remember how you once were able and it feels like a dream or a memory of a movie you watched someone else perform in. You mourn the loss of simply being happy and calm. This then fine tunes your perception of all the things you no longer have. Everywhere you look you see people laughing with friends; sharing tender moments with a significant other; shopping stress free; being ok in a crowd or a theater; any and all of the human interactions.

These things are as off limits to you as if you were in a prison looking through a fence. You can’t do it. You have been cut free from society and life and you can’t see how to change that. This hurts beyond belief.

I was or felt everything you’ve read above. No longer. Life is good to great most days. Even when it’s bad I roll with it much better than before. I just had to figure some things out. Come find me and I’ll share those things with you.

Author's Bio
Bipolar Disorder and Depression are becoming worldwide epidemics. Ken Jensen, author of the book "It Takes Guts To Be Me: How An Ex-Marine Beat Bipolar Disorder" is an ex-Marine Gulf War vet who fought and beat both, as well as numerous addictions. The book can be found on his website www.ItTakesGutsToBeMe.com and there is a link to his blog where he shares much more.

His life has been full of intense experiences, both in and out of the Marines. He has been a patient detained in a lockdown ward, arrested multiple times, and involved in brawls with both civilians and the police. He has even been clinically dead, twice.

He has also worked within the mental health care system where he was forced to physically restrain people just like him. He watched dozens rotate endlessly, in and out of the psychiatric-care network, never getting better. Some actually died due to physical health illnesses associated with their mental troubles and some died from suicide. He feared becoming one of these people.

Doctors gave him over one hundred prescriptions across a six-year span to help him get well but ultimately, failed to do so. His mind continuously got worse and his physical health soon followed. Because of this stunning lack of progress and an ever-growing fear of a horrible death, he was forced to find help outside traditional sources. He developed his own all-natural system just to survive. It worked fantastically well. Now he shares it with you.

''Scared'' by Hal

One of the things that's visible here is the way people support one another. It drew me here and made me want to participate, and I did. But after a few weeks, I got scared. I had been participating, but now I couldn't figure out what to say. I don't know how many posts I started and never sent. I wanted to respond, but couldn't; wanted to write about my own feelings and couldn't put the words together, except maybe very briefly and noncommitally.

Part of it, I think was that I came to realize the depth of suffering and the very hard lives of many people here. Especially the age 15-21 thread: I wanted to say these were OK years for me, but I was ashamed because they were so difficult for many others. And the thread was scary to me too, too. I don't know if you scared me (how?) or if I was scared of something in myself (what?). Maybe it was some kind of trigger. It just made me very uneasy. I felt out of place and I backed off. Didn't read the whole thread.

But I kept on reading, every day. I felt detached but compelled. I think I knew I would come back but didn't know how. Then I saw stricco's funny e-mail responses and I knew I could come back through humor. And maybe I could write this, and send it.

A problem of mine is not trusting and I never talk about how much I need to be able to do so. Its not trust in general, like, Will he keep his word? That can be an issue, but its not a problem unless it doesn't happen. Its this: trusting that someone cares for me, and keeps caring. I can hardly believe that its really possible. I don't think I understand or can feel caring, my own or that of others, very well. So through my life I've always tried to impress people with what I do, what I accomplish, thinking then they won't notice what I really am. And I've been mostly successful at work and elsewhere. But it was never enough; I always needed more affirmation; I couldn't look back; I couldn't trust that it was real, that there was really a caring or loving connection between me and those others. It all mostly seemed, and probably was, superficial.

I've told you about my mania a few months ago, which rather suddenly turned into depression in early April. The pdoc and I are having a lot more trouble finding the right med cocktail than ever before. A difference in my life now is that I'm retired and don't have as much opportunity to do that described in the previous paragraph.

So I've been mostly depressed with some better days, including a few days this week. But today the bottom dropped out again, and I was more miserable than ever, all the more so because I had been feeling better. So I cried and cried and cried.

My wife S and I have been married 36 years. She's been through all this bp crap with me. She's not the most patient person in the world, and she can be very critical, but she's never criticized me for my bp symptoms, even though they have been extremely difficult for her to cope with at times, as you all know. Especially the manic symptoms, which I usually didn't recognize because they rarely got in the way of the (outside) achievements and accomplishments I was aiming for. Oh, I don't like thinking of the way I behaved!!! because I was so blind to it then. I would run to the pdoc when I felt depressed. The rest of the time I would say I felt fine. If I looked manic, he didn't say. But what can you see in 10 minutes every month or three? I liked him I was getting what I wanted what's not to like? Oh BTW I didn't have any tdoc. Just the meds. And my wife. And, the past few years, a spiritual director.

