Bipolar 2 From Inside and Out

Posts tagged ‘bipolar disorder’

What If My Symptoms Come Back?

It’s inevitable. Once you’ve dealt with a mental illness, you’re afraid it will come roaring back, even if you’ve been stable for a long time. You wonder if your medications will stop working. You dread “breakthrough” episodes that will put you back in the same awful space you thought you had escaped from. You have flashbacks or dreams that take you to places you thought you had left far behind. You imagine you hear someone call your name and wonder if it’s a symptom. Sometimes, something you never thought of as a trigger will catch you by surprise and send you right back to the dark place, the anxious place, the out-of-control place.

Those fears are not unwarranted. All of those things could happen. For many people, they do. For most, the thoughts pop up at odd moments, even when you’re doing well. They’re unpredictable. That’s part of what makes them so scary – the knowledge that you have no control over these thoughts of recurrence.

It certainly happens to me. I obsess over my own thoughts. I fear dropping back into depression. I wonder if I’m exhibiting hypomanic behavior without realizing it. I overanalyze nearly every feeling I have if it has the slightest hint of a symptom of bipolar about it.

That’s when it’s good to have a strong support system – a person or persons you can talk to and check in with. Someone who recognizes your baseline behavior and when you start to depart from it. Someone who understands your disorder and what the symptoms might be.

I’m fortunate to have a support system in place, though it consists of only two or three people at this point – my therapist, my husband, and to some degree my prescribing psychiatrist. I see my psychiatrist only four times per year for med checks, but I can tell him when I think I’m experiencing symptoms and ask whether he thinks it’s something that warrants a change in meds.

I see my therapist approximately once a month, and she has a better handle on intrusive thoughts and whether they are irrational or not. She provides a “sanity check” for me. Most of the time, she reassures me that they’re normal (or nearly so). Sometimes, she tells me if I should bring them up with my psychiatrist the next time I see him. Mostly, she listens, which is what I think a good therapist does.

The mainstay of my support system, however, is my husband. He understands bipolar disorder from years of living with me and living through my mood swings. He knows my baseline level of behavior and when I begin to depart from it. For example, he can recognize when I am starting to get hypomanic and suggest to me that I might be beginning an episode. Or, if I feel like I might be getting manicky, I can ask him if he sees the symptoms in me or not. If I’m having delusions that other cars are swerving into my lane, he can suggest I take an anti-anxiety med.

Four former members of my support system are no longer there, two because they recognized my symptoms increasing and were not able to deal with them, and two lost to death. Even though my husband and my mental health providers help keep me on an even keel, I do miss the additional input. I need reassurance when I am doing well and help when I begin to veer off course.

This month, however, I am doing better. I just postponed my therapist appointment because I have no pressing issues that need addressing this month. May it stay that way.

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Baby Steps Toward Healing

Once I attended a weekend photography workshop. One of my photos received praise as being innovative and interesting, one based on a technique I had seen a friend use. The rest of my photos missed the mark. I was frustrated by my lack of progress. The instructor reassured me, advising me that I should take (or was taking) “baby steps.” That photo provided a brief glimpse of what I could do if I kept at it.

My therapist has also reminded me of this numerous times. And she’s been right. Almost all the progress I’ve made in dealing with being bipolar has been gradual and incremental.

The baby steps process was long and arduous, lasting for years. The first step was taking Prozac, which helped me for a while, then didn’t. Most of the progress I’ve made with medication has been in tiny, discrete steps. My prescribing psychiatrists have never done anything quickly, which is in one way a blessing and in another a torment. They would try me on one drug, then wait to see the results, then try a different dose or a different drug altogether. Lather, rinse, repeat until progress at last occurred.

Progress in therapy has likewise been gradual over the years. First there were therapists who diagnosed me with depression, which was certainly true, though not the whole picture. And they helped, or at least a number of them did over the years. I learned a lot about depression in general and how it applied to me in particular. I also learned about relationships, and those insights helped my marriage.

