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My bipolar life and a Kanye rant [1]
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Date: 2022-10-12
Trigger warning: Depression and suicide — I’ll give additional warnings below also for anyone who wants to read and just skip those sections.
This isn’t what I wanted to be doing tonight. Not at all. But bipolar is back in the news for all the wrong reasons and I kind of feel like I have to. I called out the need for more people to tell their stories of mental illness the other day, so I feel like I should take my own advise contrast Kanye’s chaos with someone who got treatment and improved. I really try to ignore Kanye because I just don’t like him and I really don’t like the circus side show that he’s built around his life. Kanye has openly discussed being diagnosed as bipolar, being on meds and then going off them again. He said in 2018 that he was “learning how to not be on meds.” Kim Kardashian said that being medicated wasn’t an option because it changed who he was. I won’t question that he feels different on meds and is more creative when he’s having a manic episode. That sounds about right and I absolutely do not care. It’s irresponsible to do something on purpose that may result in other people being hurt, either physically or emotionally. If he doesn’t like how medication feels, then maybe he can do what the rest of us do and work with a doctor. If he really has to insist on being unmedicated, then he can always lock himself in his compound and stop pissing in the pool that the rest of us have to swim in.
Just to be clear, racism, anti-semitism, sexism, homophobia and any other bigotries have nothing whatsoever to do with bipolar. Nothing. A manic episode might lower a bigot’s filter so they spew out hatred that they would otherwise keep silent about, but that’s as far as it goes. Mania and poor judgement go hand in hand, but none of us get a free pass on doing stupid shit and hurting people during a bout of mania. Especially if we’re deliberately avoiding treatment and celebrating the mania when it comes. It doesn’t work like that. I’ve done plenty of things that I’m not proud of and I do my best to make amends and develop plans so it doesn’t happen again. It takes work and humility to get the help I need and take care of myself.
So now we have public discussions going on, again, about Kanye’s bipolar and how that factors in to his outlandish behavior. It certainly plays a role, but really it’s just causing him to open his cloak to show the world what an ugly person he is. That’s what people should be discussing. Why he decided that it was a good idea to expose his core being to the world is completely irrelevant.
What really enrages me about this (other than the bigotry) is that he and people like him have become the face of bipolar. There are certainly other celebrities who have gone public with bipolar and are properly treated, but it’s the ones with outrageous behavior who get the spotlight. I understand that circuses and car wrecks make money for the media, but there needs to be some responsibility. The shaming of bipolar people has to stop. I don’t think that shaming is their intention, but that’s how it feels to a lot of us who have to watch this time after time. It does real harm by discouraging people from revealing their illnesses to friends and family who might be able to offer support. It contributes to people going into denial about their diagnoses and refusing treatment. No one wants to be associated with a loud bigot who can’t keep his shit together.
Now about me living with bipolar before being diagnosed and how things are going after starting treatment. I have bipolar type 2, which just means that I have hypomania instead of full on manic episodes. Basically mania-lite. But that can still be plenty intense and the line between mania and hypomania can be fuzzy sometimes. The depressive episodes for type 1 and type 2 are the same as far as I know. Most of my episodes are also mixed, meaning that they have features of hypomania and depression at the same time. Sometimes this is literally simultaneous, like feeling super energetic along with a sense of crushing despair. Other times I just cycle between moods without much warning. I can be having a great time and then be horribly depressed moments later. The depression can last from hours to days when that happens. One thing to mention is that most people with bipolar aren’t having episodes non-stop. There are generally periods of normalcy between episodes and a lot of people will only have one or two a year or even less frequently. Others like myself have them much more frequently, but it still isn’t constant, although my pre-medication mixed episodes could last for a very long time and seemed to always have something going on even if it didn’t reach the clinical threshold for depression or hypomania.
Trigger warning 1 for the next paragraph
I’ve had problems with anxiety and depression for as long as I can remember. The first time I had thoughts of suicide was when I was around 5 years old and those recurred throughout my childhood. I was generally anxious all the time, but I tried to hide it and I have a sister with a more serious mental illness who was getting most of the focus at the time. I was comparatively easy going, so my own problems just got missed. I can’t blame my parents for that because the situation with my sister was really tough.
Fast forward to high school and I was still anxious all the time, but started having intense mood swings as well. That’s also when I started having incidents of missing time. I would find myself somewhere without knowing how I got there. It was never long distances, but I don’t know how long I was actually out. I was also sometimes mildly delusional and believed for a while that I was the only human in a world full of androids. Obviously some sort of cruel experiment to see how long it would take me to figure out. I suspect that my autism also factored into this because I already didn’t fit in and didn’t understand any of the rules of social interaction that people followed, so concluding that everyone else is a robot really isn’t that outlandish as far as delusions go. I had other delusions as well that I won’t list out (too embarrassing, even with a pseudonym). They didn’t last past my senior year in high school, so that’s good.
Trigger warning 2 for the next 2 paragraphs — graphic
On to college. This might have more detail than it should, but I feel like it’s important to give an account of what’s going through the mind of someone who gets to the point of suicide. My first major depressive episode happened when I was 19. I was probably a couple of weeks into a moderate depressive episode when my girlfriend broke up with me. It was a complete shock and sent me completely out of control. It would have been bad for me anyway, but the fact that I was already headed into depression made things far worse than they would have been otherwise. Things got worse and worse over the next few weeks. I was able to kind of function when I was out and distracted with work, but when I was home alone things got dark. If you haven’t had severe depression before, it can be physically painful. My heart felt like it was struggling to beat, my body was being crushed and I barely had energy to breathe at times. I did nothing other than staring at the wall and sleeping if I could. I didn’t eat every day either and was losing weight fast. I did get kind of hungry, but getting food into my mouth and chewing just seemed like too much work.
