In other cultures, narratives of mental illness sometimes focus on spiritual matters (“he is being haunted by ghosts!”) or family relations rather than biochemistry. Our Western narrative might be scientifically accurate, but it is not necessarily the most useful or compassionate way of imagining mental illness. If “haunted by ghosts” feels more meaningful and accurate to you than “haunted by misbehaving neurotransmitters,” then please, tell your own story!
Otherwise, it's you against the mothership. Lock and load, lock and load. . . .
PROGNOSTICATING (E.G., “AM I SCREWED FOR LIFE?”)
I get a Google news feed about bipolar disorder: any news article with the word “bipolar” gets sent to my inbox. Every day I get several police reports about missing persons who are “diagnosed with bipolar disorder and thought to be off their meds,” as well as a rash of news pieces about murders and suicides involving people with bipolar disorder. Now look me in the eye. Do you have bipolar? Yes? Are you, personally, going to become a missing person or a murderer? Probably not. There are things in life you can control and things you can't, but if you get your act together as much as possible, given your personal circumstances, and do it early, then your chances of having a wonderful, happy, interesting, completely Google-news-feed-unworthy life are great.
While everyone's prognosis is different, it generally boils down to this: if you have bipolar disorder, your life is going to include some periods of crushing depression, some periods of whacked-out mania or hypomania, a whole lot of meds, perhaps a psychotic episode here and there, and maybe a hospitalization or two (or ten). You can experience all those things and still have a fun, meaningful, productive life.
Look at it this way: you're building a cabin in the woods, but a hurricane comes through and when it's over all you have is a few measly planks of wood, a saw, and some nails. Do you set the wood on fire, step on the nails, saw off your legs and cry about it, or do you chop yourself some new wood, build yourself a cabin, and have a great life? Everything is up to you. You have exactly the same power over your destiny as you did before you had bipolar—now you're just working with a different set of materials.
All you have are the fabulous resources of your own mind to realize your potential. Bipolar or not, you still have choices to make, and you're the only one who's going to be making them.
EIGHT WAYS TO PROVE YOU'RE NOT BIPOLAR
1 Keep a straight face and neutral affect at all times. This will demonstrate how completely stable your mood is.
2 Whenever you hear something about bipolar disorder on the news, laugh loudly and say, “Ho, ho, ho, I'm so perfectly twitterpated to not be affected by such a foreign and fearsome affliction as that!”
3 Paint rabbit faces on your meds so they look like recreational drugs. Wear furry clothing and plastic beads so people think you're a raver.
4 When you get hospitalized, tell everyone you know you're an “investigative journalist” doing an exposé of what it's “really like” to be hospitalized.
5 Hire a look-alike to impersonate you at social events when you're too depressed to go out.
6 Surround yourself with people who are more extreme than you (drama students, nonrecovering addicts, circus people). In contrast, you will look totally un-bipolar.
7 Start a fake blog about your completely normal, nonbipolar life. Include entries such as, “Fun day at the mall!” and “New kitty is cute!”
8 Get a high-powered career that could never be held by a person with a mental illness. That will show them!
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MANIA, DEPRESSION, PSYCHOSIS, OH MY!
A WHIRLWIND TOUR THROUGH THE EPISODES OF BIPOLAR DISORDER
Sometimes, crazy people have crazy emotions. A lot of the time, crazy people have completely normal emotions. This section discusses the technical definitions of mania, depression, psychosis, rapid cycling, and mixed states, and also discusses what they aren't. After all, it's crazy to attribute all your emotions to having bipolar.
I'M NOT MANIC, I'M JUST HYPHY
Before we get into all this bipolar stuff, let's talk about hyphy. Hyphy is a Bay Area hip-hop style characterized by people dancing or acting in a hyperactive, ridiculous manner. You put on your stunna shades, get blasted, and “go stupid.” One particularly prestigious way of “going stupid” is to put your car in neutral and dance on the hood while it rolls forward without a driver; this is called ghost-riding the whip. E-40 and Mistah F.A.B. wrote entire songs about ghostin'.
Now, when you think about it, all this going stupid sounds a lot like a manic episode: substance abuse, hyperactive speech and dancing, risky and grandiose activity—feelin' like a star. Yet thousands of otherwise sane, asymptomatic ballers get hyphy every day, and nobody accuses them of having bipolar disorder. What's the difference between being manic and plain old gettin' hyphy?
MISTAH F.A.B.'S GUIDE TO THE DSM-IV
As you can see, there's a broad behavioral spectrum to ghost-riding the whip, and in this case, I've categorized behaviors as “manic” or “depressed” based on how far they deviate from the hypothetical Mistah F.A.B.'s normal hyphy or unhyphy mood states. In the following section, I'm going to be discussing the criteria physicians use to identify the different aspects of bipolar disorder as outlined in the DSM-IV, that big fat book published by the American Psychiatric Association that contains the diagnostic criteria for all the psychiatric disorders our society currently believes in. Like the songs in a jukebox, the stock of “mental disorders” in the DSM changes all the time—up until 1973, homosexuality was listed as a mental disorder (message to APA pre-1973: y'all must have been tripping hard). It hardly needs saying that the DSM-IV is not a perfect guide to mental illness, and that some of the “illnesses” that have been described there in the past are no longer considered illnesses at all. Unlike pregnancy, you can't pee on a stick to find out if you have bipolar disorder. Definitions evolve over time, and in a hundred years, the category “bipolar disorder” might be as antiquated as the category “hysteria” is today. The purpose of the following section is to discuss the common symptoms of mania, hypomania, and depression and what they can feel like—and also to help you resist the urge to dump every experience in your life into one of those categories.
NORMAL HAPPINESS AND NORMAL ENERGY—HUZZAH!
When you've just been diagnosed with a major disorder like bipolar, you might have the urge to reinterpret everything in terms of either mania/hypomania or depression. But honestly, not every moment in your life is depressed or manic: much of the time, you're just plain old you. Normal happiness and energy are just that—normal. You don't need to pathologize your enthusiasm for flying kites or attribute your last romantic success to hypomania. You're probably a charming, loveable, energetic person in “real life”—good for you! You can be ambitious, adventurous, and fun loving outside of mania. The key difference between a “normal” state and a manic or hypomanic state is whether or not your perceptions of reality and your own abilities