During this time of depression I've thought a lot about all that S has put up with, and all she's done for me apart from the chaos of my bp, how I've been self-absorbed and career-oriented, how I haven't helped out that much, how much, for example, sheâ€™s made our home what it is and Iâ€™ve been lazy even on the traditional male fix-up projects so that sheâ€™s often done them. What a drag I must be. I do so little. I certainly do need her, but what does she need me for?

So I was saying something like that today through my tears, and I said I loved her, and she said me too, like she always does, and I said how can you love me when you do so much and I do so little, and she said she loves me not for what I do or donâ€™t do but for who I am, and I think maybe for the first time, because sheâ€™s said it before, I believed it. I trusted her. I can do it, at least once. She cares for who I am, an â€œIâ€� that I swear to God I want to find and enjoy being. My true selfâ€¦.

My true self, the one God created, not the false self I run around showing to everybody, including myself. The one that always just is. Be here now. A phrase Iâ€™ve been contemplating for many years. Hard to do (duh!). Doesnâ€™t answer to the how-to question like most everything else in the world, the world in which I succeeded but which didnâ€™t care for me. Or maybe, more likely, I didnâ€™t care for it, I was just in the game for the recognitionâ€¦. God, I hate to face up to this self. It seems fundamentally dishonest. But itâ€™s how I got along. And it certainly wasnâ€™t dishonorable, as the world goes. Maybe even itâ€™s the rule.

My dad was messed up and he couldnâ€™t give me the attention and love I needed from him as a child. When I was 16, we moved to another state and I had to remake my life. A big part of it was rejection of my father (I was ashamed of him) and subsituting the elders in a male-dominated, authoritarian church whom I could easily please by making myself into the model boy/young man. The big deal was to go on a church mission where I promptly showed bp behavior, though nobody, least of all me, recognized it as such. Hey, this was 1961-63! Midway some probably obnoxious manic behavior was interpreted by the mission president and others as a challenge to the line of authority and I got called on it. I was devastated: the way I had bought into the system, this was the absolute last thing I wanted to do. Everything depended on knowing my place, but also (privately) on working my way up, excelling and gaining recognition, and that was what I had known about consciously (if secretly). After I was confronted, I went into a depression but recovered soon enough and finished my mission. But then I knew I had a problem with authority and was able, in my mid-20s, to finally work it out in my mind and break with that particular church.

Writing this has brought me a thought. Maybe this is what scared me about your age 15-21 lives, messed up as many of them were. I was horrified, but I donâ€™t think Iâ€™m a selfless person whose concern was mainly for you. My life was messed up too, but I covered it up with this conventionally â€œgoodâ€� behavior. It got me a long ways, well into my 20s, anyhow. I was lost for awhile, but had some support, and always did well in school. I thought I would fit in on the opposite side of the desk at a university, but when I got there it was m/d x 5 years over the stress of classroom teaching. I had thought it would be the profession made for me. Graduate school had been so lovely. I resigned from the university. One reason I could is because I had S to carry me through. No more serious depressions for a while, but mania or at least hypomania, looking back. I donâ€™t know how she did it. Loyalty runs in her family.

So I can see somewhat of a connection there to my being scared here a couple of weeks ago. Now I have been able to write this. I feel better, and better being here. Maybe this isnâ€™t even the first time youâ€™ve heard this sort of story. Iâ€™m writing it for my own sake, but posting it because I want to trustâ€¦ to actually experience your caring and return it to you.

One of the things that''s visible here is the way people support one another. It drew me here and made me want to participate, and I did. But after a few weeks, I got scared. I had been participating, but now I couldn''t figure out what to say. I don''t know how many posts I started and never sent. I wanted to respond, but couldn''t; wanted to write about my own feelings and couldn''t put the words together, except maybe very briefly and noncommitally.