Finally, I was given an accurate diagnosis of bipolar disorder 2 with anxiety. That was where the steps toward reaching some resolution regarding my medication really started. That was also when I started working with the therapist who reminded me about baby steps.

Although I had made steps toward healing in the past, I had taken a deep and protracted plunge into depression before I started going to her. Several years of it had left me immobilized, despairing. At my lowest point, I described myself as “pathetic.” There were going to be a lot of baby steps needed to get me out of that miserable place.

So we went to work. I liked the kind of therapy she practiced – non-directional, non-judgmental. (I had had problems with therapists who weren’t like that in the past. Needless to say, I made no progress with them. In fact, I even took steps backward.) There was a long way to go.

Dr. B. frequently reminded me of the importance of baby steps and, eventually, how far those steps had taken me. I learned coping mechanisms. I learned new ways of thinking. I learned to accept myself with the reality of my bipolar disorder, but without the constant misery. And, by the time my proper medications had kicked in, we were making some even bigger steps. But all my progress was built on a foundation of many, many baby steps along the way.

I think all therapy consists of a lot of little steps. I don’t know anyone who has had a great revelation that instantly moved them further along with their healing. I only got glimpses of what my situation could be like if I persisted. And along the way, I regressed at times, needing to re-learn the lessons I had been exposed to and re-taking the steps I had already accomplished. Progress is like that – two steps forward and one step back – especially with a disorder as cyclical as bipolar.

Anyway, I still go to therapy and still take baby steps toward whatever my future holds. I realize it will take a long time – probably the rest of my life – but I’m dedicated to the process.

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Self Image: Who Do I Think I Am?

Self-image is a problem shared by millions of people every day. Take women, for example. They are bombarded by relentless messages that they are too fat (or too thin); too plain; with inadequately full, shiny hair; or with un-perky, non-voluptuous breasts. (Men face messages too about their lack of muscles, excess paunch, thinning hair, or short stature – but nothing like the volume (in both senses) that women receive.)

Self-image is also a big problem for people – both women and men – who live with mental illness. It’s not always physical self-image. Sometimes we get messages about how we should think and feel from all the ads on TV and in magazines and on the internet that feature happy people interacting joyfully with their friends and families. The subliminal message is that if your life isn’t like that, the advertisers’ products will make it so that it is.

Of course, nowadays there are also ads that feature depressed or bipolar people, but they end the same way. Get online help or psychotropic meds and you’ll turn into one of those happy, joyful people living life to the fullest. For many of us, that’s not the way it is. There are treatment-resistant disorders, for example, and complex problems like OCD, PTSD, and schizophrenia that aren’t mentioned at all. (PTSD is sometimes addressed in the context of veterans helping one another, which is good, but the ads for this usually offer moral and financial support, rather than a more trauma-conscious solution.)

I’ve been through my own battles with self-image, and not all of them related to things I saw in the mirror. When I was a child, I endured bullying that made me feel unworthy and unable to fit in. As a teen, I saw myself as plain and unlovable. I even doubted my parents’ abundant love, thinking they loved me only because, as I was their daughter, they had to. Later, my self-image consisted of being a depressed person. That’s who I was and all I could see of myself.

When I was working, I saw myself as an imposter. I had a “respectable business lady disguise” that I could put on when desperately needed, but I knew it wasn’t accurate. Then, when I lost my job, I saw myself as a failure.

Still later, after my most severe breakdown, I defined myself as my husband’s “sick, crazy, crippled wife.” I know those are terms we’re not supposed to use, but that’s what my brain was telling me. (The “crippled” part was because I had mobility issues that necessitated two operations on my back, and thereafter used a cane.) I used it as an excuse not to go places, see people, or do things. Actually, my husband used it as an excuse too, though he didn’t phrase it that way. (Now he doesn’t.)

