What it’s like to be bipolar?

What it’s like to be bipolar?

by Denny Friedman 

(Prietenii stiu de ce.)

Manic 

There is a kind of pain, elation, loneliness, worthlessness and terror involved in this kind of "madness". When you're high everything is tremendous, it’s fantastic, it’s bright, colourful, fast and exciting. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you persist in finding better and brighter ones. All your shyness goes, you find all the right words and you feel handsome, intelligent and have the most exhilarating empowerment to captivate others around you. You find interests in uninteresting people. Your sensuality and sex drive is heightened and your desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, being financially unrestricted, and euphoria pervade your inner soul. But, somewhere along the lines this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many of them all at once; they're overwhelming and confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humour and absorption on friends' faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything that previously was going your way is now against you, the tide has turned. You are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and imprisoned totally in the blackest caves of the mind.

Depression

If I can't feel, if I can't move, if I can't think, and I can't care, then what conceivable point is there in living?

That’s how I feel at the deepest, darkest, dismal pit of depression that haunts me every few weeks or months depending on my mood cycle.

Manic-depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviours, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live. It is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet one that presents itself psychologically in the experience of it, an illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure, yet one that brings in its wake almost unendurable suffering and, not infrequently, suicide.

When people are suicidal their thinking is paralyzed, their options appear non-existent, their mood is despairing, and hopelessness permeates their entire mental domain. The future cannot be separated from the present, and the present is painful beyond solace. No one illness or event causes suicide or suicidal thoughts; idealisations or dreams and certainly no one knows all, or perhaps even most, of the motivations behind the need to end one’s life. Love, success, money, hobbies, family and friendship are not always enough to counter the pain and destructiveness of a severe mental illness or troubled mind.

Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone or simply feel down about their life in general because they are too busy. But these experiences carry with them feelings that are bearable. Acute depression instead, is flat, hollow, unendurable and extremely tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you are irritable and paranoid and humourless and lifeless and critical and demanding and no reassurance is ever enough. You're frightened, and you're frightening, and you're self-absorbed and you feel dead from the outside in.

No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one's dark moods. Being loved and knowing your family need you means the world, it can make the pain more tolerable, but as always, one is beholden to medication that may or may not always work,may or may not be tolerable and may have so many side effects that they hardly seem worth taking.
In its severe forms, depression paralyzes all of the otherwise vital forces that make us human, leaving instead a bleak, despairing, desperate, and deadened state. . .Life is bloodless, pulseless, and yet present enough to allow a suffocating horror and pain. All bearings are lost; all things are dark and drained of feeling. The slippage into futility is first gradual, then utter. Thought, which is as pervasively affected by depression as mood, is morbid, confused, stuporous and overtly melancholic. The body becomes extremely weary; there is no will; nothing is that is not an effort, and nothing at all seems worth it. Sleep is fragmented, elusive, or all-consuming. Like an unstable, gas, an irritable exhaustion seeps into every crevice of thought and action

The horror of profound depression, and the hopelessness that usually accompanies it, are hard to imagine for those who have not experienced them. Because the despair is private, it is resistant to clear and compelling description.

What I have begun to discover is that, mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from normal experience, the grey drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain. But it is not an immediately identifiable pain, like that of a broken arm. It may be more accurate to say that despair, owing to some evil trick played upon the sick brain by the inhabiting psyche, comes to resemble the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercely overheated room. And because no breeze stirs this cauldron, because there is no escape from this smothering confinement, it is entirely natural that the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion.