bipolarliving

This is my second day off work this week. I’ve been sick with body-aches and a crushing headache, but this comes on the tailcoats of feeling burned out for a few weeks now. I’ve been working six days a week for almost a year, and suddenly I’d just had it. I’ve started almost to feel the way I did when I was a young girl at school. Back in those days, in my teenage years, I would get so anxious about going to school and want to stay home, and pretty soon, sure enough, I’d be sick. Eventually I left high school, twice, due to depression and anxiety, and graduated a year late. I do think I’m really, physically, sick right now, but it is also coincidental that I’ve been feeling so stressed at work, so burned-out, and now I have to take 2 days off. The work I do is so demanding and so stressful, especially considering the number of clients I have who are extremely personality-disordered, always a challenge for any clinician. I’m seeing my therapist tonight and I think it’s a good thing because I really need to talk about this. I know from my own past that avoidant behavior only leads to more avoidance, and this can only go on so long before you don’t have any life at all. You’re just hiding at home. Which is worse for your mental health than any amount of stress, in my opinion. My last psychiatrist said he often recommended to his patients on SSI that they go back to work, for the very sake of their mental health. I know in some cases people are just too sick to work, or to have any sort of full life in the world, but for those of us who can, avoidance can lead us down a terribly dangerous path. So the gist of my thinking is, since I am starting to feel better today, I need to go back to work tomorrow. I’m due to go to a conference, which should be a good way to ease back in.  And Saturday I’m back at my second job, seeing patients at the clinic all day. Sigh. But what I have to remember is how much better this is than when I stayed home and had no life. Too much life is far preferable to none.   I’m glad I’m seeing my therapist tonight, and that I’m writing this down and seeing it in print, to emphasize it to myself.

A former supervisor of mine always used to say, “It’s a short walk from one side of the desk to the other.” As a practicing mental health clinician who is also diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I can attest to the truth of this. 

My illness is greatly controlled on medication and I am supremely fortunate that meds work so well for me, but I still contend with daily mood swings. As one of our Peer Specialists recently said, “Just because I started working here doesn’t mean my depression got up and flew away.” Amen. On the one hand, I can say my moods hamper me because they make it more difficult for me to get up every day and go to work (although I’m quite good at doing so over the long haul, having been a psychotherapist for fourteen years). I have a daily cycle of moods that falls into a fairly predictable pattern: in the morning (contrary to the classic pattern of depression) I feel happy and almost excited. This lasts most of the morning, until about noon, when anxiety takes hold. In the afternoon this lapses into depression, which peaks at about three p.m. and then starts to die off. In the evenings I feel happy again. It’s an exhausting daily cycle that I’ve learned to live with. My job involves a lot of travel and during the afternoons as I drive around the county the depression tends to take hold and the world looks gray and drab to me, my own prospects dim, and nothing in my life seems right. Mornings are just the opposite: the world is beautiful, I’m extremely grateful for my good fortune, and the future seems full of possibility. This cycle takes its toll on me although I don’t think it interferes with the way I do my job. But on the other hand, I think my own experiences—the acute suffering I’ve experienced in the past, and the milder discomfort I continue to endure—makes me more sensitive to the pain of my clients, more able to understand them, and also to encourage them to realize that a full life is possible even if you’re stuck with this lousy illness. 

It is this possibility of providing an example to people suffering from a psychiatric illness, as someone who has struggled and continues to struggle, yet nevertheless leads a rewarding life, that has caused me to recently “come out” to my employer as being bipolar. I was in turn inspired by the fairly recent Peer Specialist movement, in which people suffering from mental illness, who have progressed in their own recovery, undergo training to provide peer support to psychiatric patients. As someone who has been in the field for a long time, yet was always closeted, per my training, about my own illness, I found myself being jealous of the peer specialists’ freedom to let clients know the extent to which they understand the client’s plights. With the blessings of my supervisor, I have talked to certain clients about my own illness, with mainly good results, although I have one client who seems to feel tremendous shame about her own psychiatric diagnosis and has apparently decided I must be as weak and defective as she perceives herself. Still, most of the time my clients have seemed to be encouraged by the knowledge that they are truly understood by their therapist, beyond the knowledge that merely book learning and vicarious experience could confer.

I’m hoping that by starting this blog, I can initiate contact with other therapists, people with psychiatric diagnoses (not just bipolar), and peer specialists as well as people who are interested in mental health issues and the recovery movement. I most especially want to reach the patients themselves, however. If my own battles can allow me to help others, it helps to make them seem worthwhile.