My Poems Won Awards!

     WARNING: LONG POST AHEAD!

     So, this post is long overdue, but here it is at last! The best news I’ve received in a while!

     Last year, my Freshman Year of college, I submitted two sets of poems to my school’s Humanities Writing Awards. And to my complete surprise, BOTH SETS WON AWARDS! One set is 5 poems about my own experience with Bipolar Disorder, and the other a sampling of 9 poems (Max & Bath) are from a book I’m working on called Alien Talk Shows.

     Alien Talk Shows, as I’m planning it, is going to be split into sections about different characters and their lives, each section focusing on one or two particular mental illnesses. The poems featured are from the first section, which is about a woman with schizophrenia and her loving boyfriend (they later marry) that takes care of her and helps her take care of herself. He loves her and her illness, not despite her illness. I hope the other stories in the book will inspire people as well.

      When I read these poems at the Western PA Undergraduate Literature Conference in the Spring, they received an overwhelmingly positive response. Many people in the audience even thanked me for addressing these topics. A girl came up to me after the reading and said, "I'm really glad you talked about schizophrenia, too. My mom is schizophrenic and it's so rare to see people with schizophrenia painted in a positive, nonthreatening light." And I agree with her. Media is quick to demonize people affected by mental illnesses, especially schizophrenia, which is what inspired me to write poems about schizophrenia and my own disorder in the first place. 

     If there is anything I would like people to know, it's that people affected by mental illness are just like you: we need love, we need care, we need acceptance, and sometimes, yes, we need a little help. And yes, we may need help more often than you'd like, but asking for help does not make us weak. It can literally save a life. I know it saved mine. I would not be in college right now if it weren't for therapy and my meds. I'd also like to remind everyone that we're not violent people: people affected by a mental illness are actually more likely to be victims of abuse. So keep that in mind the next time you automatically attach mental illness to brutal violence. 

     And without further ado, here are the poems:

Getting Help & Helping Yourself

If you’re seeking help for bipolar disorder or depression, I have a few suggestions.

First, talk to your primary care physician. This may seem like common sense, but you’d be surprised how many people neglect to tell their PCP about emotional problems because they believe there’s nothing they can do. There are actually a few things they can do. A lot of family doctors can prescribe you different medications to manage your problems themselves, or they can recommend you to someone who may be better equipped to help you manage your issues, such as a psychiatrist or therapist.

Second, look for different mental health services in your area. For me, help was only a short drive to the next city over, and help may be closer to you than you think! Consider what you would want from these services, whether it be just to talk to someone, or to try Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which aims to change your thinking and behavior patterns so solving problems on your own will become easier, and you can start to feel better.

Third, try different medications and combinations of medications. If and when you are prescribed to medications, whether those medications are antidepressants, mood stabilizers, antipsychotics, or any combination thereof, make sure what you’re taking works for you. What works for your friend or someone else you know might not work for you, and if what you’re taking isn’t working for you at all, tell your doctor. There are plenty of things you can take, and most doctors will be willing to work with you to find the most effective treatment. You can even request to change meds if you don’t like a particular side-effect of something you’re taking. I’ve changed meds twice now because of side-effects. Medications really are a matter of trail-and-error. You have to be patient and really keep track of how they affect you to see results.

Forth, make an effort in your physical life. I know it’s cliché, but exercising can really help you out, especially in battling bipolar disorder. Exercise allows you to run off excess energy when you’re manic, so you’ll be able to sleep easier when it comes time to go to bed at night. And keep a regular sleeping schedule; routine often helps people with bipolar disorder. Also, completing even a small exercise routine each day can give you a sense of accomplishment when you’re depressed, and helps bring your self-esteem out of the dumps.

