Very good advice at this time of year

Hurtful Responses

My love is still struggling this week.  It has been rare in recent memory for the rage to last for many days.   She is now in the fifth day.  In the depressive state, it is not uncommon for the patient to feel abandoned, alone in the struggle and upset with her plight.  To make matters worse, the patient will withdraw into her room and into herself exacerbating the problem and prolonging the quote unquote down period.

This has been one of the worst in a while.  The patient will further extend the suffering by cancelling appointment for health and beauty.  The patient will struggle to connect and do the simple things to climb out of the abyss.   There is no way inside so there is no helping the patient.

Though a tremendous effort by my son, the patient was nursed back to even and enjoyed a wonderful day purchasing an outfit for a company function, enjoying a wonderful supper, a movie and the wonders of a hot tub.  This was supposed to be the beginning of the up period.  We thought we had weathered the storm.   

The next day, the patient was to receive new dentures.  This was to restore her smile, rebuild the fullness in her lips and allow her to eat corn and steak once more but alas the teeth are tight and uncomfortable.  Though not to be unexpected, this coupled with being so close to the last down period has been very hard on the patient.  She is asleep once again and my heart goes out to her.

There can never be anything out of the ordinary, not now, not ever!!   Things must be then same to maintain the best possible biorhythm.  New dentures, a hair raising trip to Edmonton in a blustery winter storm and Remembrance Day are not routine.  This is as out of the ordinary as it gets.

I love her very much and hate to see her struggling.

So Sad She Could Cry

My beloved wife sat on the couch tonight and just muttered, "Have ever been so close to tears that you can feel them coming on and you don't know why?"

Truer words have never been spoken.  This is how I feel about the horrors of this disorder.   Sometimes I just want to sit down and cry.

My wife's disorder has some known triggers.  If she is faced with a large gathering social situation, she struggles.  Her biorhythm must be maintained through routine, routine, routine.   These gatherings are not routine.  My wife so wanted to attend the Remembrance Day ceremony today.  She is a true patriot.  She loves and respects those who serve.  She wanted to go but shortly before, it happened.  The social stresses derailed her emotions.  She became distant and enraged.  

In near perfect timing, one of my relatives commented, "She has her bitchy pants on today."

How perfect is that?  To tell a person who suffers from a significant emotional disorder, she is having an emotional issue.  It is like telling a cancer patient, their tumour is showing.   Don't you think this beautiful lady, crippled by an emotional disorder, knows she is having trouble.  

The trouble with this disorder is that once derailed, every emotional turmoil is brought to the surface.  Feelings of loneliness, abandonment, and neglect, however unreal are rushed to the surface.  It is all the support group can do to keep my precious wife from making hurtful and rash decisions.  The pain and suffering felt by the patient is so real.  She is in pain.

Tonight she has gone to bed very early.  She knows she is having trouble and her only defence is sleep.  There is no way to help her.  She fights this battle alone.  We don't know how to help other than to wait it out and hope that people will understand.  She means no harm but she lashes out at all members of her support group.  

I only wish her rest and love.   

Stephanie Dawson Overview

Bipolar Disorder Facts
Edited By: Stephanie Dawson

Bipolar disorder is a brain disorder marked by bouts of extreme and impairing changes in mood, thinking, and behavior.

Bipolar disorder can be treated but not cured, it tends to be episodic in nature, but the goal of treatment is to manage the disease, decrease the severity of depressive and manic episodes and keep recurrences to a minimum.

There are many differences between bipolarity and depression, also known as unipolar depression because a person’s mood swings only in one direction, down, meanwhile manic depression is bipolar, because the mood swings range from low to high and back again.

A significant number of teenagers who abuse of alcohol and drugs are suffering from an underlying mood disorder such as depression or bipolar disorder. Without realizing it, they may be trying to self- medicate their symptoms of clinical depression or manic depressive illness, since they offer temporarily relaxation, or help them to feel confident or energetic, which can actually deepen depression.

