Bipolar Me

Podcast Appearance

On Friday, November 13th, at 7:00 p.m. (Eastern Time), I will be a guest on the Bi-Polar Girl podcast! Tune in to it on Apple Podcasts.

Eight Things I’ve Learned From Being Bipolar

Image by glopphy/adobestock

I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and anxiety a couple  of decades ago, after being misdiagnosed with major depression. During that time, I’ve learned a lot about myself and about bipolar disorder. I’d like to share them now.

1. Educating people about bipolar is part of my mission in life. Many people with bipolar disorder prefer to keep it to themselves, while others reveal it to only a few selected people – usually close friends or family. And those are valid, personal choices. I have been open about my diagnosis. I’ve maintained my blog (bipolarme.blog) for years. I’ve written two books (Bipolar Me and Bipolar Us). I talk to friends and family about it, even the ones who don’t really understand.This helps me as well as some of them. I have learned that more people than I thought have bipolar, depression, or another disorder.
2. Other people may be able to “chose happiness,” but I can’t. I’ve seen in my reading and heard from friends and strangers that they are able to keep their bipolar or depression in check through positive thinking or choosing happiness or other non-medical means. None of that has ever worked for me. For me, my condition is a brain illness and must be treated with medication for the underlying causes and with talk therapy for developing coping mechanisms and getting a reality check.
3. Even meds and therapy don’t keep me from relapsing. I still get depression from time to time. I just don’t fall as far. (I have bipolar 2, so I seldom get mania.) But the medications help me to know that my depression will end, and the therapy helps me know how to hang on until it does. At the back of my mind, I always know that I will find my way back to baseline stability, if not as quickly as I’d like.
4. I am still able to work, be married, and have many friends. These are blessings that have come despite my bipolar disorder. I may be able to work only part-time, but I am proud of being able to use my education and bring in some money. My husband and I have been married for over 30 years. He is being treated for depression, so he knows a lot about what I go through. And I have good friends who stick with me even when I am difficult (and I certainly can be).
5. I can still step out of my comfort zone and try new things. I have ridden a zipline, though the act of stepping off the edge was terrifying. I gave a public reading of my first book, though I hadn’t spoken in public since before my major depressive crash. 
6. I still can’t do everything I’d like to. Being in large groups is still difficult for me, especially if I am the center of attention, such as hosting a party. I can’t even be at a party very long without having to leave. I can’t do holiday shopping in crowded stores. In fact, I do most of my shopping on the Internet.
7. My creativity is not lessened. My two blogs and two books are evidence of that. And I’ve been working on a novel – a mystery – and am in the process of getting back to it now that I have a new idea for some subtext it desperately needed. I can write poetry, sometimes about bipolar disorder. I can make jokes and conversation. I don’t often feel writer’s block and can push myself through it, even though it sometimes takes a while (as with the mystery).
8. Bipolar may be a life sentence, but it’s not a death sentence. Yes, I’ve had suicidal ideation (and I’ve written about it – https://wp.me/p4e9Hv-Me). But I got through it and I know that I still can, should the feelings return. And I know that, unless science makes some really spectacular advances, I will be dealing with bipolar for the rest of my life, getting through with the help of medication, therapy, my husband, and my friends.

All in all, I have to say it’s been a good life, despite my bipolar disorder, and I expect it to keep on being so. As I mentioned, educating people about bipolar is one of my passions, and I hope this post helps people understand the realities – not just the depression and the mania, but the possibilities.

Just Because Mental Illness Is Scary…

…doesn’t mean you should make it into Halloween costumes.

Halloween costumes for adults have gotten ridiculous. You can find “sexy” costumes for almost anything. One year I saw an ad for a “Sexy Crayon” costume. Then there’s this year’s I-kid-you-not Sexy Mail-In Ballot. I find them perplexing and not at all sexy.

Another appalling trend in Halloween costumes, though, is the “mental patient” and “asylum” tropes.

We know that it is scary to have a mental illness. My bipolar disorder makes me question my every feeling and wonder if it’s real or pathology. Schizophrenia is an even scarier mental illness, both for those who have it and the people who interact with them.

Mental illness is also scary to the general public, especially if they hear nothing but the horror stories of mental patients on murderous rampages. The news media feed these fears with endless speculations about what disorder a killer might have had or what psych meds he or she might have been on. They ignore the fact that people with mental problems are more likely to be victims of violence than causes of it. Only in extreme cases, such as a person with both schizophrenia and anosognosia, is violence even remotely likely. The “he must be crazy” reaction to reports of a seemingly inexplicable murder are nevertheless widespread.