In short, my self-image was someone who was broken – and not “in the best way possible,” as Jenny Lawson says.

Years of therapy and medication have largely gotten me to the point where my negative self-images are no longer constantly haunting me. They still rear their ugly heads on occasion, but now they aren’t all-pervasive. My husband helps too. He says, based on photos, that I was cute when I was in high school and he would have dated me. (I still have my doubts about that.)

What I’m getting at is that a person’s self-image can and does change over time. I think I am more accurate now in thinking I am no longer cute, except maybe when I smile; still mobility-challenged but not so self-conscious about it; and, I would have to say, a “recovering” bipolar person.

We’re getting to the point where we don’t all or always think that what we see in the mirror reflects our worth or our true self. We’re learning not to believe our own or others’ negative messages about our appearance – though there is certainly still a long way to go.

What I’m not sure of is that we’re making much headway on redefining our self-images regarding our mental health or lack thereof. Despite all the positive affirmations we see and hear in so many memes and elsewhere, do they really sink in and change our thinking? Or is the only way to do that bound up in time, treatment, and the support of our family and friends? I’m just glad that it is possible to change, whatever the mechanism. My life is much more settled and happier now that I no longer see or define myself as I once did. That’s something I want to hang on to.

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Garden-Variety Jerks

I see a lot of questions of this kind: My neighbor/sister/friend does this [unpleasant behavior]. Is this caused by his/her bipolar disorder?

There certainly are behaviors of people with bipolar disorder that are unpleasant to those surrounding them. Not taking showers for a week when the person is depressed is one of them. Another, when the person is in the grip of mania, is having sex outside a relationship. Being unable to leave the house is a bipolar-related behavior. So is gambling away your savings. So is standing you up or ghosting you. And blaming themselves for everything. And taking on too many projects and finishing none of them. Talking too fast or too slowly.

Playing their music too loud or parking across your driveway is not a bipolar-related behavior. Neither is littering. Or insisting that you take the garbage out. Or yelling when they are angry. Or becoming huffy when you criticize them.

There are some behaviors that may or may not be bipolar-related – for example, talking about themselves too much. This could be an indication that the person is depressed and brooding (if the talk is about how worthless they are) or manic and aggrandizing (if the talk is about how great they are). Or it may just be that the person has low or high self-esteem that doesn’t rise to the level of pathology. Feeling that everyone is picking on them could go either way. So could taking offense at every little remark. It’s sometimes hard to tell, particularly if you’re not a psychologist.

It’s more than a little weird that people are willing to attribute all kinds of bad behavior to mental illness. But think of all the racist haters and killers that are assumed to be mentally ill. While some may be, it’s an automatic and often unwarranted assumption. It takes away from the attention that ought to be given to real mental disorders and it perpetuates the stigma associated with mental illness. Or it assumes that racism and hatred are mental illnesses. These are extreme cases, of course.

Sometimes bad behavior is not due to mental illness at all. Sometimes what you’re dealing with is a garden-variety jerk. To address the picture above, it’s not pathology to be messy and it’s not a sign of mental illness to be mad at a roommate for being messy.

There’s not a lot you can do if the behavior you object to is caused by mental illness. You may have to simply understand or let the annoyance go. The person may resent that you assume their behavior is a sign of mental illness, even if it is. And about all you can do in that case is help the person get help if you can.

When you’re dealing with a garden-variety jerk, there are other sorts of remedies you can apply. You can call the police on the neighbor with the loud stereo. You can ask the messy roommate to straighten up or leave. You can set boundaries of what you will and won’t put up with and enforce those boundaries firmly but fairly when they are violated.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that the person in question has a mental illness and is also a jerk. If you can figure out what to do in those cases, please let me know.

I’m not saying that mental illness should be an excuse for bad behavior or absolve a person of the consequences of their actions. I am saying that it’s easy to assume that all bad behavior is due to mental illness, just as much as it’s easy to assume that all bad behavior comes from being a jerk, or worse.

