Salon.com > Bipolar Disorder

My bipolar partner beat me

Thu, 23 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Cary,

I've been a reader of yours for years and, frankly, I think the only voice I think would understand.

I'm a 32-year-old artist with a 9-year-old child from a previous marriage. I have been in a committed relationship with my current partner for four years. He's 31. In the beginning, he wooed me like no one had ever done. He offered my son and me a home (300 miles away from where I was living). We met on Twitter and both of us were in serious relationships before we decided to cut our ties with them and go for it. We moved into the apartment he shared with his brother and, at one time, his ex-girlfriend. Now he has a temper, and we clashed at first, because I was used to being the head of the house as a single mom, but we loved each other passionately. He is also an insanely jealous man, and I became more withdrawn to avoid any problems. All in all, we had a good life. I brought my own baggage and he had to deal with my depression.

We decided to open a business with a partner and invested everything into it, only to have the partner withdraw at the last minute and turn his back on us. We lost our apartment and our car. His brother had to move away and my parents stepped in to help with my son, moving him 300 miles away. We moved into the supply closet of our business.

I’m sleeping with my ex again — why?

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Dear Cary,

I am a 38-year-old woman having a hidden affair with my ex-husband of 10 years ago. To be completely honest, we're just having sex, no seduction involved. Old feelings are welling up for me, some good but mostly bad, all with a huge side order of guilt and shame. I don't think my ex has feelings for anyone except himself and our children. He's the most selfish person I know while extolling himself any chance he gets as a model of generosity. Yes, he's free with money and he's pleasant and jocular with strangers, acquaintances and friends, but he's stingy with his feelings. I'm realizing (again) that he doesn't seem to have any. He seems to exist on a completely superficial plane and when someone pisses him off he tells them how he feels and is done with them. He doesn't give anyone a chance to reply, just cuts them off. To him any discussion is an argument. He avoids confrontation unless he's the one instigating it. I should mention that he smokes pot daily, several times a day, and has since he was a teenager.

Why can’t Hollywood get bipolar disorder right?

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 19:20:00 +0000

I’m not sure what happened exactly in the last 10 years, but apparently I tapped into a popular trend when I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder back in 2003.

What I mean by that is, when I was first diagnosed, I’d never even really heard of bipolar as a mental illness before. I knew the Jimi Hendrix “Manic Depression” song. And I’d heard stories of how Francis Coppola was such a crazy genius back in the '70s, but how once he started taking Lithium, he lost his creative edge and ended up making movies like—well—Jack. Oh and of course, Nirvana had that “Lithium” song.

But other than that, I wasn’t super aware of bi-polar disorder in popular culture. Now hit TV shows like Homeland and Academy Award-nominated movies like The Silver Linings Playbook all feature bi-polar characters.

Bipolar disorder is very real for me. But it’s also completely manageable.

My life needs a purpose

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 01:00:00 +0000

Dear Cary,

Thank you for reading this letter.

I am 60 years old and I want a purpose. Being a mother has been my one real purpose. My adult children are secure and joyful and don't care for maternal meddling. I worked for pay for 12 years. It was a job not a career. I have been on disability for two years for problems related to being ADHD and bipolar -- mostly depression, although ADHD greatly impairs both my long- and short-term memories. I have found both homeopathy and Western medicine to be helpful.

I know most important for everyone -- and especially us aging boomers -- is social contact. My first obstacle is that I am an introvert. I scored 89 percent on the Meyers-Briggs. My apartment is in a building designated for recipients of Social Security and disability benefits. It is a nice, well-maintained building. My immediate neighbors are lovely. I rarely leave my apartment except to do laundry or grocery shop.

Going off meds to write my book

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 01:00:00 +0000

I’ve decided to go off my meds. If you knew me, you’d probably say I was crazy for even contemplating such a move — crazy as in: "Holy crap! She’s-off-her-meds" crazy. My friends think so, and so does most of my family. Because it took seven years to stabilize my last “episode” of bipolar disorder — the increasingly severe cycling that started when I hit 39 and my hormones began to fluctuate — a normal phenomenon for women that age but one my bipolar brain could not tolerate. But very little is known about the effects of hormones on bipolar disorder so what followed were seven horrific years of deep depressions and horrible irritable, anxiety-ridden manias (I never got the giddy, top-of-the-world kind you see in the movies).