Finally, watch what you eat. You don’t necessarily have to go on a diet, but you should cut back on caffeine and sugars, since these can ramp up your energy even more when you’re manic. I say cut back because quitting these things cold-turkey isn’t good for you either. It has to be a process. If you’re like me and drink soda all the time, gradually reduce your intake and drink other things instead. I, personally, prefer green tea and cranberry juice on ice. Watching what you eat is also important when you’re depressed. If you eat too much, well, there’s a myriad of things that could happen. You could end up feeling bad about yourself, feel sick from overeating, the list goes on. Or sometimes when you’re depressed, you might not eat enough. Watch for patterns in your eating habits when you’re depressed and adjust accordingly. Try to feed yourself the appropriate amount. If you know you’re overeating, cut back. If you’re not eating enough, make yourself eat at least three medium-sized meals a day to make sure you’re getting enough nourishment, which will help you feel better.

So that’s how to get help, where to get help, what to do once you get help, and a little bit on how to help yourself. Healing starts with you. You know yourself best, you know what you need to do, go out there and see what works for you and don’t give up! You can live better, even with bipolar, depression, or another mental illness.

What does Bipolar Disorder feel like? Part 2: My experience.

This post will be a more in-depth look at how my mood states present and how I feel when I’m experiencing them. It is primarily an elaboration on my last post, so if you haven’t read it yet, go ahead and check it out first. This post will still be here when you come back. 😊

Below, I describe what my mood states feel like. What’s copied from my journal verbatim is in italics, and things I added specifically for this post are in normal type. Of course, this is not what all bipolar people experience, just what I have experienced.

What it’s like:

Hypomania:

In my waking hours, I sometimes find myself in a dreamlike state. Everything is amplified, and I feel as though everything is perfect and the world is at peace, life cannot be any more beautiful. When I’m like this, nothing worries me and I’m hypersensitive to the beauty in the world. This is what I call the bright side of hypomania.

But there is also a dark side. I can become very irritable and anger easily. I also tend to become very annoyed very quickly. Sometimes I say hurtful things I don’t really mean and end up hurting people’s feelings, which I NEVER mean to do. 😢

Depression:

Other times I feel stuck, like I’m paralyzed but the world is moving in fast forward. I call these slow days because I feel like I am too slow to catch up with the world. My motivation disappears and I start to feel hopeless as my obligations pile up. Without motivation, it’s extremely hard to do anything, and I stay in bed for as long as I can. I eat too much or not enough, I lose track of my personal hygiene, and I put off doing things for as long as I can afford to.

This is usually accompanied by anxiety, which makes me feel guilty and scared, especially at night and around other people. I feel a fear of being “found out,” even though I’m never sure what exactly I did wrong.

When I’m like this, I cry almost constantly, going back and forth from mild sniffling to full-blown bawling for days on end. I have a strong feeling that life is not worth living and that nothing I do matters. Often times, I want to be dead or stop existing, but don’t necessarily want to die or kill myself.

Normalcy:

[Normalcy] doesn’t make me feel bad like depression or anxiety, but it’s not as good as the bright side of hypomania, either. I don’t anger as easily and when I do, I get over it much faster. In my normal state, I sleep healthily (no insomnia or oversleeping), shower regularly, and eat well. It’s hard to achieve this state without my meds, and I’m very grateful I have them! The only drawback to normalcy is that I’m not as creative. I’m more creative when I’m hypomanic and even when I’m depressed. But the tradeoff is worth it to me—being able to do my schoolwork and do it well is more important than anything in my life right now. Normalcy allows me to achieve my goals more efficiently.

So, that’s a clearer picture of how I feel in the different mood states, in case my last post on what bipolar disorder feels like made you curious! 

What does Bipolar Disorder feel like?

What does being bipolar feel like?

I get this question a lot. You may have seen some of the symptoms on the chart from my last post and thought, “Well, everyone experiences that from time to time,” which is true of most of the symptoms on the chart, but it’s about how those symptoms are experienced that determines whether or not you’re dealing with bipolar disorder.

There are a few things that make bipolar disorder different from normal mood changes:

First, bipolar moods don’t typically match up with what’s happening in your life—there’s a disconnect between what you feel and what is happening.

Second, the moods you experience are extreme and seem to come and go without reason. Bipolar moods aren’t usually a reaction to anything like normal moods, but they can be triggered, so there’s not always a total disconnect. Eventually though, there probably will be, because mood states last for weeks or even months at a time in normal-cycling bipolar disorder.

And that’s another thing about bipolar disorder: moods fall on their own sort of cycle, kind of like a period, but with emotions instead of blood.

