Bipolar Disorder: What is It?

I had always been brought up to respect everyone around me, but incidents in my life have left me rather confused about many things. Firstly, I’d always suffered with bad mood swings, and there were moments that I was unable to control what I was doing, or conscientiously control my actions at least.

With the diagnosis came the promise of medication that would make my condition more stable, and give me the chance to cope with life in a way that up until that moment had proven impossible. Unfortunately as I was soon to find out, this was not the case, and living a normal life ever again would not be an option for me. When trying out the various medications in order for me to be able to get back to some form of normality, we stumbled (or at least that is how it came across) across a new medicene, which in clinical trials had proven to be very successful in at least part controlling the BiPolar, Level 1, which is considered more severe than my diagnosis.

I attempted these tablets, and whilst they did level my moods out somewhat, they did not however stop my cycling from mania to depression and back again. Unfortunately this is the only thing I have ever understood about being BiPolar. You swing from a manic mood (very happy, on top of the world, nothing could ever go wrong., etc…) to a depressive mood (feeling rubbish, suicidal, everyone’s picking on you, not able to cope with life, etc…).

In essence despite being diagnosed back in 2004, I still only have a very small amount of knowledge about BiPolar and what the condition actually entails for me as an individual. It is unfortunately purely down the lack of ability of the medical staff to be able to explain things in a way that the patient understands.

One of the things that I have often noticed, is that the community mental health teams are very quickly to put additional staff in the way of being able to communicate directly with the people that make the decisions about your medication, and how you should be living, and in a majority of cases, they do this without informing you. This does mean that if you need clarification about anything that you will need to be persistent enough to get that information, which I know firsthand I am not anywhere near persistent enough, even if I wanted to be.

So in essence, I think it is quite clear, that as a BiPolar sufferer, I am still not entirely sure what the condition is and how it effects me, other than to say that I act out of sorts quite often, and these behaviour changes are out of my control.

What do you think? Are you a BiPolar sufferer with different experiences? Leave a comment below and let me and the rest of the world know!