Bipolar Life
I don't have a bipolar diagnosis. I don't have the symptoms of bipolar disorder. But, I've certainly been thinking about it recently and wondering what it's like when all the ups and downs are on the inside rather than on the outside.So far this semester, my experience in school has been wonderful and terrible. I have felt wonderfully happy, encouraged, positive, capable, and on my way to good things. In turn, I have felt deeply sad, discouraged, negative, completely lacking, and headed straight for hell.
It is only fitting that in the past day or two, I've begun to wonder if having bipolar disorder is like having all these wonderful and horrible external events going on inside your head. So, that even though I can (at least in theory) walk away from my bad situations, people with BPD have it on the inside and fight a much more difficult battle.
Am I way off the mark here?
posted by jordanrep.com/10522 @ 9:22 AM
2 Comments:
I'm with Kay Jamison, Harvard psychologist, co-author of the definitive medical manual on BP, and author of An Unquiet Mind: there's no explaining the illness to someone who lives outside of it.
For example, in some of my mixed states, fans sing to me. No, not just the buzz but actual words. I find it annoying as all hell and do my best to ignore them.
Tell this to an outsider and I guarantee they will flip out. The condition will become exagerrated in their minds. They will insist that I am so psychotic that I am about to pull out an ax and slaughter the neighborhood.
But you don't know what those voices sound like, do you? And I can't describe it to you. I've seen poor attempts in movies to replicate those hallucinations -- those echoey things that are meant to show that the person experiencing them is either higher than Olympus Mons (on Mars) or completely whacked out. Those are nothing like any auditory hallucination that I have had.
Another thing is that we're not constantly in an either or situation. We do walk the middle ground, often more than we experience mania or depression. The idea that we're always in episode is a common misbelief of the unafflicted. What is hard for us is distinguishing, sometimes, the sly onset of mania or the fading relief of depression. We have stable moods, too, even without the meds.
Hi Joel, Thanks for the comment. That's helpful.
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