While people who aren’t bipolar can experience extreme moods, they are almost always triggered by some event in the person’s life. It’s a totally normal, sane reaction to be depressed when, say for example, your pet dies. It’s normal to feel good in response to things going well in your life, such as getting a job you wanted. What’s not normal is laughing and feeling giddy at a funeral or hysterically crying and wanting to kill yourself even though you just got accepted into college.

In my own experience with Type 2 Bipolar Disorder, something SUPER small can set me off (like dropping a spoon on the floor that I was going to eat with), I have a reaction that is WAY out of proportion to what happened, and I stay in that mood for a week or longer.

Either I’m set off, or I fall into a cycle where my moods rotate every week or two weeks. Typically, I have a week where I feel pretty good; I have a spring in my step, I’m happy, I smile at people, I talk, the world is bright, I get things done. That progresses into a week of anger and irritability, where even the sound of another person’s voice annoys me and I just want to be left alone. Then, I spend at least two weeks in severe depression, having random bouts of hysterical crying and wanting to kill myself. Between all that, I have some periods of normalcy, too, but I don’t really notice them as much.

Another thing that happens to me is I stop reacting to what’s going on around me. I remember one time I was hypomanic for a few months, even though a lot of bad things were happening in my life at the time. I was pretty much unaffected though, because of my hypomania. I’ve also had times where everything is really going well, and I’m debilitatingly depressed. It goes both ways. If my cycle is set for depression, I’m probably going to be depressed regardless of what happens.

But since being put on an antidepressant and a mood stabilizer, I’ve kept a pretty even keel. I don’t feel extremely sensitive and emotional like I did before, and I don’t have crying spells like I used to. Though, I also don’t have days where I feel like everything is perfect and the world cannot possibly get any more beautiful. The tradeoff is worth it to me though, because I’m more productive now than I ever was when I was hypomanic.

So, in general, that’s what being bipolar feels like in my own experience. I’m not saying that’s what it’s like for everyone with bipolar, but if you ever find yourself feeling like your emotions run like clockwork and are amplified, you should probably talk to someone and try to get some help. You’ll be better off in the long run, even if you don’t have bipolar disorder.

Types of Bipolar Disorder

This post is going to be a bit longer and take a step back from my last post, which was more based on personal experience. This post will be more fact-based, and the purpose of it is to give you quick definitions of the different types of bipolar disorder all in one place, so you can easily refer back to them as you read through other posts on my blog.

             Most people are surprised to know there isn’t just one, definitive type of bipolar disorder, but a few different types and sub-types, which I define below.

Here’s a handy little scale I made that I’ll use to help define the different types:

(Various Sources)

Note: this is not a definitive list of symptoms, and different sources will list different symptoms for each mood state. This is just meant to give you a general idea of how the states present.

First let’s look at the three main types:

1.     Bipolar Disorder Type 1: Blocks 1 to 5, the whole scale. Type 1 is defined by alternating states of severe depression and mania. Type 1 is usually what people think of when they hear the words “bipolar disorder,” and is marked by severe manic periods that can progress into a state of psychosis.

2.    Bipolar Disorder Type 2: Blocks 1 to 4, occasionally some of 5, excluding symptoms of psychosis. Type 2 is defined by alternating states severe depression and hypomania. Type 2 has the longest depressive states of all the types, and puts sufferers at an increased risk for suicide. Type 2 is also frequently misdiagnosed as unipolar depression, because its hypomanic periods can pass unrecognized or be mistaken for periods of “high-functioning.”

3.    Cyclothymia (NOT TYPE 3!): Blocks 2 to 4. Cyclothymia is defined by alternating states of hypomania and depression, usually with more frequent episodes of hypomania than of depression. Cyclothymia is known as a “milder form of bipolar disorder.”

Here’s a visual representation of these three types:

Source: One Mind Institute

Other types and sub-types:

•      Rapid Cycling: Rapid Cycling is not a type of bipolar disorder on its own, but a sub-classification of the three types defined above. Rapid Cycling is defined by experiencing four or more manic, hypomanic, or depressive episodes within a year. States can alternate every few days or even within the same day, which is referred to as “ultra-rapid cycling.”

