![]() ![]() ![]() “We just thought it was normal teenage rebellion.” “We’d never even heard the word ,” my mom said of those years when it seemed one drama followed another. My therapist said we all have symptoms of post-traumatic stress. I suspect she and my dad have blocked out a lot of the worst of it. At first, she didn’t seem to remember much. I asked my mom the other day what she remembers of that trip, or others like it. As they had many times previously, my parents sped to my rescue and took me home - this time, to a hospital. No one knew where I was until I called my mom and dad from a New York hospital. I remember standing on the bow as the ferry pulled into the harbor at dawn and watching bioluminescent creatures dancing beneath the surface of the turquoise water. I abruptly left my next job at Harvard to waitress in a midcoast tourist trap because it was more fun, and spent another summer living in New York City on my American Express card while I dated a minor league baseball player.Īt the height of my hypomania, I disappeared to a Mediterranean island for three weeks. When I was better, I moved to Boston to work 70 hours a week at a consulting firm with future billionaires, spending every spare penny on clothes, shoes and extravagant Christmas presents. The next fall, three days after arriving at college - three days of nonstop hysterical phone calls home - my dad drove back up the interstate to pack me and my stuff into the station wagon and take me home. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in my mid-20s after years of dramatic “ups and downs.” During my junior year at the University of Maine, I ran 6 miles late every night through the deserted snowy cow pastures, matching my breath to Steve Winwood and The Who on my Walkman. In fact, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, bipolar disorder has one of the highest suicide rates of all mental illnesses, with 10 percent to 20 percent of unmedicated patients taking their lives.īut here’s the list I keep in mind: author William Styron talk-show host and author Jane Pauley former President Bill Clinton adviser Robert Boorstin actresses Patty Duke and Carrie Fisher artist Ellen Forney, whose wonderful graphic novel “Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo and Me” helped me explain my disorder to many people and psychiatry professor Kay Redfield Jamison, whose best-selling memoir about bipolar disorder, “An Unquiet Mind,” brought me through a lot of darkness. I believe most of these people are unmedicated or undermedicated, or are “self-medicating” with alcohol or street drugs to deaden their pain. ![]() Police and other public safety officials, who encounter bipolar disorder at its most intense and destructive, think of the delusional woman running naked across Main Street or the man suffering from psychosis whom they talked off a bridge. More recently, people remember Robin Williams, the brilliant actor and comedian who also died of suicide last year. Others remember Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain or Ernest Hemingway. Throughout nearly 10 years as a journalist, I’ve watched people in all types of situations react when they hear the word “bipolar.” Some think of Claire Danes’ somewhat unlikely character on the TV show “Homeland,” an unstable, occasionally medicated CIA agent. The National Institute of Mental Health estimates 2.6 percent of U.S. In recent months, the semicolon has become a symbol for those with mental illness and survivors of suicide whose “sentence could have ended, but didn’t.” For my friend Jared Fiori, who also battles bipolar and who joined me Friday to get inked, “It will be a reminder, right there, that this can’t end this way.”Įvery time I see my tattoo, it reminds me that despite the pauses - episodes of depression and, less frequently, hypomania - my life has taken, I’ve always continued.īipolar disorder, or “manic-depressive disorder,” is different for everyone, but is generally characterized by alternating periods of crippling depression and euphoric mania or less intense hypomania, with some experiencing “mixed” episodes that, for me, are like agitated depression. ![]()
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