In a lot of cases, you simply have to live with it.

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Remote Work and Mental Health

Nowadays, many workplaces have a toxic culture or at least a dysfunctional one. They demand – not just expect – more from their employees than any human being should have to, or be willing to, give. Sixty-hour weeks. Twelve-hour days. Giving up weekends and holidays. They treat employees as fungible things that can be easily replaced and regularly are, especially if they don’t live up to the brutal “standards” that are supposedly required by the free market.

Toxic workplaces are also full of toxic people. Bullying of employees and coworkers is common. Gaslighting even happens, more regularly than we’d like to admit. Required conformity and enforced corporate “team-building” parties and picnics suck the meaning out of workplace enjoyment. Exhortations that the workplace is a “family” and then behaving in ways that belie this are rampant – false, harmful, and destructive.

Corporate practices aren’t human-friendly, much less family-friendly. Flexible working hours, job-sharing, onsite childcare, remote work, part-time work, and extended sick and other types of leave are largely reserved for only the highest echelons or never even considered for any workers. Health and disability insurance are nonexistent or ultra-expensive for workers because of the monetary costs to the company. Discussions about the stress caused by work end in suggestions to try yoga. Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs), if they exist, provide some therapy, but only with a provider of the company’s choosing and usually only for six weeks or so.

Then along comes the COVID pandemic. Suddenly, corporations and other, smaller businesses were faced with the difficulties of staffing during lockdowns and quarantines. All of a sudden, workers weren’t so available or so desperate. Owners had to scramble to hire enough workers to keep the wheels turning. Some businesses were forced to raise wages. Others had to rethink corporate travel to cut costs.

And some turned to remote work. Not all could, of course. Some jobs simply can’t be done from home. Construction workers, wait staff, airline attendants, and countless others were simply let go or put on furlough, many of them without even partial pay. But many jobs, particularly office jobs, were the sorts that could be done from home, on the phone or via computer. And that proved beneficial both for the affected companies and for the mental health of their workers. Bosses suddenly realized that work-from-home even improved the bottom line, reducing overhead. It soon became clear that home-workers were able to be as or even more productive when not being constantly interrupted by mandatory meetings and other useless exercises.

How did telecommuting affect workers’ mental health? First, remote workers were spared from many aspects of toxic workplaces. Micromanaging became largely unfeasible.

This certainly helped improve their working conditions and stress. So did getting respectably dressed only from the waist up, especially for those of us with limited spoons. Being able to step away from the computer for a half-hour or more to do something about chores or even hobbies provided a welcome break. Lunches could now be taken whenever you were hungry and last more than 30 minutes. Even spending more time with pets reduced stress and provided emotional support that’s next to impossible in most workplaces.

Many of the stresses that so exacerbate mental health conditions were at least lessened. People were more comfortable in their own homes, with comfort objects and self-care items more readily available. Those with a greater need for alone time suddenly had more of it. If they found that they could work better or more productively part-time at home, it was a benefit for the companies as well.

Of course, not all bosses took to this new way of working. Once they figured out that employees could be more productive when working at home, some of them upped output requirements. They could insist that employees remain logged in during standard working hours, making flex-time less doable. Or they started requiring more output from those telecommuting, or scheduling Skype meetings that cut into employees’ time.

I work at home, remotely, and have for a number of years. I do so because I have been fortunate enough to find jobs that pay (though not a lot), jobs that match my skill set, jobs that aren’t 9-5, and jobs that are conducive to working around my days of depression and hypomania. I’ve considered going back to work in an office from time to time when funds were low, but not enough to actively pursue it. Truth to tell, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do that again, and not just because I like working in my pajamas. (For those who are curious, I’m doing transcription and ghostwriting at the moment. They provide a supplement to Social Security and allow me time to work on my blogs.)

