My Bipolar Odyssey

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I thought I’d start off by talking about my bipolar disorder because it’s something that’s affected every part of my life in myriad ways. If you don’t know much about it, throw away your misconceptions because I’m going to share.

There are four main types of Bipolar Disorder. Experimental chimp helped clarify some of them for me, so here’s what he had to share: 

Bipolar I – mania (often involving psychosis) and often depressions (sometimes severe).

Bipolar II – depression (sometimes severe) and hypomania (like mania but not as severe and without the psychosis).

Cyclothymia – mild depressions (dysthymia) and hypomania.

Bipolar NOS – (not otherwise specified) looks like bipolar disorder, but the person doesn’t actually fit the diagnostic criteria.

There is currently no diagnosis of Bipolar III. And there’s not likely to be as diagnostic trends are moving slowly towards regarding all mood disorders as a spectrum, rather than individual categories. Cyclothymia is sometimes called Bipolar III. Manic reactions to antidepressants are occasionally called Bipolar III or Bipolar IV, depending on whether the person doing the telling calls cyclothymia Bipolar III. Neither of these are official or widely recognised diagnoses, though.

I have Type 2.

I used to think the mental-health field was a load of crap. From a very young age I was misdiagnosed with Depression. They would try different meds on me with no effect until what I now know was my cycle changing. Then they would yell, “Eureka,” and think that they finally found one that worked. My highs have always been shorter than my lows, though, and it was never long before the world started closing in on me again. So when I moved out on my own, I gave up on them all because I hadn’t gotten anything from them up to this point.

When I met my now ex-wife, I was on the up side of my cycle. Part of being on the up side is being impulsive and not thinking things through. It’s no small wonder then that I got married after only knowing her for six weeks. But when I came down a year later, I was a whole different person. I went from being bubbly and full of life to being miserable, apathetic, and hopeless. She didn’t know how to relate to me anymore. She went to my parents for help, and together they encouraged me to go see a psychiatrist again.

This time, though, I met a psychiatrist that knew what he was doing. My doctor quickly diagnosed me with bipolar disorder and we started experimenting with drugs to fix things. He started me with antidepressants to quickly pull me out of my rut. Then we started on some drugs to treat the root cause. At this point, I began to really recognize what was going on. To me, being bipolar was normal so I never understood completely what was wrong until I started feeling what most of you would consider normal. We went through a few other drugs before coming up with a fantastic cocktail, and now almost a year later than when I started, I am finally in control of my own emotions.

And being out of control is the hardest part of being bipolar. It’s not like you can think a happy thought and turn things around. In fact, you stop reacting to any kind of emotional stimuli completely. No matter what happens, you always feel the same with little, if any, variance until your cycle shifts. Now I feel really alive–feeling both pleasure and pain and having it affect me–for the first time in my life.

Hypersexuality is one very common accompaniment to being bipolar, and it explains a lot about why I feel so sexually frustrated all the time, sometimes just minutes after having sex. It’s probably also why so many “deviant” sexual activities seem so exciting and even normal to me. I had never been affected by pain the same way I am today; now it excites me. But then again, it turns me on, too, now that I have a better understanding of how these things are supposed to feel. I can get off just as easily on inflicting pain, playing with power, or even just feeling a finger slip down my back. It’s incredible.

Being bipolar also caused me to withdraw for a significant part of my life. I never felt better or worse, so it didn’t matter what I did. The result was that I spent all of my time trying to escape from the world, and thus began my love for video games. At first, I confess to playing them for an unhealthy amount of time, but as I matured so did my game-playing habits. At this point in my life, I don’t play nearly as often as I would like because I often find myself busy, as I’m sure most of you do, but I’ve gained an appreciation for their power of escapism that I think few others have…and we all need to escape at some point in our lives. If you haven’t played in a while–or ever–you owe it to yourself to play.  Do it right now.  I’ll wait.
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Thanks for reading!