The Symptoms of Bipolar Disorder and How to Deal With Them
It arrives as the diagnosis nobody wants to hear: Bipolar Disorder. Officially it's described as uncommon, yet a strange thing happens in practice, where more than half the patients walking through a psychiatric office seem to leave with that same word written on their chart. Is there an actual epidemic of it? Or has psychiatry simply gotten so stretched thin that a rushed appointment ends with a quick label pressed onto a person and little else? What follows is a look at the main symptoms, what they might actually be telling you, and the practical ways people have found to live with them.
The condition gets described as lifelong, the kind of thing that means medication from now until the end. But is that the whole story? There are accounts, rare and scattered though they are, of people who figured out how to handle their own symptoms and eventually stepped away from the pills they were told they'd never stop taking. The reason given is almost always identical: they couldn't tolerate the side effects. So did those people genuinely heal? Or were they misdiagnosed to begin with? With no blood test that can measure a so-called chemical imbalance, how would anyone prove it either way?
Yes, it is possible to manage Bipolar Disorder without relying on medicine. Stay close to your doctor while you try, though, because medication does have its place in treatment. The thing the handful of people who claim to have moved past the diagnosis share is not luck. Every one of them threw themselves into self-development and personal growth, the kind of commitment that the person who simply swallows a pill each morning and waits never bothered with.
Mania is where most descriptions start, and its signature symptom is racing thoughts. Picture a flight of ideas moving so fast it feels completely beyond your control. If you genuinely cannot steer your own thinking, medication is reasonable. Plenty of people hated the feeling of being slowed down, and that dulling was one of the exact side effects that drove them away from antipsychotics and mood stabilizers. Yet slowing you down is the entire point of those drugs prescribed for manic depression, which is the older name for Bipolar. Racing thoughts can also be the mark of a mind that simply runs hot. The medications quiet it by suppressing dopamine, which over the long run can mean a shrinking brain. Consider that seizure disorders also come from an overactive brain, and the medicines handed out for them are the same anticonvulsants sold as mood stabilizers. A fast mind is often a sign of intelligence, and anyone who has spent time around people labeled mentally ill knows how sharp they tend to be. Does being smart mean you need a pill? Does it make you crazy? To the average person who can't follow a word you say, yes, you'll look crazy, mostly because their own mind can't keep pace.
Racing thoughts can be reined in through mindful meditation. Sit still for twenty minutes and let the mind empty out. Some people put on meditation music or listen to a spiritual teacher whose voice settles them. Smooth jazz does the job for others. Journaling helps too, assuming you can write as fast as your head is spinning. With practice the thoughts begin to slow once the habit of getting them onto paper takes hold. What you really need is a channel for all that surplus energy. And if you're pouring down caffeine, that cup might be the quiet engine behind what you're calling madness.
Pressured speech is another familiar sign, and it tends to travel with racing thoughts, though not always. It can show up in severe anxiety, or as a speech impediment of the sort common in people with Asperger's Syndrome. A speech therapist can help, or you can save the money, pick up a voice recorder, and coach yourself on enunciating clearly. Given time it stops being a chore and becomes automatic, and your speech evens out as you grow.
The rest of the manic list runs toward impulse: sexual promiscuity, spending sprees, that sort of thing. Do people in a manic depressive state really get that reckless? Look at dopamine and how it ties to serotonin. Serotonin is the feel-good chemical; dopamine is the pleasure one. When serotonin drops we slide into depression and anxiety, which pushes us toward whatever brings relief, whether that's sex or a shopping binge. That reads a lot like self-medication, doesn't it? Notice, meanwhile, that SSRIs for depression are rarely prescribed to Bipolar patients. The reason is that as serotonin climbs, dopamine keeps climbing too. As we ease up, we chase the things that make us happier because there's now energy to burn. So a mood stabilizer gets added to counterbalance the antidepressant that handed us too much fuel in the first place.
Keep in mind that the manic phase is, at bottom, too much energy. Much of the time it reduces to a shortage of self-control. Mental illness is largely about struggling to manage emotion. The people who carry these labels tend to feel more, think faster, and run with a surplus of emotion. Until that gets managed through real personal work, the mood swings run the person instead.
A patient should never taper off medication without a doctor watching over it. Even so, other kinds of therapy are needed to become more whole. There's an Anonymous group for nearly everything now, Emotions Anonymous among them. Committing to growth takes being genuinely sick of the struggle, wanting change badly enough to pay any price for it, and being willing to actually get to know yourself. Study bipolar closely and a lot of it starts to resemble severe anxiety, though severe enough anxiety will get treated with the same bipolar antipsychotics anyway. Learn to govern your own mind and spot your triggers, and a fuller life becomes possible.
Erwin Wooten