Did toxic work environments cause mental illness? Probably not, though they have pushed some people closer to the edge and others past the breaking point. It’s hard to work in corporate culture with any kind of mental disorder (except possibly narcissism). For these people, remote working is a blessing. COVID has been devastating, but one of its side effects has been to improve working conditions for millions of people – and especially those living with mental illnesses.

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Of All the Things I’ve Lost…

The quotation from Mark Twain goes, “Of all the things I have lost, I miss my mind the most.” It’s a little annoying, at the least, when people repeat it. Those of us with psychiatric diagnoses don’t actually lose our minds, but we do lose a lot of other things along the way.

Friends

I’ve certainly lost friends because of my bipolar disorder. I can think of two in particular who were very dear friends, but cut off all contact with me when I was at the depths of my depression and they feared I was suicidal. I reached out to them a few times and even sent them a copy of both my books, but got minimal response. I still miss them, though they now live in another state and it’s unlikely that we’ll ever see each other again, even in social settings we all used to frequent.

Jobs

Twice I lost jobs largely because of my bipolar disorder. The first time, I had been isolating a lot, keeping the door to my office closed and barely interacting with any of the other employees. While an open door wasn’t technically a requirement of the job, I was the only editor who habitually hid behind a closed one, and it wasn’t taken well. I’m afraid I got a reputation as being difficult and uncommunicative. Finally, after several incidents where my emotions ran away with me, I was let go.

The second time was at the job I had directly after that job ended. At first, I did all right in the department where I was assigned. Then my boss left and the department was disbanded. I was transferred to another editing group, and there my difficulties began. The people there misunderstood my attempts at humor. My boss didn’t understand bipolar disorder and when she asked, “What does that mean?” I was caught off-guard and made a brief, unhelpful remark to the effect of “Sometimes I have good days and sometimes I have bad days.” I could see her thinking, “What makes you different than anyone else?”

Finally, I was put on probation, the only time in my entire career when that ever happened to me. I decided to leave before they could fire me. Then I went into a period of hypomania about not having to work there anymore and starting a freelance career, which did not turn out as well as I had hoped.

Intellectual abilities

I know a lot of people worry that when they have a disorder such as bipolar, or even when they take medication for it, they will lose some of their brainpower. I never felt that way, but looking back I can see that the disorder also disordered my thinking. Moods of despair and exhilaration interfered with my cognitive functions. In addition to the general dulling of feelings during depression, I also lost the ability to concentrate enough to read, formerly one of my primary and best-loved activities. Even as I mourned the loss of my reading, I was simply unable to pick up a book and follow its contents. I took to watching mindless TV shows instead – really bad ones.

Enjoyment

Just as I no longer found joy in reading, I no longer found other activities enjoyable or interesting as well. I used to love cooking, especially with my husband, but when depressed, I could barely microwave a cup of mac-n-cheese. I loved good conversation with friends, but I barely talked to anyone and ignored friends’ overtures. I enormously enjoyed traveling, but couldn’t summon the energy even for a day trip.

Confidence

I used to be able to do all kinds of things by myself – attend business conventions (and science fiction conventions) and write articles for publication, for example. When I was suffering the most from bipolar disorder, I could do none of these things. When I went to conventions, I needed a bolt hole and spent as much time as I could in my room. At that point, I couldn’t write about my condition or even send emails to friends. One of my friends said, when I was considering ECT, “Write about it! That’s what you do!” But it wasn’t what I did anymore. Putting pen to paper – or words on a screen – was not even a possibility. I asked someone else if she would write about it instead.

Things I haven’t lost

Of course, most of these things came back to me once I was properly diagnosed and medicated. I now read every night, write my blogs every week, travel here and abroad, and make friends that I keep in touch with. I discovered that some of my friends had stuck by me, even when I was in the depths. I still can’t work in an office, but I have found work I can do from home. I enjoy travel again. And if I’m a little slower to get a joke or find a word, it doesn’t bother me so much. I know my brain is just fine, except for occasional glitches.

