Bipolar Backstory

With­out reveal­ing any names (to pro­tect the inno­cent and not-so-innocent), here’s a hope­fully some­what con­cise descrip­tion of my learn­ing that I had Bipo­lar II disorder.

Bipo­lar II is dif­fer­ent from Bipo­lar I, aka Manic Depres­sion, in the fol­low­ing ways (not cat­e­gor­i­cal, but it’ll give you the fla­vor)– manias are mild, char­ac­ter­ized by high energy, pro­duc­tiv­ity, and cre­ativ­ity lev­els, none of the more dan­ger­ous aspects of mania such as gam­bling, extreme spend­ing sprees, promis­cu­ity, delu­sions, and psy­chosis. Often called “hypo­ma­nia.” How­ever, manias slide into irri­tabil­ity, anger, ragea­holism, and then into deep, pro­longed depres­sions that can include sleep­less­ness, exhaus­tion, lack of inter­est in for­mer activ­i­ties, sui­ci­dal thoughts, pas­sive thoughts of death, etc. Bipo­lar II suf­fer­ers tend to cycle more rapidly between phases, and suf­fer from more and longer depres­sive episodes than peo­ple with Bipo­lar I.

I’d been depressed since Novem­ber of 2005, with no par­tic­u­larly good rea­son. Work was going well in that I enjoyed work­ing with my clients and col­leagues, even if my cases weren’t always what I would want, either for facts or for sheer excite­ment. My mar­riage was going well, as my Bet­ter Half (the BH) was finally employed again after a long period of unem­ploy­ment, and the money sit­u­a­tion was start­ing to be sta­ble again. And there were no par­tic­u­lar Larger Fam­ily Issues, since my fam­ily and the BH’s fam­ily were doing well. My depres­sion and energy lev­els con­tin­ued to sag– I gave up yoga, stopped cook­ing, was exhausted when I came home from work, and I became more anx­ious about tasks at work that nor­mally wouldn’t have both­ered me. I began wast­ing more time at work, tak­ing longer than I’d like to do rou­tine work, and avoid­ing doing tasks I did not want to do but which were nec­es­sary steps to mov­ing my cases along. One case in par­tic­u­lar began to gnaw at me; the facts were stu­pid, and my client sim­ply wasn’t liable, in my opin­ion. But oppos­ing coun­sel was the most stub­born, obsti­nate, WRONG lawyer I’d ever come up against. I began to doubt that I was see­ing the case aright, at which time I started to fall apart, and let the entire case go straight to hell.

At the same time, I was hav­ing other health prob­lems, none in and of them­selves ulti­mately life-threatening, but con­tribut­ing to my dis­tress, dis­trac­tion, and phys­i­cal and men­tal dis­com­fort. I couldn’t sleep at night for wak­ing up in a cold sweat think­ing about this par­tic­u­lar case, and yet I was utterly par­a­lyzed from doing any­thing about it when I got to work.

On the out­side, I still put up a pretty good show to my col­leagues, who were occu­pied with their own wor­ries and some pretty large cases our office was han­dling. This all con­tin­ued through April 2006, when the prozac my PCP had pre­scribed stopped work­ing after 6 weeks and I was feel­ing men­tally Worse Than Ever. I made an appoint­ment with Mass­a­chu­setts’ Lawyers Con­cerned for Lawyers (www.lclma.org), and after an intake ses­sion with a sym­pa­thetic but not sen­ti­men­tal social worker, even­tu­ally got a refer­ral to a ther­a­pist, who ended our first ses­sion with these life-saving words– “You know, I think you might be Bipolar.”

Before this appoint­ment, how­ever, things had come to a head at work, and the oppos­ing lawyer on the bad case had finally given up on me and called both the client and my bosses. I was called on the car­pet and broke down, telling them about my depres­sion, my other phys­i­cal prob­lems. I threw myself on the sword, admit­ted every­thing, and offered my res­ig­na­tion. My bosses were shocked, I think, at the way I fell apart, because I was and am now again the Hard Charg­ing But Not Mas­cu­line Female Asso­ciate. To their credit, they didn’t fire me on the spot, and the con­ver­sa­tion turned imme­di­ately from the dis­cus­sion of The Case to my own health. When I told them I had made some thrash­ing over­tures toward help, and that I’d been to LCL but was still wait­ing to see a ther­a­pist, the con­ver­sa­tion shifted again– to get­ting me through this.

I have never been more embar­rassed, grate­ful, humil­i­ated, relieved, and as con­scious of Grace as in those first few weeks after The Case went to hell. I don’t know what I would have done if my bosses in par­tic­u­lar had not been so sup­port­ive of me, and I couldn’t believe for a long time (and still some­times don’t) that I actu­ally deserved the friend­ship and sup­port they have shown me. Once my ther­a­pist nudged me toward the bipo­lar diag­no­sis, it was all uphill. My health insur­ance paid for ther­apy with­out a fight. I found, after some ini­tial few weeks try­ing to locate a shrink who would accept my HMO, a won­der­ful psy­chi­a­trist who treated me with the humor, respect, and crit­i­cism that I need to keep per­spec­tive, and who rec­om­mended, on the first try, a com­bi­na­tion of med­ica­tions that have allowed me to feel ener­getic, happy, nor­mal, and serene in vary­ing com­bi­na­tions. I still get mood swings, espe­cially with my period, I still have a hard time with the win­ter­time lack of sun­light, and I still have a hard time when I don’t get enough sleep– but they don’t push me too close to the edge, like they used to.

I still have lots of work to do with my ther­a­pist. I have lots of bad men­tal habits, formed both before and after my bipo­lar likely emerged in my late teens, that I need to root out. I have lots of mood trig­gers that I need to rec­og­nize, so that I don’t let things get my goat the way they did with Oppos­ing Coun­sel from the Case.

Things are now much bet­ter, and after a pro­ba­tion­ary period at work, I feel like I am back on my game and bet­ter, because my energy lev­els are more con­sis­tently high than they used to be, and I am less irri­ta­ble and more eas­ily amused on a reg­u­lar basis. I do feel like the med­ica­tion and the ther­apy have allowed me to finally become the per­son I always felt was under the mood swings, but I know I’m going to have to keep an inter­nal eye out to make sure I don’t go down the dark road alone again. I did have one minor freak-out, a few months into my new treat­ment, but I rec­og­nized it in time (albeit the Nick Of Time) and together with my boss, were able to come to a res­o­lu­tion that embar­rassed no one and which pre­served the client’s inter­ests. So now I am work­ing to build on the per­son I can be, and to recap­ture and main­tain the cre­ativ­ity and self-expression I lost toward the end of high school. (Although this time, hope­fully the poems won’t be as bad, and I will restrain myself from draw­ings of uni­corns in the margins.)

It’s going to be a jour­ney, and like any jour­ney, there will be bumps, pot­holes, sink­holes and exhil­a­rat­ing views– but I feel like my back­pack is full of the tools that I need to cope with what­ever the road throws at me.