Raw Writing for the Real World of Bipolar

Wow, it’s been a rough and wonderful few weeks. My article on Health.com on Life as a Bipolar Mom was featured on CNN and it got a lot of buzz. Some of it was good and some of it was bad. I didn’t figure in the stigma of Bipolar Disorder until it was too late, but I’m glad that I came out of the ‘Bipolar Closet’.

A while ago I told my family. It was difficult then, too. It was hard to have a conversation about my diagnosis by three different doctors with parents that don’t believe in mental illness. My father asked what Bipolar Disorder was about. After I told him that it’s a mental disease that alternates between the highs of mania and the lows of depression he was silent. My mother, on the other hand, gave me a load of crap on how it was just a label that the doctors were trying to place on me and I needed to ignore them. I told my best friend of over ten years and she promptly asked me questions about my medications and she’s since stated that she’s worried that I take too many of them. I told my Unitarian Universalist church group and they were supportive, mainly because many of them are educated and liberal.

There’s such a horrible stigma attached to Bipolar. It’s not enough that we have to try and live our everyday lives as normally as we possibly can. We’re bombarded in the media, too. When a celebrity comes out of the closet it is with shock and taboo. Look at the media blitz that occurred when Britney Spears was hospitalized with her disorder. Since then she’s tried to maintain a lower profile while trying to deal with her disorder and regain rights to her children. She’s proven that she, like many others with the disorder, can regain stability in her illness. This doesn’t mean that she won’t relapse. Unfortunately, it’s tougher for her becase the media will be there, too, when it happens.

I believe that it’s imperative to our journey to mental stability to come out of the closet anyway. It may be a hard road to travel, but I think it helps you grow. Hearing some ridiculous taunts and advice may be difficult to hear, but I think it helps, too. Most of the advice that I’ve received has been aimed at the medications that I take. I’ve heard everything about homeopathic remedies and that getting off my medications would be the best thing for me. While some of the advice is well intentioned, I also feel that some of it is self-serving. These people don’t know me. They don’t know what it’s like to be in my body and experience hallucinations or suicidal thoughts. They don’t know how horrible I feel when I cry that my life is not what I wanted it to be before my diagnosis. I wanted to be a writer or a lawyer. Now I feel that those dreams can’t be accomplished. These people don’t know how defeated I feel sometimes.

But when you come out of the Bipolar closet, you don’t do it for them. You do it for you. You do it to prove to yourself that you are worthy, even if they don’t agree with you. You do it to fight the stigma out there. You are a normal person, even if you’re a little tainted by a mental illness. You’re still you. You do it to educate the person standing next to you so hopefully they will learn to understand that this is a disease of the mind, not of the soul.

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© 2009 Cristina Fender