Living with Bi-Polar, a review of Stephen Fry’s documentary, and personal experiences Part 4

Part 4 Self-Medication.
                Self-medication has been around longer than today’s regulated medication industries; after all, self-medication is where all medication began. However, for this line of discussion, I’d like to start with a definition from Wikipedia:

“Self-Medication is a human behavior in which an individual uses a substance or any exogenous influence to self-administer treatment for often unmanaged, undiagnosed physical or psychological ailments."

               Now I will only be discussing my personal experiences with this, as I don’t feel too comfortable on stating second and third hand accounts. For myself, alcohol was the medicine of choice in my teens and twenties. Why? To quote Homer Simpson, “To Alcohol…the cause…and solution to…all of life’s  problems.” Well, when you’re walking around like a time-bomb, you tend to only focus on the latter half of that wisdom.  For a manic-depressive, alcohol seems like a great choice. On one hand, if you’re depressed, just drink up and you’ll feel better. All those happy people in beer commercials can’t be lying, right? On the other hand, when you’re manic, you either want to:
A) Stop the ride and get off. Your exhausted, and your mind won’t shut off. So how do you get it to stop? Use a beer hammer of course! Drink and drink until you knock yourself unconscious.
-or
B) Keep the party going! Woooooo Hoooo! THIS IS AWESOME!!! Give me another beer and a shot!
Yes, those are indeed complete opposite outcomes from using the same substance. How does this make sense? It doesn’t. When you’re bi-polar, you also tend to re-make things as you need them to be. When you’re in a manic state, what is rational to most completely eludes you. Why? Well who has time for facts and logic when I’VE JUST THOUGHT OF THE MOST AMAZING THING OMG NEED TO GO GET A…yeah…that happens a lot. Mania can make you feel god-like. The universe is your and all in it is within your understanding. Consequences really don’t factor into a manic high.

                So for depression, you also drink. Why? “I’ll take country and western song cliché’s for a $1000.00 Alex” So many people have written why people drink when depressed I’m not going to cover it. The why really isn’t relevant, as much as the ‘what happens when?’ part. See, when you’re depressed, all you can think about is wishing you were not. Many times I think subconsciously I was craving a manic episode. Not knowing that’s what my times of frenzy were, I related to the next thing. Getting hammered. Being drunk parallels mania in a lot of ways. Loss of inhibition, slight feeling of euphoria, relaxation, confidence, etc. all mimic parts of a manic episode. The biggest difference is when you’re drunk, you might have slightly impaired judgment. When someone is manic they may not be that closely tied to reality. When a person is in a state of mania and gets drunk, its game fucking on hold on to your hats time folks!!!  Yeah, take that rulebook and set it on fire for all the good it will do you. I’m glad I never got into hard-core drugs, as it would have gotten me killed. If a drag racer holds the Nitrous button down too long he can blow the motor. If you try to take a race car like brain and add rocket fuel to it, you’re going to burn it out quick. Alcohol was “safe” because I couldn’t drink enough to kill myself, right? (Again, loss of logic).

                The problem is what constant drinking does to a person. For a normal person it is bad enough; when you are bi-polar it gets worse. Think you were rapid cycling between mania and depression before? Well step right up, we have a treat for you! It’s called exhaustion! Can’t sleep? Get blackout drunk! Wake up hung over and groggy! Go to work and deal with people all while trying to get your head on straight. Shift is over, time to go relax with a drink! Or TEN!!! Hey, that bottle of rum isn’t going to drink itself!

                See, what I didn’t know was that getting blackout drunk and passing out was possibly WORSE than not sleeping. When you’re half-crazy with sleep deprivation, you don’t think clearly. All you want is results, sleep. Should have I talked to a doctor? Yes. Did I talk to a doctor? Hell no. (See part 1). So, instead of getting the rest I thought I was getting, I really was just trashing my ability to remember stuff, flooding my body with toxins, and adding obscene amounts of calories directly from the beer and the poor eating that went along with it. I think Taco Bell has stayed in business solely on the amount of money drunks spend there between 12am-4am on the weekends. 

                This cycling of mania-blackout/depression-blackout had quite a toll on my heath. I was gaining weight, having memory problems, and my mood swings were getting worse and worse. Since alcohol is so easily available to teens, it was my starting off point. If I had access to potentially stronger drugs I probably would have done as many as possible and died from any number of possible fates. But I didn’t die. I credit that fact to a group of people that was a large part of my life at that time. I will go on more about how they kept me from being my own worst enemy in future posts.

                I hope that this helps those who have never self-medicated relate to those that have. It is not a practice I encourage in the form that I’ve shared. If anyone reading this feels I am not giving enough explanation to any given topic, please let me know in the comments. I’m new to writing in this style, and want to balance assuming people know the general dangers of alcohol with giving examples of how they can be so very attractive to bi-polar individuals.

Living with Bi-Polar, a review of Stephen Fry’s documentary, and personal experiences Part 3 (Mania)

Part 3 : Mania


Now I realize that parts 1 and 2 were a bit more autobiographical than analytical, but I wanted to give a background. I wanted to show how easy it is to have what may seem like a good support network, when in reality a manic-depressive person is simply unprepared for whatever triggers lie ahead.

In the video, there is discussion about when it is too early to diagnose a child. I will avoid this issue, as it is a personal one. To clarify my last statement, I mean that like its effects, the observation of the behavior will be dependent on the family when dealing with a child. If a family is very close, with parents that have good observational skills and a baseline of what “normal” behavior should be, then it is possible to catch this illness early. However I will again stress that this is up to the family and doctors who know the person best. Medications for treatment are complex at times, and the extent for how they work is still not fully known for all of them. I will segue into teen / early adult life and self-medication, and the dangers it poses for people like me.

