Grumpy Cat

So, I have this blog and I have yet to post a picture in it. Today, this one seems appropriate for my mood:

I got the Grumpy Cat picture here: http://buymelaughs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Funny-Cats-Top-49-Most-Funniest-Grumpy-Cat-Quotes-4.jpg and obviously I cannot take credit for this meme, or any other.

Today began with agitation, when my mother called me just to make sure I was awake. Yes, I had overslept beyond what I meant to, but I didn't actually have anything pressing to do in the morning, and I do not enjoy waking up to phone calls. I wake up in sort of a panic, trying to squint at the blurry cell phone shrieking for attention, lurch out of bed and start pacing around my room. All in all, it's incredibly unpleasant, and yes, I realize that it's just my own reaction, but that doesn't make it any more enjoyable.

Unfortunately a bad wake-up tends to set the stage for a not-so-great day, and in my case, this meant a day of excessive anxiety and irritability. These are two very common symptoms of mania, which I am trying to deal with as best I can, but unfortunately there are not a plethora of solutions. For the most part, the best you can do is up your dose of medication (done), stick to your routine (doing), and if need be, hand over your car keys (done) and your bank cards (ahem... no).

I am certainly not at the point of needing hospitalization, but the jittery, irritable, anxiety-prone feelings plaguing me today in particular have me wishing I could do something more productive than riding it out. Of course, anyone who has ever dealt with any form of mental (or physical) illness knows that there's really no miracle cure. There is no instant gratification that will make your problems go away, and things that masquerade as such (drugs, promiscuity, alcohol, spending sprees) actually tend to cause more problems than the temporary relief they provide is worth.

So today, I just have to live with a bad day. Everyone has them, whether or not they have a mental illness. All I can really do is hope that tomorrow is better. Luckily I have an appointment with my therapist bright and early. I still have to get through today, though.

Family Matters

Last week, at my Monday night Depression-Bipolar Support Alliance (DBSA) meeting, the facilitator made a joke as the group split up into supporters (friends, family, and partners) and consumers (those of us with mental illness). He said, "In there they cry and in here we laugh." It made me wonder why it is that those who come to support us are crying and bemoaning their misfortune at being related to or friends with a mentally ill person.

I'll be honest that I do find it frustrating, and even resent a bit, the 'why me' attitude of some supporters. Yes, they have chosen to live with our illness, to try to support us through our ups and downs as best they can, but they aren't experiencing those ups and downs firsthand. Yet as I try to learn more about my disease and treat it, I do have to accept that it's a lot of work to take care of another person. Even if you don't have to do everything for them, providing emotional support can be incredibly taxing on the psyche.

My family members found it horrifying to learn about the psyche of a person with bipolar when they read An Unquiet Mind by Dr. Kay Redfield Jameson. I read that book ten years ago, and I found it inspiring and amazing that someone with the same illness I had could do so much, not to mention learn how to manage her illness so well. So I was puzzled (and yes, a little hurt) when my mother read it and expressed shock and horror at the extremes of bipolar. My brother even described the thought processes Dr. Redfield Jameson detailed in the introduction as "completely alien."

After considering it and attending DBSA for the first time, I realized that the issue was that people with normal brain patterns think very differently from people with mental illnesses. While they might have an impulse to buy something they don't need, or to punch an obnoxious person in the mouth, my impulses include things like rolling in the grass with my dog or throwing my pooper-scooper bag into the face of an obnoxious neighbor. And those are the tamer ones.

The truth is that I can't understand a rational mind any more than a rational mind can fully understand mine. When I do and say things that make no sense to people around me, it frightens them. When I become so depressed that I can barely function, not only does it scare people, it makes the more empathic ones feel sad and depressive as well. So it actually makes perfect sense that the people who fall into the role of core support or even caretakers might feel distressed at the situation more often than not.

I wish I had good advice for family members, other than to attend DBSA (really, the group is incredibly helpful and there are chapters all over the United States) and learn all that they can about the illness of the ones they support. And of course, to keep up the good work of supporting family members and friends with mental illness. You may never know how much it means to us to have someone who cares, but I can tell you that from my own experience, it really can be all the difference in the world.

The Stigma

Today I want to tackle one of the least pleasant aspects of having bipolar disorder: the stigma that goes with it. There is exactly one media portrayal that is remotely in the realm of realistic, The Silver Linings Playbook, but it also portrays people with bipolar and mental health issues as being unable to control their behavior and prone to making massive public scenes of outrageous behavior. Do these extreme behaviors and outbursts sometimes happen? Yes, but not nearly as often as the media would have you believe.

Some of the stigma that accompanies bipolar stems from the modern belief that showing emotion or even having it, is somehow 'crazy' or 'melodramatic.' As bipolar disorder does involve feeling the greatest extremes of despair and euphoria, anger and excitement, those of us who have this illness actually do feel emotions more strongly than most people.

To be clear, I am not saying that all of the negative stigma is entirely undeserved. Many of the symptoms of this disease can and do cause extreme behavior during episodes. Promiscuity, substance abuse, and aggression often accompany both manic and depressive periods. Obviously these behaviors are not healthy for us or for those around us. But by and large, those who do not understand or know much about bipolar disorder tend to exaggerate how terrible it is for them to deal with-- often without considering how difficult it is to live with for those of us who have it.