•      Bipolar NOS (not otherwise specified): Can be all blocks (1 to 5), or any combination in between. NOS is defined by the irregular fluctuation of its states and cycles, and therefore cannot be classified as any of the other types.

•      “Mixed Features” or a “Mixed State”: This is not a type of bipolar disorder, rather, a mood state that (I assume) can occur in any of the aforementioned types. Mixed states are defined by feeling both depressed and manic/hypomanic at the same time. Symptoms typically include high energy, sleeplessness, and racing thoughts along with feelings of hopelessness, despair, irritability, and suicidal thoughts.

•      Bipolar Depression: You may have seen commercials on TV for the anti-psychotic drug “Latuda,” which can be used to treat “bipolar depression” and schizophrenia. “Bipolar Depression” is not a type of bipolar disorder in and of itself, it simply refers to the depressive states within bipolar disorder.

•      Bipolar Disorder Type 3: I don’t think Type 3 is an official diagnosis yet, but from what I can gather, there is speculation that there is another type of bipolar disorder that will cause patients to flip into a mania/hypomania after taking antidepressants to treat depressive states.

•      Soft Bipolar: I can tell you from experience that there is nothing “soft” or forgiving about bipolar disorder, but to be honest I don’t know much about this type, so here’s a link to some information about it from BipolarLives.

Here’s where I got my information from:
•      Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance
•      BipolarLives
•      WebMD
•      Latuda

So, you think you have Depression? It could be Bipolar Disorder.

As many as 1 in 5 people that go to their doctor complaining of depression actually have type 2 bipolar disorder, like me. But how are you supposed to know you might have bipolar disorder if you don’t even know what it is?

Simply put, bipolar disorder is a mood disorder characterized by alternating states (also called episodes) of depression and mania or hypomania, sometimes with periods of normalcy in between. But that definition won’t help you at all unless you’re able recognize what it means.

Depressive states present with the same symptoms as typical unipolar depression: sadness, loss of interest, lethargy, you know the rest. Thing is, you may have times where you feel better with no cause, like your depression has suddenly “cleared up,” only to be devastated when it shows up again.

Those times you felt better? They may have been manic or hypomanic episodes.

Whaaaaat!?

You may be going “What!? What’s a (hypo)manic episode? I didn’t even know I was having them!”

I didn’t know I was having them either, until my random happiness and giddiness about life progressed into agitation and irritability. I was hostile towards my friends. I literally had days where I woke up angry. But I don’t consider myself a mean or angry person, so that told me that something was wrong.

Increased happiness, agitation, and anger are just a few symptoms of a manic or hypomanic episode. Because there’s also a boost to your energy when you’re manic or hypomanic, you’ll probably feel better. Really, anything feels better than being depressed, so you may not see this occasional, unexplained anger as a problem like I did. Maybe you just assume you have a bad temper and leave it at that. 

But, while you’re here, take a look and see if you experience any of these common symptoms of hypomania and mania (this is not meant to be an exhaustive list, so take it with a grain of salt):

Hypomania

“Good” symptoms:

• Happiness.

• Joy or giddiness about life or living.

• Generally elevated mood.

• High energy.

• Increased motivation.

• Confidence.

“Bad” symptoms:

• Anxiety.

• Impulsivity.

• Racing thoughts.

• Insomnia.

• Irritability.

• Anger.

• Bloated self-image (to the point of being narcissistic).

Mania

All the symptoms of Hypomania plus:

• Euphoria or feeling “on top of the world.”

• High sex drive.

• Hyperactivity.

• Feeling a “reduced need to sleep.”

• Aggression.

• Hostility.

• Engaging in risky or self-destructive behavior.

Mania can progress into a state of Psychosis:

• Paranoia.

• Hallucinations (usually shadowy figures).

• Delusions about what is really happening around you.

If you’re sometimes having symptoms of depression and sometimes having symptoms of mania or hypomania, try taking this test and see how you do. Along with doing some of my own research, it helped me figure out that I had bipolar disorder, not just depression.

I have a blog!?

Apparently!