I had to preface this post with one of the most hideous and hilarious of google images' finest for your entertainment. Wow, so that's what shows up when you image-search 'bipolar disorder'. So that's what we look like, the heinous bipolar tribe; happy and glowing with smiles that light up the room, and on the flip-side, miserable, po-faced harridans of the lowest order. Hotness!
Bipolar disorder is quite the trendy illness of the mental variety right now. The media likes to make us aware that the bipolar gremlins amongst us are actually friendly, overachieving success stories that you'd like to have at your dinner party. I'm looking at you, Stephen Fry. And actually, this is no bad thing, it certainly beats the outrageous stigma surrounding less tasteful conditions such as schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder.
I've suffered with depressive episodes and periods of outrageous judgement and recklessness throughout my life. Most people could attest to the same: making bad decisions and feeling totally fed-up are nothing new in life. But its when it encroaches on your ability to make it through the week, and at worst the day, or you are living in a total dream land where the repercussions of your actions are as meaningless as the proverbial water off the duck's back, that something more could be going on.
When I was a teenager I hated everyone and everything, most of all myself, much like most other teenagers. The problems arose when the erratic behaviour began, like truanting, but not with friends having a laugh. Instead I was hiding my stuff in the park and instead of walking to catch the bus, I was stripping off naked out of my school uniform in the woods and then putting my own clothes on and hanging out there on my own all day. I was developing an eating disorder that saw me lose a massive amount of weight in just several weeks, that found me going for naps after school so I didn't have to pay attention to the screaming hunger pangs in my stomach. I was involved in a relationship with an older boy who thought, for the whole year we went out, that I was a year older than I was, and that I had sat my GCSE's just a couple of months after we started going out, when in fact I would be sitting them the following year (he never did find out the truth). I found myself, one day after school, throwing myself down the stairs, twice, in a bid to injure myself. On a similar occasion, I numbed my ankle with a bag of frozen peas and then attempted to break my leg by furiously bashing my sister's metal keyboard stand against myself. I didn't, by the way, succeed, as it turns out I have pretty strong bones. Shit like that needs attention. But for one reason or another it didn't receive it. And I developed the life-long and hugely successful habit of masking my true feelings and turmoil from the wider world.
The problem, as it turns out, with having such a useful skill in your arsenal is that people don't realise you're in grave need of help. Usually until its too late. The endless cycle of highs and lows, of crazed, relentless cravings for 'excitement', 'escapism' and 'partying', or of wishing I was dead so I didn't have to talk to anyone that day, went on for the next ten years, when, aged 25 I found I had run out of coping strategies. After being dismissed by my local GP and sent on my way with a prescription for fluoxitine (or Prozac, kids), I ended up, perhaps unsurprisingly, taking an overdose one drunken night, alone in my room in my latest student house share. I popped everything I had. Luckily for me, a slurred phone call led to a kindly woman from the Samaritans urging me to call for an ambulance. I ended up hanging up on her in a pissed up fug of booze and pills, but I did call that ambulance. I'd love to let her know she saved my life.
Plenty more went on between that time and today, including more overdoses and a diagnoses of borderline personality disorder. This is not a great thing to have folks, mainly because of the stigma and a general misunderstanding of the condition. Jeez, my own sister asked if that meant I had "multiple personalities". It didn't, of course, but this veiled what was probably going on the whole time in the background - bipolar affective disorder. I got this diagnosis after moving to a new area, suffering yet another serious bout of depression and demanding to be reassessed by a psychiatrist. Suddenly I had a name and a set of symptoms that matched my experience over the last 30 years of my life. And for the first time in my life, it all made a bit more sense.
No comments:
Post a Comment