However, a lot of the stigma that exists isn't deserved. Many people think that a person living with bipolar disorder is a ticking time bomb who will inevitably go off on a rampage of insanity. This is not the case. Someone who is properly medicated and managing their illness can actually see manic and depressive episodes coming and take actions to head them off. Even someone who is not fully engaged or actively treating their illness is not necessarily going to act out in an out of control fashion all the time, or even most of the time. With treatment and management, recognizing the onset of mania, depression, or mixed states means that we can prevent them from becoming all-consuming or dangerous.

You may notice that my last name is not included anywhere in my blog. That is because most employers these days check potential employees on the internet, and even such common things as posting Facebook photos of yourself getting drunk at a party can have a negative effect. While the Americans With Disabilities Act clearly states that it is illegal to discriminate against employees with mental health issues, all an employer needs to say is "we've found a more suitable candidate," to circumvent the issue.

I have only recently disclosed my diagnosis to some of my closest friends, because of the incredibly negative reactions that others have had. While only a small handful of people in my life are trustworthy and compassionate enough to know about and make an effort at understanding my illness, this is a fairly recent development. For more than ten years since my mental health issues have come to light, my own family did not understand it, and consequently did not understand how to help or support me.

There is only one solution to the stigma that accompanies bipolar disorder, and that is to educate others about the disease. The media may never be much help, but then, they portray love as consisting of steamy sex scenes and running through airports. Taking the time to explain the disease to individuals will help them to understand, and perhaps they will help others. Hope isn't always easy to come by with this illness, but hope is the starting point to building a better future for anyone.

Something to Consider

The first thing I need to say to anyone reading this is that I have bipolar disorder. I've had this disease since I was a very small child (I can recall a manic episode from when I was about three years old), but without the language or comprehension to express it, I was not diagnosed until my late teen years.

Like so many with this illness, I did not take my treatment very seriously, nor my medication, for many years. I rode the highs like a carnival ride, and mired myself in the lows, disdaining proper treatment in favor of self-medication, isolation, and a slew of other bad choices. While I have not been hospitalized since the age of nineteen, I have spent a total of two to three months on inpatient wards.

I am very fortunate to have a family that is (finally) really learning about this illness so that they can offer the support I need to manage it. There are many other ways in which I'm luckier than a great many people suffering from this illness, such as an excellent therapist, but until recently I did not make use of my inner strengths or external resources to treat it.

Managing bipolar disorder requires a lot of time and effort that I simply did not want to put in during my teen years and early twenties. There are a number of aspects to managing an illness-- any chronic illness-- that are difficult and frustrating. Medication, routine, and eliminating things like alcohol and street drugs are all necessary, as is a support network of people you can trust to help you with your illness when it takes over.

Everything I've read stresses the importance of medication, which many people with bipolar struggle to take and frequently disdain. There are side effects to contend with, remembering to take the medication, and the simple irritation of swallowing a handful of pills every day. I have been lucky enough not to suffer from excessive weight gain, but I've always had trouble with dizziness and shakiness from my medications, especially when the dose increases.

Forming a routine and sticking to it is another hurdle in managing bipolar disorder. Doing the same thing every day sounds pretty boring to most people, and people with mental illness are still people, after all. I resisted forming any kind of routine for years because I didn't want to miss out on 'life,' yet throughout all that time, I wasn't living so much as barely surviving. Nowadays, I still struggle to keep to the routine I've set up, and I am trying to add to it to keep myself busy and largely stable.

Giving up alcohol was a lot easier for me than it might be for others, but I really struggled to quit smoking pot (marijuana). While getting drunk tended to set off the most manic or depressive impulses floating in my head on a given day, getting high made me feel 'normal.' When I was irritable, smoking a joint mellowed me out. When I was anxious, stressed, depressed and/or angry, smoking a joint made me feel better. And when I was manic, smoking pot helped to somewhat slow me down, at least for a little bit. Now that it's out of my system, I've started to notice that I feel my illness more thoroughly, which has the advantage of allowing me to better track my ups and downs, but the disadvantage of actually having to deal with them.

Perhaps the most difficult thing, for me, has been forming a reliable support network. My tendency to withdraw from others, hide my feelings whenever possible, and the less than savory people my excessive drug use surrounded me with made it very difficult to trust others. I would be lying if I said that it's currently easy to trust other people, but I would also be lying if I said that trusting in the right people-- the most supportive friends, my closest family members, a kindly neighbor, and the members of my support group-- hasn't proven to be very worthwhile. The truth is that if someone rejects you because you have a mental illness, they're probably not a very good person to begin with, and you shouldn't trust them anyway.

I've written out a laundry list of the various difficulties with treating and managing bipolar disorder. It's overwhelming, I know. The only way to handle all of it is to take things one at a time, one day at a time.

To leave things on a positive note, I want to draw attention to the number of times I bothered to type the extra words to specify people with mental illness. This is very important, believe it or not. I am not bipolar. No one with with this condition is their disease, no more than someone with cancer is themselves a cancer because they have it. I am a human being-- and so are you, if you have a mental illness-- and while this disease might take up a lot of time and energy, we are all much more than just a diagnosis.