Of Common or Garden Manic Depressives

It is probably unsurprising that bipolar disorder has attracted such a significant amount of press in recent years.  Let’s face it, the vertiginous highs, desolate lows, incitement to extreme acts and celebrity sufferers make it a pretty tasty morsel for your average journo.  So it’s little wonder that in the early 00s it rose to the status of mental illness du jour, with a public profile variously helped and hindered by the seminal Stephen Fry documentary and a glut of exploitative Kerry Katona reality shows.  But what of the lives of your common or garden manic depressive?  A swift Google will provide you with a smorgasbord of very brave, confessional e-lit detailing the often difficult to read experiences of bipolar sufferers in the throes of depression, hypomania and mania.  What I have yet to find, however, is a voice which goes beyond raising awareness of the symptoms and experiences brought about by the condition.  Bipolar is, as I have learned to my cost, still viewed as a dangerous disease, its sufferers to be pitied and/or feared.  There are a great many of my friends and family who do not and will never know about this huge part of myself because it is so taboo.  What I would like to do here is to take a small step towards redressing the balance; to provide you with a real person’s real(ish) time experience of what, for want of a better word, I must call ‘recovery’: the process of learning to live with bipolar from the point of diagnosis onwards.  Part of making sense of the diagnosis and assimilating it into my life has been, for me, understanding the history of the condition and its treatment, as well as exploring my own relationship with it.  So there’s some of that in here too, though I’ve tried to steer clear of misery-lit territory.  I hope it might even be funny.  Some of the entries are written off the cuff on the date they were blogged, others are transcribed from diaries, scraps of paper and BlackBerry memos written along the way.  All chart the events since I first set foot in the offices of a psychiatrist named J in October 2011.