All mood disorders start in the brain. Since the brain is an organ of the body, mood disorders are physical, biologically-based disorders. However, in mood disorders, the chemical processes responsible for normal brain function are disrupted.

Bipolar Disorder Facts

How can I tell whether someone is bipolar or just dealing with stress? The signs to watch for are persistent changes in moods or behaviors that make the person seem different from normal.

Symptoms of bipolar disorder may include:

• Elevated mood—silliness or extreme happiness that is inappropriate
• Grandiosity—inflated sense of importance
• Racing speech and thoughts
• Talking more than usual
• Irritability or hostility
• Excessive distractibility
• Decreased need for sleep
• Reckless behavior or poor judgment (daredevil acts, hyper-sexuality)
• Hallucinations and psychosis

Symptoms of depression may include:

• Lack of pleasure in life
• Withdrawal from favorite activities
• Agitation and irritability
• Persistent feelings of sadness and/or crying spells
• Sleeping too much or inability to sleep
• Drop in grades or inability to concentrate
• Thoughts of death and suicide
• Fatigue or loss of energy
• Significant weight loss, weight gain, or change in appetite

Important relationships are often damaged or strained as a result of clinical depression or bipolar disorder.

Adolescents suffering from depression may not behave like themselves, and they are unable to tell others how awful and worthless they feel. Be supportive.
There are many ways you can support others with depression and bipolar disorder. Most importantly, encourage them to get treatment and follow their physician’s instructions.

Their self-esteem may be so low that it is difficult for them to believe that they matter to anyone. You may have difficulty because people with mood disorders are not always easy to be around and may even reject those closest to them. You should not take this personally, it is just another indication of how bad they feel most of the time.

It is important to have a balanced diet, rich in vitamins and minerals, such as Omega 3s, folate, and B vitamins, which may have a positive impact on mood, and have some impact on general health. It is important to have a healthy lifestyle, diet, exercise, and good sleeping habits to manage bipolar disorder more effectively. Visited (1105) times!

Can't Love Her Enough...

When my beloved wife is in her down period, no matter what you do to show her love., no matter how much time you are together, to her, in her soul, it is not enough.  My observations of this disorder have always come back to the amplification of feelings when things are not going well.

If she is struggling and is ignored, even for a few minutes, then she is ALWAYS ignored.  All other times in our history when she was ignored come rushing back and are added up to create this huge block of being ignored.  There is no doubt that being ignored is not a good thing, no one likes it.  The trouble with the bipolar patient is a single incident is magnified one hundred fold.  If a person was ignored all the time, they would become angry too.  The anger as an outcome is not unreasonable.  The anger to an innocent incident is what identifies a bipolar sufferer.  

If she is struggling and she is left alone, even for a few hours, then she is ALWAYS left alone.  It does not matter that she is more than welcome to come along and SHE chooses to stay at home.  This is not important.  What IS important is that she is left alone.  This is the part of Bipolar Disorder that is very difficult for the support group has great difficulty in understanding, myself included.  If you don't want to join in, but become very upset when you are not included, there is nothing that could have been done to keep your emotion positive.  The situation is LOSE-LOSE.

Bipolar sufferers always struggle to maintain a strong support group because the support group, spouses included, want to have traditional measures of success to apply.  If I try to be positive, to do positive things, the patient will be positive and have upbeat feelings.  The truth is that NO MATTER what you try, the amplification of emotions may make the outcome negative and there is nothing you can do about it. 

To the many members of bipolar sufferer's support groups out there, many of you as spouses, I say this.  Keep your chin up and keep being positive.  Sometimes the support group needs a support group...

Never Enough...

When you struggle with emotions, you tend to gravitate towards a person to bind you to reality. For the bipolar support group, one person is usually selected as the totem marking the path to reality. For the most part, this burden is something we handle as part of caring for the bipolar sufferer.