Sometime after the first month, I just couldn’t take it any more and started making plans. I didn’t actually realize that I was making plans initially, but my father used to teach suicide prevention classes (irony) and I knew the signs. So… I knew where things were headed and I made sure to not do the things that would tip anyone off. It might sound strange that I wasn’t quite to the point that I was going to kill myself, but knew I would be soon and facilitated that instead of getting help to stop it. When depression gets to that point, it’s no longer just sadness. Confusion sets in and thought processes are not rational. I wanted to keep my options open and if someone got help for me, not existing would no longer be an option. I was afraid that I would be forced to live in torment — I didn’t believe that anyone could make it go away. I didn’t have any specific date in mind, but one night when I was feeling especially bad, I just walked into my room and taped a plastic bag around my head. In my mind, that would be a relatively painless way to go, but once the oxygen ran out panic set in and I tore the bag off. Suffocation is actually not that easy to go through. The next night I decided that bathtub electrocution was the way to go. I was trying to figure out if the circuit breaker would trip before I died (I didn’t want to fail a second time) when I realized that someone in my family would find my body and I felt like I couldn’t do that to them. For at least that night. Just to demonstrate my state of mind, my first reaction after realizing that they would find me was to keep my clothes on in the bath to avoid the indignity of them seeing my naked body. Not at all rational. After another week of resisting another attempt every night, I think a friend figured out that something was up and convinced me to see the on call psychiatrist at the hospital. I got on antidepressants and started improving over the next month. I’m glad now that I’m not actually good at suicide and I’m glad that we didn’t have any guns because that would have been my first choice instead of the bag. The descriptions above might sound a little nonchalant, but there was a lot of anguish and sobbing mixed in. During my first attempt, I didn’t even feel like I was in control of my body. I felt like I wanted to stop existing and my body did what it needed to do to make that happen. I was just along for the ride and didn’t try to get off.
Coming back a few hours after writing the first draft. I’ve never recounted this before to anyone and even 30 years later I feel like I’ve given myself a gut punch. I’m still not sure I should be posting this section in detail, but maybe it will help someone understand what it’s really like.
End of trigger
I continued to have mostly mixed episodes through college and had my first extended hypomanic episode in my mid 20s (I think it may have qualified as full mania, but I’m not sure). For about two years, I only slept about three hours a night and worked on a side project while my family slept (I’m a software engineer). This wasn’t quite constant for those two years, but off and on for weeks at a time with occasional hard crashes in between. It felt great. I had energy, great ideas and intense focus. I was unbelievably productive and creative. I sometimes look at the stuff I did back then and am still astonished at some of the ideas I had. That’s also the only time that mania or hypomania has felt good. Every other time has felt awful. Hypomania has a lot of adrenaline all the time. I feel like I’m going to jump out of my skin constantly and can’t sleep. Sometimes I can be really productive, but often my thoughts race and I can’t focus on anything at all. I’ve been told that I’m wild-eyed and edgy during those times and I believe it. I also did things that were just mortifying afterward — breaking stuff in the house out of frustration, considering seeking out an affair (I didn’t), saying hurtful things that I didn’t intend to say, and just being a general asshole. Coming out of hypomania after I’ve used poor judgement isn’t pleasant.
Sometime around 30 I started having periods of derealization as well. I sometimes felt like limbs were in the wrong positions or that I had extra limbs. Occasionally I would feel that I had multiple bodies offset from each other. I could also have the sensation of floating out of my body and spreading out across a room. These episodes would usually only last a few minutes, but were really off-putting. I didn’t get overly concerned though. I just figured that my brain had found another way to do weird stuff and it always went away again. I also never mentioned it to a doctor because I was a little embarrassed by it. In retrospect, I probably would have been diagnosed sooner if I had. I was seeing a psychiatrist by this time because I was really putting stress on my marriage and my wife insisted that I had to see someone if we were going to stay married. I went through the carousel of diagnoses for probably 10 years before a new psychiatrist got it right. I tried pills for ADHD, anxiety, depression, sleeping aids. Pretty much everything was tried and none of it helped all that much long term (mostly they made things worse). So I started on a mood stabilizer as a test because the doctor wasn’t completely confident in the diagnosis. It worked and I felt improvements within a few days.
When it started working, the entire world became less intense and I wasn’t constantly living on the edge of sensory overload. It was as if I had spent most of my life with someone banging a gong behind me and I finally knew what quiet was like when it stopped. My chronic insomnia also stopped and I was able to sleep consistently for the first time in years. I still have episodes, but they are nowhere near as intense or frequent as my pre-medication episodes, which is exactly what the medication is supposed to do. The derealization and other weird-ass stuff is also gone. Despite the clear benefits of the medication, I had a lot of difficulty accepting that I was bipolar initially. A lot. I was actually hoping that the medication wouldn’t work because that would mean I wasn’t bipolar. This is a pretty common reaction. If you spend a little time on Reddit, you can find plenty of stories of people starting medication and then stopping because it actually works. They don’t want the symptoms to come back, but the stigma is frightening. For me, there’s a clear line in my life separating uncontrolled bipolar from stabilized bipolar. It literally saved my marriage and improved everything about me. There’s no way I would ever go back.
[END]
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