Part of it, I think was that I came to realize the depth of suffering and the very hard lives of many people here. Especially the age 15-21 thread: I wanted to say these were OK years for me, but I was ashamed because they were so difficult for many others. And the thread was scary to me too, too. I don''t know if you scared me (how?) or if I was scared of something in myself (what?). Maybe it was some kind of trigger. It just made me very uneasy. I felt out of place and I backed off. Didnâ€™t read the whole thread.

But I kept on reading, every day. I felt detached but compelled. I think I knew I would come back but didnâ€™t know how. Then I saw striccoâ€™s funny e-mail responses and I knew I could come back through humor. And maybe I could write this, and send it.

Iâ€™ve told you about my mania a few months ago, which rather suddenly turned into depression in early April. The pdoc and I are having a lot more trouble finding the right med cocktail than ever before. A difference in my life now is that Iâ€™m retired and donâ€™t have as much opportunity to do that described in the previous paragraph.

So Iâ€™ve been mostly depressed with some better days, including a few days this week. But today the bottom dropped out again, and I was more miserable than ever, all the more so because I had been feeling better. So I cried and cried and cried.

Oh, I donâ€™t like thinking of the way I behaved!!! because I was so blind to it then. I would run to the pdoc when I felt depressed. The rest of the time I would say I felt fine. If I looked manic, he didnâ€™t say. But what can you see in 10 minutes every month or three? I liked himâ€¦ I was getting what I wantedâ€¦ whatâ€™s not to like? Oh BTW I didnâ€™t have any tdoc. Just the meds. And my wife. And, the past few years, a spiritual director.

Written Jul 08, 2006

Mikka''s Story
It was a dark and stormy night ..... Before me, an amazonian blonde with cropped hair gesticulated wildly. Shrewish screaming pierced my ears. Thrown cutlery pierced the plaster walls. Yanno .. there comes a time in every man's life when he doesn't know whether to smack a dame in the mouth, or put her over his knee. I'm passive aggressive. I stayed quiet, figuring she'd work out which she preferred and do it herself.

The storm howled outside, mirroring the chaos inside. A powerful gust jolted the lock, slamming the front door open. I could see my belongings strewn across the lawn. Clothing blown into the shrubbery. My favourite white cotton shirt, stirring restlessly in a pool of mud, as the wind slurred across surface. Was I really going out in this weather? I walked to the bathroom to grab "old faithful".... a box of anti-depressants. The shrew screamed again ... and again ..each time tearing into my soul ... like an alchemist witch with a dagger at the final newt. It seemed I didn't have much choice.

Was I REALLY going out in this weather? A gym pumped iron grip grabbed hold of my arm while her other fist slammed into my body. Repeatedly. Screaming .. Screaming ... Shoved to the door .... slung unceremoniously through like a cook heaves the morning's garbage. The door slammed. The lock clicked. Sheltering below an eave, I was alone. Forlorn. Abandoned, misunderstood ... mistreated.

Like a miracle, the storm abated instantly. The rain stopped, wind died. Like a sign from God. "You're better off out here". Shrubs stopped their maddened shaking. Puddles settled into calm ponds. Water poured down the gutters, sluicing away the detrius of man: cans, wrappers, pastic bottles .. leaving the street clean and new. I was feeling better already. I walked. Just walked and walked. Anything to get away from that place... away from her. Clouds scurried, and tentatively the stars came to life. I could see the warm glow from windows, where families ate together. The flickering of television crept out .. and music sometimes danced through the breeze.

The park .. I was close to the park. I knew this place from when I was a boy. Familiarity felt safe. The manicured lawns glistened with moisture, asphalt shone under lights. Flower gardens burst with blooms and the allure of fragrance tantalised my nostrils. This must be spring. In this place of nurtured abundance, the world seemed full and rich. Yet I felt so lost. Brushing the droplets from a painted seat, I leaned back and rested. Rested my heart ... soul .... mind.

Stress. I have to be careful. I knew how stress sends my system spiralling. Taking the pills from my pocket, I popped out two and swallowed them dry. Erch. There was a drinking fountain near here .. I'm sure. Quickly found, I washed the chemical taste from the back of my throat. Back to the seat. I sat quietly. The time stretched. How could I go back ... to THAT .... I couldn't. But something was stopping me from walking away.. to build something better. I was stuck.

Slowly, calmly, I took the pills from my pocket and stared at the blister pack. A fresh box... full. The foil twisted and creaked as I popped each tablet out. My hand filled. I dropped them in my shirt pocket, and continued. Job done.