Losing all those things made me realize just how good my life is now that I am back to being myself. I have my mind back, if it was ever lost at all.

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Hypomanic, Anxious, and Overextended

My hypomania and my anxiety are fighting each other. Here’s what happened to start the quarrel.

There wasn’t much work for me over the holidays and into February. The transcription company that I freelance for didn’t have many assignments to give out, and, being part-time, I was low on the list to get them. Plus, one of the company’s biggest clients was leaving. And my husband and I got COVID, so it was impossible for him and difficult for me to work.

The job at the transcription company isn’t great. I make a few hundred dollars a month, which is a good supplement to my Social Security and my husband’s pay. I’m really a crappy typist, though, so it takes me longer to finish assignments than it does for most people. I work only four days a week, but it feels like full-time.

But, with the job likely to go away entirely, my anxiety was triggered. I figured it was time to look for a new part-time gig, maybe one that wouldn’t be as taxing.

I started my job search and eventually found a company that was hiring remote online tutors, which seemed perfect for me. My bipolar disorder makes it difficult for me to work in an office, especially in a 9-to-5 job. I’ve done it in the past, but don’t think I could anymore.

Then good news came – the transcription job wasn’t going away after all. A new client had signed on (though the work hasn’t started to come in yet, so I have no idea what the pattern of assignments will be).

I didn’t want to give up on the tutoring job. (I haven’t started yet, as they are still processing my paperwork.) I figured I might be able to do both, tutoring on the three days per week that I wasn’t transcribing, or in the mornings between assignments. The tutoring gig requires only five hours per week, though you can take on more.

Then I got a lead on a job editing, which is my real love when it comes to work. And I began to wonder whether I could do that in addition to both the tutoring job and the typing job.

Of course, that’s hypomania talking. I don’t get hypomania very often and when I do, I have a hard time recognizing it. My husband sometimes notices it before I do and gently reminds me when he sees me starting to go overboard. “You’d be awfully busy,” he said, looking dubious. It made me stop and think. For one thing, it made me think that it might not have been a good idea to buy the new computer that the tutoring job would require. For another, my time off with him is precious, and I wouldn’t like losing that.

The typing job is supposed to get rolling again, but I like it the least, as it isn’t a good use of my real skill set. But I’ve been doing it for several years now, so I’m kind of used to it. The prospect of having no extra money coming in scares me, though, enough that I am really considering getting that second part-time job. That’s my anxiety talking as well as my hypomania.

Realistically, I ought to just stay with the job I have and hope that the new client works out. Now that that is a possibility, maybe I should give up the idea of more work. But the uncertainty that I’ve recently experienced tells me that I ought to have another way to jump, just in case.

Which will win – my anxiety, my hypomania, or my husband’s common sense? I really want that editing job . . . .

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Going Off (Some) Meds

I regularly tell people not to go off their meds without consulting their psychiatrist. I yell at them, in all caps. It’s not just a bad idea, it can result in withdrawal and even lessening the meds’ effectiveness if you do go back on them. Yet recently, I went off two psych meds without my psychiatrist’s prior approval.

Here’s what happened.

My husband and I recently had COVID – probably the Delta or Omicron Variant, as we have both been triple-vaxxed. That is to say, my husband tested positive for COVID and I have close contact with him, plus I had the same symptoms that he did.

Since we didn’t need expensive and rare treatments or hospital stays and ventilators, we relied on over-the-counter medication to treat the symptoms, which included sore throat, coughing, fever, congestion, and fatigue. We recovered in a couple of weeks to a month and my husband is back to his job, where he regularly interacts with numbers of people. I work at home, so I didn’t have that problem. I just needed to take some time off when I felt truly crappy.