Stephen Fry mentions self-medicating briefly, and then moves on. I’m only partway through the second part of this documentary, so I’m not sure if they will come back to it. (He is just now talking to a doctor about Lithium).

So why is self-medication so common with manic-depressives? Well, to know that, you first need to understand the mania. Manic episodes are not like what the word sounds like; well at least some of the time. Depending on the severity of the episode, any number of things can occur. I’m linking the Wikipedia page on mania here, as there is a lot of information written, and I don’t want to simply regurgitate it all. [Mania] Of the utmost importance a person needs to understand that manic episodes are not “neat”. To clarify, they don’t always fit into one type or another. A manic-depressive person can cycle through many different states, up and down, and with varying levels of severity. This is hard for some people to comprehend, and that is understandable.

In the opening sequence, Stephen Fry interviews Carrie Fisher, and she makes some of her own observations on mania. She is not exaggerating that there is no drug that can come close to a manic high. This is absolute truth. No amount of ANY stimulant, psychoactive, or mood altering drug can come close. You may ask yourself, “Really? Come on, there are super-crazy drugs out there, surely SOME of them are more intense?”  To answer this, simply think of what a drug is. It is a chemical that changes the way our brains process information. Each drug targets a specific function, and has a focused chemical reaction / response built in. Now imagine all of the types of behavior drugs can illicit. Now imagine trying to take all of those drugs at once. There are still a finite number of chemical interactions that can take place based on the number of initial reagents you dump into your body. During a manic episode, the brain goes into various stages of hyperdrive/meltdown without any outside chemical input. As vast and near limitless is the brain’s capacity for imagination is, so is its capacity for creating its own runaway reaction. Think of a nuclear reactor that is in a runaway reaction; the more it gets further into the reaction, the more intense and violent it becomes. The same is with the brain during mania. Nothing will stop the runaway reaction unless one of two things happens. Either you run out of fuel, (collapse), or insert an agent to stop the reaction like control rods, (medication).

Since most people are not fond of collapsing due to exhaustion, they will seek other means to cope with mania. As this post is already long, I will discuss the logic, (and fallacy), of the manic-depressive’s rationalizations in self-medicating in the next post.

Living with Bi-Polar, a review of Stephen Fry’s documentary, and personal experiences Part 2

I’ll skip a lot of specifics about my family. I am somewhat comfortable talking about my own issues, but theirs are for them to tell. I will attempt to only give generalities, and might change a slight fact not to obscure the truth, but to protect privacy as best I can.

One simple truth is that I felt near constant loneliness as a child, well into my teens. This drama is familiar for many people of that age, but the cycling up and down of mania and depression worsened it for me. You see, as a child, when your experiencing a manic episode, you’re just “full of energy”, and when you’re depressed, you’re just “being moody” or “going through a phase”. Now, one could say, “Come on now Corey, if you really were that bad, someone would have noticed, right?” Well, to be honest , yes. Someone would have noticed and SHOULD have noticed, but there was one little problem; too many people.

“Wait, what? I thought you were alone, how can that be with too many people?” I shall now endeavor to explain. You see with the absence of my father, my mother had to work a full-time job to make ends meet. On top of that she went back to school to get a teaching degree. (I would like to make note that I do not resent my mother going back to school. On the contrary, I am proud that she did so. I only mention it to frame the reasons for absence and to frame the next issue.) With so little time to spare, my mother employed the help of my father’s parents and a circle of parents with kids in my grade to watch my brother and I.

My grandparents were great, and I especially had an extra bond with my grandfather, (as did my brother), since he was the only real father-like figure we had to look up to. He would be the person who would frequently pick us kids up and ferry us home to wait for my mother. We would get shipped all over. Some weeks we would ride the school bus home to person (A’s) house. Sometimes we would go to person (B’s) house for a couple days, then back to (A’s) house for the rest of the week. Sometimes we would get dropped off at person (C’s) house because fuck (A) and (B).
(Ok, that last bit was a touch of humor; A and B were fine. As a kid you don’t know why you’re at A. B or C’s place. You just take your orders from the commander, [mom], and deploy where you’re told.)
I hope you’re beginning to see the picture. I wasn’t so much alone, as in a constant state of flux. Nobody was really ever around long enough to see my behavior long-term to have even a chance of noticing what was wrong with me. When all of the clues are spread out over 10 players who don’t know they’re playing; no one gets the correct answer of “It was Professor Plum, on the bridge of the Space Battleship Yamato, with a bottle of astro-glide…” Yep, most were clueless, or just too distracted.

I’ll end this section with a sort of “disclaimer” if you will. I am not an “I blame blah-blah-blah for all my issues” person. Again, I’m relating cause and effect. The people who volunteered to watch my brother and I were all wonderful people for the most part. I am glad to this day that they were willing to allow a couple entropy machines into their lives and disrupt their daily schedules.  They allowed this disruption for little more reward than the thanks of a grateful parent. I could not then, nor now, have expected any of them to have seen me as more than a smart kid that was hyper and moody. How could they? They had lives going on and decided to be charitable enough sharing their homes and food with us. Hell, I have a hard time now as an adult keeping track of all the things that need done at my home with just Kim and the dogs, and I see them all day long. Unless one of those parents that watched me was a multitasking deity, they would have had zero chance at observing me enough to see patterns or cause-and-effect behavior scenarios. Hells, I’m just glad that none of them became alcoholics after dealing with us kids.

TL/DR Before I get to the thanking portion, the quick take away is that bi-polar is hard to diagnose correctly. Don’t be a helicopter parent, but don’t ignore any child’s behavior if you think there is reason for concern. True, even the most diplomatic overtures can quickly escalate into WWIII when talking to other parents about kids’ behaviors. But to be honest people, we need to be a little less polite, and a bit more involved if we are going to start catching these types of diseases early.