I filled my mouth with half the pills and took a gulp of cold fresh water. A few stuck, so I gulped again. Foul taste. Filled my mouth again and took a larger gulp. Repeat and stir. Wash and spit to lose that foul aftertaste. Then quietly .. calmly .. walked back to the seat and sit. And wait. Disconnected. One hour. Two. Tongue thickened... muscles slackened... pulse dropped.

The fighter woke. "I am NOT going to die like this..NO WAY...I'll get to the hospital if it kills me". Not sure where the wry wit came from. I had to hurry. My stomach held enough junk to kill me. I knew it. I tried to move fast. I couldn't. The pills were beating me. Every block was getting harder .. Keep going, just keep going. I was slowing. Not even smart enough to knock on a door. How many blocks? Why did I walk so damn far? I'm fading .. I can feel it. Somehow .. I don't know how .. I made it. I kicked on the door until the bitch let me in. Terror showed in her eyes. She could see how close I was. "Don't you f-ing die on me!!"... she screamed repeatedly as she raced to the hospital. It wasn't out of care. Pure guilt. Pure self serving fear. My head was rolling. I couldn't feel much.

But feck her .. and feck this disorder. I lived

Offabit''s Story
My earliest memory is of my mother reading to me by the light of a ceramic cowboy lamp that she made me. She read me "Clifford the Big Red Dog", I believe. I knew she loved me then, despite all the abuse. Fear and love existed together and I had no difficulty with that- contradictory emotions were, and are, commonplace with me. I am at ease with my emotions... They come unbidden and, therefore, I do not blame myself for them. I think that this is a lesson my mother taught me, inadvertently or not.

I just don't know for sure. Perhaps it is mostly in my own imagination.

My childhood wasn't what you'd call successful. I was bright enough but a wise-ass and a late bloomer to boot. All the tough kids would try to start trouble with me in school where, with my quicker wit, I would invariably make them look foolish. After school, however, my wit was no match for their fists.

This went on for years. I said I was bright- not wise.

And I was angry. I stayed angry until not that long ago.

I would like to say that I did well in school because it was the one place I could be successful- where I received positive feedback. This is the tale that I, as a teacher, tell my students. In truth, I succeeded at school because I had no choice. Failure was not an option. Hell, "B" stood for "beating" in my mother's home. I have since seemed to have lost those brain skills- due to age and medication (prescribed and recreational). Several times I've written something only to reread it and get that "WTF was I thinking?" feeling. Happens more and more... I'm sure you'll get the same feeling reading this.

In short, I am no longer 'bright.' But I am still a wise-ass; your garden variety nut-job.

Anyway, my success in school is proof that the fear of my mother outstripped the biology of my yet undiagnosed bipolar. Somehow I stayed focussed on the light, no matter how dark the days became.

I wasn't diagnosed until later in life- 36 or 38 years of age (I remember it began with a 3 and ended with a loop or two...memory fails me after that). My then fiance, M, insisted I see a doctor about my temper. Me, being the accomodating fellow I am, agreed. Several docs later I had the classification we've all come to know and mostly accept.

I'm happy about it. I don't hate the fact that I have brown eyes or a full head of thick brown hair so I refuse to hate the fact that I have bipolar. Hell- sometimes it really comes in handy- like when I have to paint an entire room in one afternoon and I just happen to be manic. I don't particularly care if anyone does have a problem with my diagnosis. In fact, eff anyone who can't take a joke. It's been my experience that normal people have just as much baggage as anyone with an official classification.

So I made it through high school and lettered in football (American football- the one with all the needless commercial breaks and actual scoring). I bring up the latter because the two may have gone hand-in-hand. Football gave me a safe place to be aggressive and it continued the lessons of discipline that began at home. Football made it possible to manage my bipolar without my knowing I had it. Of course, it may have delayed my diagnosis. But still- I was lucky.

Football also gave me a way to pay for college. But it couldn't do my schoolin' for me.

In fact, it was tricky to get through college undiagnosed, unmedicated and unscathed- and thats why I didn't... Scathed I was- in spades. It took me four years, three summer schools, one arrest, a couple of suspensions, and a few too many habits in vice to somehow achieve my diploma. Not a diploma in any practical fields mind you- majors in theater and english and minors in religion and education. Bipolar indeed.