When we read the directions on the OTC symptom-relief pills, however, there was a warning that said not to take anti-anxiety agents or sleep aids with them. My regular routine has been to take a sleeping aid at bedtime and an anti-anxiety pill in the morning and at bedtime, with an extra dose allowed if I have an anxiety attack during the day. I have been taking both of the meds literally for years and have never had any problems with them. (I won’t say what any of the medications are, since everyone has different reactions to different medications, and my reactions, while fairly typical, won’t hold true for everyone.)

Perhaps out of an excess of caution, I decided not to take the anti-anxiety and sleeping meds while on the OTC ones. When I quit taking them, though, I was worried that I might experience some of the ill effects that were possible.

Throughout the course of my bout of COVID, I didn’t notice any withdrawal symptoms, excess anxiety, or difficulty sleeping as I feared I might. In fact, I slept better than usual and had fewer attacks of anxiety. So I decided that I would try going off the two meds for a while, even after I felt better. It was about six weeks until my next med check with my psychiatrist.

Of course, when my med check came around, I told my psychiatrist what I had done and why. I thought he might react badly when I said that I did this on my own, without his advice and consent.

Instead, he seemed thrilled.

“Good for you,” he said. “You’ve stopped taking the two addictive ones, too.”

I had known those drugs were potentially addictive, which was why I was watching for withdrawal symptoms. I took the lack of these as signs that, though the drugs were addictive, I was not addicted. (My psychiatrist has to regularly have an analysis done to show whether his patients have a high risk of abusing psych meds or taking more than needed. My score was 0%.)

It felt good to have my psychiatrist validate that I had done a good thing and not a bad one. But even more, it felt good to be taking fewer pills each day. I’ve never minded having to take pills or felt ashamed of taking them, but it was still significant to me that I had lowered my medication schedule to just the ones that had beneficial psychotropic effects, such as antidepressants and mood stabilizers. I was delighted to find that I didn’t need as many pills as I had once thought.

All in all, my experiment was a success, but I was lucky, and my experience is not medical advice. I don’t recommend it to anyone else. Consult your prescribing physician before you cut back on or stop any medication. I MEAN IT!

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How I Learned I’m Not “Pathetic”

When I first went to my therapist, I often described my life and myself as “pathetic.” Slowly, as I made progress, I stopped doing that. It was a revelation that took some time to sink in. Here are some of the things my therapist said and did to help me overcome this harmful description of myself and my bipolar disorder.

Refusing to accept my description. This may seem like an obvious thing, but it had real meaning for me. I had been majorly depressed for approximately three years and bipolar as long as I could remember. I couldn’t do anything – get out of bed, shower, feed myself or the cats, or perform the tasks of daily living. (My husband picked up the slack. Thank God for him.) My therapist never said in so many words, “You’re not pathetic” or “Your thinking is wrong.” She just patiently spent the time with me and gave me tools I could use to get better.

You’d think I would take this as denying my perception of reality, which I ordinarily hate when anyone tries it. But this time, I welcomed it. It was nice at that point to have someone denying my perception because Dr. B.’s perception was so much more appealing than mine. It gave me something to shoot for – a time when I would no longer feel that “pathetic” was an apt description. She also let me cry it out, which I often did when I was feeling particularly pathetic.

Baby steps. (Also known as “Eat the elephant one bite at a time.”) My healing was slow, thousands of baby steps of accomplishing more and more. Because my therapist never gave up, neither did I. Baby steps take you only so far at a time – after all, they’re tiny. But over time, they add up to a measurable distance. As I slowly moved away from my “pathetic” label, I also moved away from feeling pathetic. Eventually, I was able to eat, if not the whole elephant, at least a larger portion of it through slow but steady progress.

Not that I didn’t sometimes backslide. Whenever I hit another depressive episode, my feeling of pathetic-ness came roaring back. It was only as I learned that some other feeling was possible that I was able to catch a glimpse of a time when pathetic might no longer describe me.