Yet there remain harmful and outdated stereotypes regarding mental illness that manifest themselves in holiday costumes. The most common feature of a “mental patient” costume is a straitjacket, despite the fact that such restraints have not been used for decades. But “straitjacket” is visual shorthand for “dangerous mental patient.” It’s as out-of-date and offensive as “sexy nurse” costumes featuring short, tight white dresses and nursing caps, with oversized toy hypos. I haven’t seen a nurse in anything but scrubs in years.

Another disturbing trend among Halloween costumes is the association of mental illness with blood. Many of the costumes feature blood smears or bloody handprints. You can even get “insane asylum” home decor adorned with stark concrete walls and multiple blood smears and handprints. These are suggested for use in throwing “theme parties.”

Combining pop culture with insanity is another source for Halloween costumes. The Hannibal Lecter mask appears in many costume lists, often combined with a straitjacket. (It’s usually advertised as a “cannibal” mask, to avoid copyright difficulties.) Another, more recent, one is the Harley Quinn “Suicide Squad” costume, featuring tight short shorts, black hose, and a huge prop hammer. (At least, as far as I know, no one has tried to do a sexy Hannibal Lecter costume, though I ought to Google it to make sure. There is a “sexy insane asylum patient” costume with a peek-a-boo straitjacket.) Horror movies are also fertile ground for “crazed killer” costumes. In addition to Hannibal Lecter, there are “hockey mask” and “Leatherface” (Texas Chainsaw) masks.

If you find yourself at a costume party with a person wearing a straitjacket costume or  a house decorated with an asylum theme, my advice is to leave immediately. Don’t engage in conversation. This is not the time for educating the populace on the realities of mental illness and the harm that stereotypes do.

Fortunately, this year there may be fewer costume parties because of social distancing requirements, fewer chances to insult and make fun of actual mental patients and those who have spent time in psych wards. Maybe by the time this pandemic is over, we can go back to insulting and misrepresenting Wiccans with sexy witch costumes.

Whatever Happened to Allie Brosh?

In 2013, Allie Brosh was the darling of the mental health community, on the strength of her best-selling book, Hyperbole and a Half and her blog of the same name. Then she disappeared for seven years. This year, she finally resurfaced with a new book, Solutions and Other Problems. 

Hyperbole was such a success because of the humor it contained, as well as the unflinching look at clinical depression. 

It was instantly relatable to those of us who had been through it too:

[I] could no longer rely on genuine emotion to generate facial expressions, and when you have to spend every social interaction consciously manipulating your face into shapes that are only approximately the right ones, alienating people is inevitable.

Sometimes humor and insight were combined, as in this passage:

[T] rying to use willpower to overcome the apathetic sort of sadness that accompanies depression is like a person with no arms trying to punch themselves until their hands grow back. A fundamental component of the plan is missing and it isn’t going to work.

It also offered hope, including the famous passage where a single grain of corn helped the author break free from her depression. The book was illustrated with gonzo drawings of the author as a peculiar stick-figure-ish entity with a pink dress and a strange yellow triangle of a ponytail.

Now, seven years later, along comes Solutions, with that same propensity to tear your heart out with truth about loss, grief, and loneliness; relationship concerns, family tragedy, and physical health scares. Then without warning, you come across a passage like this:

Some years have been pretty hard, but overall, I have a pretty easy life. If I find a dead deer, I don’t have to fight a bear for it. I don’t even have to eat it if I don’t want to.

It should be noted that the stick-figure author avatar has a larger wardrobe now. And that, for those who fear that a book containing so much serious material will be difficult to read, rest assured that there are still plenty of dogs, bananas, a drunken kangaroo-pig, and poop stories.

If you get this book – and you should – it will be worth your while to shell out for the print edition ($30 for the autographed version), as the electronic edition is unsatisfying. The illustrations which flesh out this work even more than they did Hyperbole, do not come off to good effect electronically, with the hand-printed dialogue occasionally unreadable. But you need to see the illustrations, in particular Brosh’s extended series on the lives of her and her sister.

During the seven years that she was off the map, Brosh never lost her legion of admirers. In an interview with BuzzFeedNews, she sounded very like Jenny Lawson (The Bloggess), when she said:

Hey there, weirdos (<—they like when I call them that, I promise). You are more dear to me than you could possibly know. … I don’t know where you all live or what you all look like, but I’ve seen pieces of who you are, and it’s good to know you’re out there.

The comparisons between Brosh and Lawson are inevitable. Both write books that address serious, even devastating, topics with a hefty dose of humor. Both have extensive followings in the mental health community. Both have a tendency to self-isolate, but keep writing through the trauma. 

Brosh says that she has given up her blog because she was more comfortable with the book-writing process. And Instagram. And playing online games anonymously.

I, for one, hope that she continues with the book-writing process, and that her planned third book doesn’t take another seven years to produce. I don’t think I can wait that long.