With that background I naturally gravitated to special education. Which is, in my humble opinion, the finest profession for someone with MI. Eighteen years later, I am still here. That's not to say it was easy ... How I managed to hang on to my job is more a credit to the nature of that job than to my effort, I think. Somewhere along the way I learned to sprint- to go short distances while holding on to any shred of sanity. I can accomplish this in a profession with as few hours required at a time as mine. So I held onto that shred but I didn't manage to hold on to much else.

Well my computer...

When I joined BPS M had gone her own way and I had found another sucker I was very interested in. I have no desire to share the horror story that my life was ( any more than I already have)- I just knew I needed help- particularly if I wanted to keep this woman.

BPS was just what I needed. I knew I needed help but I really wasn't ready to do everything I had to. I wasn't that lightbulb quite yet- I could almost change myself. If it wasn't for the no nonsense advice of the members, mods and admins I know I wouldn't have made it.

I have since married that sucker, known here as messydesk. She is diagnosed as bipolar as well.

Yes, our life is bliss.

That is a load of shit and you all know it. Our fights are legendary- epic in proportion. They move with earthquake type intensity and yet blow over like a summer rain. Yet we know that bad weather looks worse through a window. Easy to anger at times, we are also easy to forgive and forget. After all, we must give what we hope to receive from one another. It does work for us so far, a mere six months in.

I'll update as needed.

I am grateful for this site and all its members. I am glad to be more than just an on a bit, off a bit member. I am grateful for the lessons I learned here- the most memorable being that of boundaries, staying compliant with doctors and meds, and that I am unique- just like everyone else.

New Bipolar Remedies
Scientists Test New Bipolar Remedies Associated Press - September 03, 2007

NEW YORK - Scientists are casting a wide net to find better treatments for the crushing depression and uncontrolled manias of bipolar disorder, and some approaches they're testing seem pretty surprising.

Like skin patches that prevent seasickness. Or a drug that fights Lou Gehrig's disease. And then there's a newly invented device that resembles a hair dryer in a beauty salon.

Some of the strategies were identified by logic, and others by pure chance. Scientists already have evidence that they may someday prove useful against bipolar disorder, also called manic-depression.

Doctors yearn for better therapies to treat the condition, which can rip careers and marriages apart and drive people to suicide. It is so complex and mysterious that researchers haven't developed a medication specifically for it since lithium, more than half a century ago.

Bipolar disorder appears in various forms and degrees of severity in about one in every 25 American adults at some point in their lives, according to a major study published in May.

The disorder is characterized in part by episodes of mania, which are periods of boosted energy and restlessness that can run for a week or more.

"You have so much energy, you have so many great ideas" said Tamara, 26, a Pittsburgh resident who was diagnosed several years ago. She asked that her last name not be used.

"You feel like you're thinking so clear, you've got the answer for everybody. You need to tell them, you need to phone all your friends... It's so hard to sleep. You keep thinking of all sorts of things."

But mania can also bring extreme irritability. Tamara's energy and charisma made her the life of the party, but "if somebody spilled a drink on me, I would just explode," she recalled. "It's like all your emotions are just completely intensified."

She got into fights and experienced road rage. She made bad decisions, plagiarizing a college paper and behaving promiscuously.

"A lot of things sound like a good idea when you're manic," she said, "and they're really not."

During manic episodes many people even get hallucinations or delusions, and Tamara experienced those too. "I was convinced I could hear other people's thoughts, or at least know what they were," she recalled. "I thought everybody was saying bad things about me."

The disorder also brings episodes of depression that last a week or more.

"Nothing is interesting," Tamara said. "You're bored with everything... Nothing sounds fun anymore. All you want to do is sleep. I slept days and days away."

In her senior year of college, thoughts of suicide frightened her into seeking help.

Doctors currently treat bipolar with a variety of drugs including lithium, anticonvulsant medications that can stabilize mood, and antipsychotics. Psychological therapy and patient education greatly boost the effectiveness of the drugs.

Tamara takes lithium and another drug, and says, "I'm doing fine right now."

She's lucky. Bipolar disorder is hard to treat chiefly because the depressive episodes are more severe and more resistant to therapy than ordinary "unipolar" depression, notes Dr. Andrea Fagiolini, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh.

Overall, current medications for bipolar "certainly reduce symptoms but don't do a good enough job," said Dr. Husseini Manji of the National Institute of Mental Health. "Many patients are helped, but they're not well."