The most difficult stage is when the sufferer is struggling in the down period. At this point, there can NEVER be enough attention. The totem MUST be available at all times to keep the sufferer grounded. Even the littlest distraction, such as checking your phone, is seen as abandonment and neglect. This is the burden of the support group.

The sufferer cannot do things for themselves at this time. The sufferer cannot find things to occupy the struggling mind. Instead the sufferer looks for the signpost at every turn. When it is not available, the sufferers sees themselves as unimportant or neglected.

Nothing is further from the truth but it is the reality. Often people think of the bipolar patient alone, but the support group is along trying to help.

Sadly the help is never enough....

Pharmacy Fallacies

Many bipolar sufferers are heavily medicated. They require a substantial and often changing cocktail to manage their behaviour through day to day life. This means that their psychiatrist will often make strange and even unorthodox choices in order to try to maintain stability for the patient.

When the patient requests a change in their medication, please follow through with the medication as prescribed by the psychiatrist. If you have questions about the approach, feel free to consult with the psychiatrist as to the reasons for the approach but do not confront the patient directly. They lack a good understanding and see the questions as accusatory and even as suggesting the patient may be an addict. Please direct the questions to the doctor or primary caregiver.

These people need to understand that affecting the mood of a bipolar sufferer, especially in a negative way can lead to violent changes in biorhythm which forces the support group to deal with fits of rage or sorrow.

This is not to question your competency o your motives, this is to protect the support network. Please delay filling the prescription with a simple, "this will be ready later" and it will allow you as a professional to make an informed decision.

Just some simple advice...

There's Just No Joking....

One of the great truths about bipolar is that trouble sleeping will be common place. In order to combat the tremendous energies associated with the manic period, often powerful sedatives are used for sleeping. This can lead to sleeping in on many days. This has been a part of our life. One of the side benefits has been a few hours of alone time for me on the weekend mornings. This is a time for quiet reflection, for writing in a variety of genres. This has also afforded me time to enjoy guy TV like sports highlights or science fiction.

I love this time. Unfortunately, with pharmaceutical sleep comes irregular sleep pattern. This has changed my wife's rhythm from sleeping late to going to bed early and thus waking up early. She is now awake in my guy time. I made the mistake of joking that she was invading my time. I was trying to be funny not realizing that I had entered a bipolar phase... You just never know.

As most bipolar support group members know, irregular moods bring amplified response. She took a smart aleck comment and turned it into I don't wan her around. I am embarrassed and ashamed. I should know better. There is no joking...

I love her dearly. I definitely want her around. I forgot that you need to be very careful in choosing your words when dealing with a bipolar sufferer. Always remember, there is no joking!

Bombs Away

And so it begins... Out of nowhere, my beautiful wife turns from that special lady to a raging bipolar lunatic. No lie... A lunatic.

The horrors of bipolar sensitivities are amplified when the low period starts. My sweetheart has to endure stabbing like cramps that mimicking the horrors of an appendix attack. She struggles with the pain. There is no doubt about that.

Worse yet, she becomes hyper sensitive to emotional pain. My son and I went to play a video game... A totally innocent act... But in the eyes of the bipolar sufferer, it was a choice to be with him and not with her... Abandonment!!

What I have learned about the disorder is the feelings are real. They have a practical origin. My wife was hurt and probably had a right to be hurt but it is the response that is unnatural. An evening of grouchy silence to pay for fifteen minutes on the wii is a gross over reaction. I love her to death. She is a great lady and the love of my life. I have to keep reminding myself of these facts. This is not who she is. This is her disorder.

I have been reading about dis associative personality disorders online to try to understand better how to respond when the rage is over. My wife will not remember being angry. She will not remember the pain. She will not remember that everyone around her must be walking on egg shells when she struggles. When she comes out, she does not understand why people around her have changed their opinions of her.

We were warned when she was first diagnosed, we were told that bipolar patients end up alone and without friends. They cannot understand why and are depressed and devastated as a result.

As I was saying to a friend of mine today, head for the mountains boys, the bombing is about to begin....