My mom’s a chronic debtor

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 01:00:00 +0000

Hi Cary,

I write seeking advice as the newly pregnant daughter of a chronically indebted, bipolar (and most likely borderline), recovered-alcoholic mother. The most recent incident that spurred this letter occurred when I took the day off to attend to my mother during an outpatient surgery and she did not have the $10 necessary for her pain medication co-pay. This came on the heels of the holidays when I had told her the best Christmas present she could give me was the knowledge that she had ability to pay her bills in January. Instead, I got several department-store gifts that were presumably bought on a credit card.

I declined to pay the co-pay and received holy hell in the form of manipulation, anger, promises, anger, threats, etc. My brother later gave in, as we were worried about her pain.

My mother makes over $80,000 a year in the mental health field. From the bills lying around on her desk (I looked and invaded her privacy) it appears that she is now in debt again to the only folks that will issue her a card, department stores, and to several bill-me-later and payday-loan places. I am an artist, live paycheck to paycheck, and make a fraction of her income. I do live within my means, and recognize that I have a lot of anxiety around money due to my experiences with my mother. I am attempting to become more financially literate and not fulfill the starving-artist stereotype.

Jesse Jackson Jr. keeps name on election ballot

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 16:00:00 +0000

“Homeland’s” Carrie Mathison and Nicholas Brody: A deranged love story

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Showtime’s glorious thriller “Homeland” is full-body television: It sets pulses to racing, stomachs to churning, minds to strategizing. Its first season was a visceral 12-episode ascent to an apex of anxiety, the finale leaving its two star-crossed protagonists not so much hanging from a cliff, as smashed at the bottom of a canyon, a beat after their hold had given way. Marine Sgt. Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) had just failed to set off the bomb in his suicide vest and kill the vice president, while Carrie Mathison, the manic genius CIA agent, played with incandescent focus by Claire Danes, elected to have her short-term memory — and knowledge of Brody’s treachery — wiped out by electroconvulsive therapy.

Season 2, which premieres on Sunday night, picks up six months after the aforementioned events, the action having slowed — temporarily. A fragile, disgraced, medicated Carrie, officially bounced from the CIA, is languidly recuperating, avoiding the spycraft that is her calling. Brody, now a congressman, is being considered as a vice-presidential candidate, while secretly trying to aid the terrorist Abu Nazir without committing violence himself. Carrie is soon called to Beirut for one last job — and you know how those tend to go. The series' thriller engine turns on, turns over and begins to purr. By the end of the first episode, as Carrie gets her groove back, I was fist-pumping. By the end of the second episode, I was doing whatever fist-pumping with every single nerve ending in one’s body is called.

My bipolar awakening

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 20:59:00 +0000

When I left the hospital building that morning, I had a thought: I walked in there quirky; an hour later, I walked out officially crazy. My assessment of it – “crazy” – perhaps illustrates how I felt about it then. I thought I just have a peculiar personality; my psychiatrist said I’m bipolar. This wasn’t the first time that bipolar was suggested, but it was the first time I got this diagnosis while completely sober or not in the middle of a psychiatric crisis. Still, I struggled because of my skepticism about trigger-happy labeling and the social stigma surrounding mental illness. For example, when I went to get my new medication for the first time, I told the nice and completely uninterested pharmacist that I had epilepsy. The drug I was prescribed is an anti-convulsive, and I was clearly more comfortable with pretending to suffer from seizures than being seen as “crazy.” Besides, I was already admitting left, right and center that I was an alcoholic. I needed another label like I need an elephant.

Bipolar drugs suck

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Dear Cary,

I read with interest your recent advice to a woman struggling with CFS and with the people trying to "help" her. I also struggle with a chronic illness, bipolar disorder, and have heard from friends and strangers that I am "making it up" or "being dramatic." Sadly, I have had to let go of some relationships because while I know I have this illness, it was very tempting to listen to these friends and stop taking my medicine.

Ah ... my medicine. As you may or may not know, psychiatric drugs are the pits. A mixed blessing indeed. While they eliminate the hallucinations, reckless behavior and unbelievable rages, most of them include side effects such as rapid and significant weight gain, short-term memory loss, sedation and cognitive slowness. Contrasted with my formerly manic self -- full of energy and creativity, quick-thinking and charismatic -- being on these drugs is torture. It feels like I have willfully bundled myself in wool and climbed into a dark and stuffy closet. There are two parts of this distress: dealing with the side effects and saying goodbye to my "real self." Losing my "real self" was what upset my friends so much. They really didn't like the new me. The healthy me.