What's more, many patients can't tolerate current bipolar medications because of side effects like weight gain, sleepiness, tremor, and the sense of feeling "drugged," Fagiolini said. (Some patients also stop taking their medicine because they miss the "highs" of the disease, he noted).

A study of treated patients published last year found that about 60 percent got well for at least eight weeks, but only half of that group remained well when followed for up to two years. That was with very good therapy, noted Dr. Andrew Nierenberg, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

"That means there's a lot of room for improvement," Nierenberg said. "That's why we need new treatments."

Just as heart attacks come from chronic heart disease, the manic and depressive episodes come from an underlying chronic brain disease. And "we just don't really understand what's behind the illness," said Dr. Gary Sachs, who directs bipolar research at Harvard's Massachusetts General Hospital.

The mystery and complexity of the disorder have discouraged scientists from trying to develop drugs for it, Manji said. Not since lithium have they developed a drug specifically for bipolar, Manji said.

Like lithium, some of the latest crop of early candidate drugs revealed their potential simply by chance.

Take the experience of NIMH researchers Maura Furey and Dr. Wayne Drevets with the drug scopolamine, which is normally used to keep people from getting seasick or carsick. Several years ago, they were studying whether scopolamine could improve memory and attention in depressed people. So they gave the drug intravenously to depressed patients, trying to find the right dose for a brain-imaging study.

They noticed that patients started feeling less depressed the night after the injections. Most antidepressants take weeks to kick in.

"Some patients would say it was the best night of sleep they'd had in many years, and the next morning they woke up feeling a substantial lifting of their depression," Drevets said. "In many cases that improvement persisted for weeks or even months."

Drevets and Furey quickly changed their research focus to test the drug's effect on depression itself. And in October 2006 they published an encouraging, though preliminary, result with a small group of depressed patients, some of whom were bipolar.

Now Furey is leading a study using scopolamine skin patches - like travelers wear to prevent motion sickness - to treat depression in bipolar disorder as well as ordinary depression. For now, people shouldn't try patch treatment for depression on their own, she said.

A similar bit of serendipity showed up at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., in 2001. Depressed bipolar patients who were getting their brains scanned for a study of brain chemistry suddenly felt a lot better. Alerted by a research assistant, scientists started taking a closer look. And in 2004, they published their conclusion that the electric fields produced by the brain scans might lift depression. It's still not clear how.

Follow-up studies have had inconsistent results. But researchers have now built a device that resembles a hair-salon dryer to produce electric fields. They plan to start testing it this fall.

Researchers have also used the few insights they have into the disease to develop potential treatments.

That's the story with riluzole, now used to treat the paralyzing disorder Lou Gehrig's disease, also known as ALS or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Scientists found that a drug that's effective against depression in bipolar disorder boosts the abundance of a certain protein in rat brain cells, and that riluzole does too. So the researchers tried riluzole in a small number of depressed bipolar patients, and in some patients the symptoms virtually disappeared, Manji said.

So riluzole, which is distributed by Sanofi-Aventis, might become a treatment for bipolar disorder, he said.

Similar research used an off-the-shelf drug to get a lead for developing a new medication. Studies in rats showed that lithium and another anti-mania drug hamper the effect of a particular enzyme in the brain. That suggested other drugs that hamper the enzyme might work against mania too, Manji said.

The best available candidate: tamoxifen, used to fight breast cancer. Manji's recent study in a small group of bipolar patients found that tamoxifen quickly quelled mania. Other studies have found similar results, he said.

That shows the value of blocking the enzyme, and now Manji is trying to develop other drugs that will do that, perhaps for use in emergency rooms. He wants to avoid tamoxifen itself because of concern about long-term side effects, since his work requires a higher dose than women use to stave off breast cancer for years.

Scientists say the real key to unlocking the mysteries of bipolar disorder - and thereby exposing targets for drugs - lies in a new generation of research into DNA.

In recent months, scientific journals have begun to publish the early results of a revolution in DNA analysis: the ability to scan entire genomes in detail to find genetic variants that predispose people to particular diseases. Some of the new work is implicating dozens of variants in bipolar disorder.

Such work can expose the hidden biological underpinnings of disease, and tip off researchers to unsuspected targets for intervening.

