Matthew Temple

About five years ago I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder for the first time.  I spent one week in a psych hospital near Los Angeles after a week of crazed, little-sleep computer programming activity, which ended in an emotional crash and my calling a suicide hotline.

Since then I’ve been independently re-diagnosed as bipolar by multiple psychiatrists in a Vermont hospital.  These doctors’ opinions differ in the details, but the main diagnosis is the same: “Bipolar Disorder”, “Bipolar Disorder Not Otherwise Specified with psychotic features”, “Bipolar I Disorder, most recent episode manic”, etc.

To obtain these recent diagnoses cost me months in inpatient hospitalizations this last fall.  Doctors observed me, kept me from hurting myself, and prescribed medicine to stabilize my moods and manage the psychotic effects of manic states that occur in bipolar disorder, namely: delusions and hallucinations.  I have both.

I resent my medicine.  I didn’t have to take it before, and I like to think I was doing just fine (though I wasn’t).  To feel I need these medicines in order to function properly seems an insult to my basic nature—what is wrong with the natural me, such that my way of operating is unacceptable?  I wish it was as simple as saying I’d become unacceptable to others, but it’s not: bipolar disorder gets in the way of my life.  It makes it impossible to maintain normal relationships, normal work, normal finances.  Some of those are things I’d like to do.

Five years ago, when I got out of the hospital, I was like: yeah, ok, I have bipolar disorder, I’ll take my Lamictal and get on with my life.  I can still work, I’m not fundamentally fucked because of this disorder—am I?  But lately, things have worsened.  I can trace the onset of bipolar symptoms back to my high school years, but I was mostly functional through my early twenties.  Since then things have become increasingly..well..crazy.  I destroy relationships, I have become unhirable due to my past behavior (threatening suicide at work, for instance, which seemed perfectly normal to me), and my finances are all expressed in negative numbers.

My tendency is to blame myself and punish myself because I could have made other decisions.  We’re all responsible for our actions: can’t I just change mine?  After the trajectory of my life over the past 10 years, though, and given my failed attempts to control certain of my behaviors—or even recognize them while they’re happening—I become more willing to see myself through the bipolar lens.

In a way, my disorder is me; in another way, it’s something I have.  To my executive function, it’s not me at all, because the executive me wouldn’t do some of the things I’ve done in manic or depressive states.  Only sometimes am I aware that I have this problem: I’ve been incredibly resistant to accepting that I have this disorder.  Even with multiple independent diagnoses, all pointing in the same direction, I can still convince myself that they’re all a mistake, that I’m fine.  A panel of three California psychiatrists concluded I was bipolar.  Since then, fully five other psychiatrists have agreed on this diagnosis for me.  At what point will I accept that this paradigm might be helpful as I try to understand myself?

The United States National Institutes of Health say that

Patients often have trouble recognizing their own manic symptoms.

That rings true.  I mostly can’t tell which state I’m in, manic, depressed, or otherwise.  I can’t tell that I’ve entered a depressive state.  Mania doesn’t seem like mania to me, it seems normal.  When other people point out features of my present state, I can sometimes understand their point of view.  In general, I don’t see what’s so great or bad about these various states.  Except that when I’m depressed, I want to kill myself.  And right now, on all my medicines, I don’t want to.  That’s obviously a major difference; what I’m saying is when I’m depressed, I don’t know that I am, I just am it.

The NIH also says

Some people stop taking the medication as soon as they feel better or because the mania feels good.

I get this.  This is what I’ve been considering the last few days.  I can reason through the logic of continuing my medication, but it doesn’t feel right.  It feels like I don’t need it.  It feels like I was ok without it.  It even feels like I was better without it: like others with this disorder, I like my mania.  I like being overly personable and flirting with human beings, financial disaster, the danger of drugs, or whatever I can find.  I like being able to write 3,000 words of a novel each and every day for six weeks in a row.  I like dancing naked on my roof with some friends.  Unfortunately, that’s just the beginning of my craziness.

Once, on a whim, I quit a very nice job and moved across the country to live in a tent in my friend’s back yard.  I have bought hundreds of glow sticks (all that were available in the camping sections of several stores) which I then passed out to everyone dancing at a night club.  In an attempt to get a gallery show, I mailed the contents of my kitchen (as well as original art) to a New York art dealer.  I even sent my spice rack.  And I’ve telephoned both the NSA and CIA, believing I had unique and amazing software that was going to save my country from spies.  (I did not.)

What have I lost to this?  Jobs, lovers, money, family relationships, the chances on my life through one suicide attempt, my sobriety during manic phases.  The respect of others, through my wild behavior and emotions impossible to understand.  My trust of myself, through uncontrollable thoughts, and feelings that engulf me.

I’m in the deepest holes I’ve ever been in.  I’m lost.  My career is destroyed; I don’t know if I’ll be able to move ahead in the work world.  I’m lucky to have had some state health care in Vermont so that I could spend time in the hospital when I needed it, and so that I could focus on my illness seriously at a time in my life when I can no longer say: I have bipolar disorder, now let’s get some Lamictal and head into the office on Monday.  I don’t know what my life is going to look like from here on out.  So this post doesn’t have a tidy ending.  This is me somewhere in the middle.  In the middle of my life with my particular sickness and my particular health.  For now I’ll take my medicine, I’ll let my family help me, and I’ll just operate without needing to know.