Bipolar awarness

Today, March 30th, I just became aware at 11:16 pm. as the day is ending, is bipolar awarness day.

Trigger Warning, Content Warning, themes of mental illness like bipolar and scizoaffective disorders and their symptoms, traumas like abuse, malnutrition, addiction, self harm, and suicide are mentioned briefly.

Please do not take anything in this article as a substitution for proper, individualized, and/or professional diagnosis or treatment for any illnesses or disorders.

Please reach out to a trusted person in your support system, your regular health professional, or a hotline like the national suicide hotline, 3 digit number  988 or the crisis text line by texting HOME to 741741.

If in iminent unshakable danger, like inability to separate yourself from means of dying by suicide, call 911 or your local emergency services.

I shared my bipolar diagnosis in an early YouTube video a few years back on the fight4mylife.net YouTube channel because I wanted people to see that while the condition is stigmatized, there is nothing to be ashamed of with having it. (I’ll be the first to admit that everything about the video is cringey right down to the thumbnail).

In honor of today, I’m gonna share a little story about my bipolar diagnosis, how I came to terms with it, and how I manage it now that it has progressed to scizoaffective disorder (a disorder where you have symptoms of both bipolar and schizophrenia but not quite either disorder by themselves)

According to the Mayo Clinic,

“Schizoaffective disorder is a mental health disorder that is marked by a combination of schizophrenia symptoms, such as hallucinations or delusions, and mood disorder symptoms, such as depression or mania.”

(https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/schizoaffective-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20354504)

“The two types of schizoaffective disorder — both of which include some symptoms of schizophrenia — are:

Bipolar type, which includes episodes of mania and sometimes major depression

Depressive type, which includes only major depressive episodes”

(https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/schizoaffective-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20354504)

What does that mean for me?

For me personally, I have the Bipolar type of Scizoaffective disorder which means that if I don’t take my meds properly (or at all) I get hallucinations in auditory, visual, and or tactile forms. Auditory involve me hearing a voice telling me to harm myself only, visual include Scary images of attackers or demonic figures or even worst, bugs all over, tactile hallucinations include me feeling bugs on me and crawling in me.

Also if I don’t take my medicine I can’t sleep at night, and that works me into a hypomanic to manic episode which consists of me not needing sleep for several days, but still having energy. This seems like it would be fun, and there is euphoria for a bit of the time with me feeling on top of the world, but being in that state comes with several negative outcomes as well.

In that state, I am more likely to experience grandiose thinking that I am destined to do all kinds of spectacular things, plus my risky behaviors increase like drinking and unsafe dating practices. Then, non manic me has to deal with the consequences.

That used to be my existence all the time before I got diagnosed and put on the right medicines (the effective combination of which changes at times). I would consistently experience these episodes for weeks at a time sometimes. But I did have fewer hallucinations at one time.

How I got diagnosed:

The story of how I got diagnosed is pretty interesting because I have been in therapy since I was 14 and had been diagnosed with major depressive disorder (severely depressed but not for as long as dysthymia), then dysthymia (where you are depressed for longer periods of time but it’s not as severe).

No one had ever diagnosed me with bipolar disorder, though until I was trying to get on disability after my break down in 2015 (that’s a whole other story for a different day) and I had to meet with the court’s psychologist to determine if I was able to work or not (that was a whole battle in itself and again is a story for another time).

It stuck out to me because I would have thought that of all the people who would have recognized it, it wouldn’t have been someone whose job it was to prove that I was fine to work (note I am not suggesting that people with bipolar can’t work, far from it. Just for me personally, with all the stuff I have going on in combination with each other, working a meaningful job is not in the cards (though hopefully not forever). I have been going to college to keep myself sharp for when I can work, though.

The diagnosis was not added to my health history at that time, but a later therapist I had saw the same traits and behaviors that doctor saw and made the diagnosis official until just in 2023 when it shifted to scizoaffective disorder.

Coming to terms with the diagnosis:

Accepting this diagnosis wasn’t easy. Mental illness runs on both sides of my birth family, and when paired with the traumas I’ve experienced, that leaves open a way for these types of disorders to activate. I learned in college that while it’s not often clear how one gets most mental illnesses, it is generally thought to be a mix of genetic factors combined with environmental factors.

Not environmental in the sense of wilderness, but in the sense of the environment a human being lives in throughout their lives. I foe example was abused for most of my life in one way or another, I was often malnourished, the family I grew up in was dysfunctional and didn’t believe in mental health despite having mental health issues, and I started drinking before my brain was fully developed when addiction also runs in my family.

I was also placed in foster care then my adoptive family separated not too long before my mrntal breakdown started and I was thrown into adulthood without much preparation or idea how to manage college and work full time plus relationship struggles with my birth and adoptive parents.

All of those are environmental issues that most likely, combined with my genetic risk factors to trigger my mental illnesses like my bipolar which became schizoaffective disorder.

All that being said, I did develop shame regarding my mental health at first. I didn’t want to end up like my birth parents who were sick but wouldn’t get help for it, I also saw how people with disorders like bipolar are treated by society.

Terms like “crazy” and “psycho” get thrown around as insults towards people struggling with their mental health, and it makes things like dating a nightmare because it’s hard to decide when to share and how much to share with the person you’re dating or trying to date. It also makes getting hired harder because, for me, at least, I never know if I should disclose things like why I have such a long gap in my employment or how I left my last job.

Overcoming the shame:

After a great deal of counsil from several different therapists, heart to heart talks with the people in my support system, and some self reflection, I started to realize that I shouldn’t let the diagnosis take over my life. As I see it now, I had the disorder long before I got diagnosed, so the only thing that changed is that now I have a treatment plan for it, and it’s so well managed now that I rarely see any symptoms pop up and when they do, they are less severe.

How I deal with things now:

The way I handle the disorder now is with coping mechanisms. This includes creating a safety plan with information about what a crisis for me looks like, what steps I can take in a crisis, and emergency contacts, including my therapist, psychiatrist, and primary doctors. 

While the safety plan is good for any time, most coping mechanisms mainly work the best for depressive symptoms of the disorder. In a depressive episode, I get severely depressed and get my most suicidal (though that hasn’t happened for a long time). I can’t stop crying, and it’s nearly impossible to get up and out of bed. I also sometimes get physical manifestations like nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea (sorry, TMI!).

After treating physical symptoms, I have to rely on my coping skills, like writing loved ones’ names on my arm to avoid self-harm, distraction with comedy until I can get in to see my therapist, calls and visits with people in my support system, snuggles from my new puppies, listening to sad or rock/metal music. surprisingly, it makes me happier in these moments than listening to anything else would.

I have also started adding things like gratitude journals, regular journaling, meditation, and if I am able to get myself out of bed, I go out doors in nature to soak up the vitamin D and all of the natural beauty of my area.

For this specific disorder, I have to rely on things other than coping mechanisms to care for myself when crisis does strike as many times when I am in a manic episode I feel so euphoric and productive that I can’t see the reality of the situation is that im just doing a bunch of stuff very poorly. or when I am hallucinating, everything feels so real that I can’t tell what is or isn’t real.

That is when I lean into my support system to help me until I come out of an episode and get myself care back on the right track. Speaking of self care, It is not 1:20 am where I am, no longer bipolar awareness day, and I need sleep, so that was all of my story, I hope it helped you in some way whether you are personally struggling with any of these disorders, or whether you are jus trying to understand people with these disorders.