"We've been stumbling in the dark for most of our history" of bipolar research, said gene expert Dr. Francis McMahon of NIMH. But "these kinds of studies ... will really give us the chance to reason from biological insights back to the patient."

Sachs, of Harvard, agreed: "I think these whole-genome scans will in fact be the important bridge to better treatments."

And not just in some far-distant future. The new gene studies, Sachs said, help give "a great potential to advance the field in our lifetimes and treat people who are living now."

Redefining Bipolar Disorder: Toward DSM-V
Am J Psychiatry 163:1135-1136, July 2006

doi: 10.1176/appi.ajp.163.7.1135

Â© 2006 American Psychiatric Association

Editorial

Mary L. Phillips, M.D. and Ellen Frank, Ph.D.

We now recognize that bipolar disorder is often accompanied by anxiety, eating, and substance use disorders (1) and high rates of medical illness, especially cardiovascular, cerebrovascular, and metabolic diseases (2). Individuals with bipolar disorder also suffer from a marked disruption in sleep rhythms and social relations. Rather than defining bipolar disorder solely as one of episodic mood disturbances, we should consider defining it as a multisystem disorder involving disturbances in all of the above-mentioned domains. By employing a symptom-based rather than an etiologically based approach, DSM-IV fails to reflect the multisystem presentation of bipolar disorder.

Increasingly sophisticated neuroimaging and genetic research have deepened our understanding of the neurobiology of bipolar disorder as one involving complex disturbances in relationships, linking environment, genes, neural systems, and behavior. This approach supports the research agenda for DSM-V, emphasizing the need to translate basic and clinical neuroscience research findings into a new classification system for psychiatric disorders (3). Although the understanding of the pathophysiology of bipolar disorder remains limited, preliminary findings from recent neuroimaging studies have indicated persistent dysfunc
tions specific to bipolar disorder within neural systems underlying mood and cognition (4, 5) that are also found in healthy first-degree relatives as endophenotypes of the disorder (6). Specific genetic variables contributing to normal functional variation may further affect dysfunctions within these systems (7).

How can DSM-V reflect the clinical complexity and pathophysiology of bipolar disorder? An immediate first step is initiating large-scale studies to identify the specific clinical spectrum, neurocognitive, and neuroimaging measures that best distinguish individuals with bipolar disorder from those with other mood and psychotic disorders and incorporating these as supplementary diagnostic criteria into DSM-V. The future challenge will be to test the construct validity of these new measures versus conventional criteria in longitudinal studies examining clinical outcome and treatment response, leading ultimately to an etiologically and pathophysiologically based classification system for bipolar disorder.

Is it Bipolar or Depression
By: Psych Central News Editor
on Friday, Feb, 9, 2007

Reviewed by: John M. Grohol, Psy.D.
on Friday, Feb, 9, 2007

Researchers from Spain believe they have developed a simple test to distinguish between a form of bipolar disorder and depression. Type II bipolar disorder is an underdiagnosed disease which can be easily confused with depression.

Patients with bipolar disorder experience manic or hypomanic episodes (euphoria) and depression. Type II bipolar disorder (hypomanic) patients are especially difficult to diagnose since their manic episodes are not very marked and they are usually diagnosed as depression patients.

Contrarily to what happens in type I bipolar disorder, depressive symptoms and, above all, manic symptoms alternated in this form of the disease are not evident and difficult to identify. In fact, patients suffering from it usually go to the doctor because they are depressed, without thinking that they have also had slight manic episodes (euphoria and other cognition disorders).

According to background information in the article, medical authorities lack tools to successfully identify this pathology, which can take 8-10 years to be correctly diagnosed. Furthermore, antidepressant treatment can be counterproductive in patients with type II bipolar disorder.

Accordingly, a simple tool of 32 questions â€“ called the HCL-32 test has been developed to distinguish major depression from bipolar disorder. The study verifying the questionnaire is published in the Journal of Affective Disorders.

In the study, this test was able to identify more than 80 percent of patients with bipolar disorder. Although the test could not distinguish between types I and II, this decision is relatively easy to take from the clinical data of the patient.

While the test needs to be replicated among patients in wider populations, the HCL-32 test can provide very useful information to psychiatrists and even to primary-care physicians.

Source: IDIBAPS - Institut dâ€™Investigacions BiomÃ¨diques August Pi i Sunyer

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