Saying, “Look how far you’ve come.” This is something that my therapist kept reminding me. Dr. B. noted that I was becoming able to get out of bed to come to her office. She would bring up the tools that I had acquired or developed to help myself leave the bad old days largely in the past. She would also point out that I not only remembered those tools, I was using them.

Sticking with me. Dr. B. was also there when I backslid. A couple of times I had made so much progress that I thought I was able to go it alone. But, sooner or later, I would need a “booster shot” of work with her to remind me of the things that I really already knew. When I was feeling too low to make it into the office, we would have phone sessions. When COVID hit and in-person visits became even more difficult or impossible to arrange, we began having videoconference sessions. Slowly, I worked up from every week to once every two weeks to once every three weeks – and am now meeting with her only once a month.

And, let me tell you, it feels great not to feel pathetic anymore.


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mental health

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The Difference a Diagnosis Makes

I thought I had depression and that’s what I was first diagnosed with. Later, I learned that I really had bipolar disorder, type 2, with an anxiety disorder on top of it. Here’s what I learned on my journey to a proper diagnosis.

Understanding. Once I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a lot of things from my life started making more sense. I finally realized that some of the inane things I thought and did as a child/teen were attributable to hypomania. Being idiotically happy when I won a goldfish at a carnival, carrying it before me, grinning like a loon. Near-constant mirth when I read a novel parody, laughing long and loudly every time someone used a word or phrase that reminded me of it. Luckily, I didn’t have any money to spend, or I would have done that too, based on my later behavior. Even things I did as an adult before my proper diagnosis made more sense – flight of ideas, pressured speech, and the like.

Second opinion. Going to a different psychiatrist and finally getting the right diagnosis was, in many ways, like getting a second opinion. We don’t often hesitate to get a second opinion on matters concerning our physical health (and insurance companies may require it). Why is it different when it comes to our mental health? I’m not saying that doctor-shopping is a good idea or that a diagnosis of depression did me no good at all. It just took a different psychiatrist to put together all my symptoms in a way that made sense to me as well as to him.

The “Aha Moment.” When I got my bipolar diagnosis, it was like a wake-up call. I instantly understood that my psychiatrist was right. Once I had that insight, I was able to explore my actual disorder in various ways – further sessions with him and with my psychotherapist, reading books and reliable online sources, sharing with other people who have the same diagnosis and listening to their experiences.

Getting the right meds. I had been taking medications for depression for many years. Then I learned that I might – did – need treatment with anti-anxiety medications, mood levelers, and other kinds of drugs that specifically targeted bipolar symptoms. I still needed meds for depression, but I needed a “cocktail” of drugs that addressed all my difficulties, not just one.

Going on maintenance meds. The process of settling on that cocktail of meds took a long and difficult time, but once I had the right diagnosis and the right meds, I was able to cut back to seeing a psychiatrist four times a year to get renewals on my “maintenance” medications. The process that stabilized me also allowed me and my doctor to make “tweaks” to the dosages to correspond with increased or lessened symptoms.

A new revelation. My learning about my disorder didn’t stop with my new diagnosis. Recently I learned that my depression could be what is called “dysthymia,” a type of depression that is roughly equivalent to the difference between mania and hypomania in bipolar 2. I wasn’t sure this applied to me, as my depressive episodes seemed long enough and severe enough to be considered major depression, but after consulting my therapist and other reliable sources, I began to see how a dysthymia diagnosis actually did correspond to my symptoms.

Having hope. The most important thing that the right diagnosis gave me was hope. Properly understanding my disorder and the correct treatments for it allowed me to hope that I could achieve stability and healing from all the years when I didn’t realize I was suffering from hypomania as well as depression. I could at last look forward to a life where my disorder didn’t control me. With help from my psychiatrist and the medications he prescribed, I have been able to live a contented and productive life. Work, stable relationships, and the other benefits of having proper treatment are achievable – and I have largely achieved my goals in life.

And my new diagnosis has been responsible for it.

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