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    Being Bipolar Living with Manic-Depressive Disorder: A Patient's Firsthand Account
    Being Bipolar Living with Manic-Depressive Disorder: A Patient's Firsthand Account
    Being Bipolar Living with Manic-Depressive Disorder: A Patient's Firsthand Account
    Ebook61 pages46 minutes

    Being Bipolar Living with Manic-Depressive Disorder: A Patient's Firsthand Account

    By Claudette Cruz

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    About this ebook

    Being Bipolar—Living With Manic-Depressive Disorder: A Patient’s Firsthand Account is an inside look into the mind of a bipolar patient. I've struggled with bipolar disorder all my life, even before I was diagnosed at the age of 16. With this book, I hope to illustrate the daily and continuing struggles that a person with bipolar disorder may face. This is not a success story, however.
    Though I hope bipolar people will read this, my main focus is spreading awareness to people who have acquaintances, family members, etc. who suffer from the disease. I hope for acceptance and for understanding for people with mental illness, especially those suffering from bipolar disease.

    Please rate and review if you find this book helpful. I am open to feedback in regards to content you'd like to know more about.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherClaudette Cruz
    Release dateJul 10, 2015
    ISBN9781310407215
    Being Bipolar Living with Manic-Depressive Disorder: A Patient's Firsthand Account

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      Being Bipolar Living with Manic-Depressive Disorder - Claudette Cruz

      Foreword

      Let me start by clarifying something: this is not a medical textbook, nor is it meant to be used as a diagnostic tool or as anything other than a narration of the life I have experienced living with bipolar disorder. The purpose of this book, I hope, is to share how bipolar disorder has affected my life, and how it may similarly affect the lives of people living with the disease, not to mention their loved ones. Not a week goes by when I don’t encounter some sort of article or video about some person who became unhinged and killed others. Often, out of ignorance, people lump in bipolar patients and other people with mental illnesses with your common criminals. I want to change that through my story.

      I want to change peoples’ perspective on bipolar patients. I want to spread awareness about how it’s like, how I see things, what I feel. Many times people will tell me that I’m being unreasonable, that I’m not making sense, when my mind, according to my different process of reaching a logical course of action, tells me I’m in the right.

      People not walking in our footsteps find it hard to grasp what we go through. You don’t know how sick I am of listening to my mother tell me to make more of an effort, that I was not being cooperative when I couldn’t get out of bed in the mornings to go to college. I’m not lazy. I never have been. When I have the energy, I’ll exercise for an hour straight, or go on a cleaning spree, or work for hours without a break. My problem is that I’m pretty much chronically depressed. It’s not a mild depression either; my depression is so severe that I feel like my body is sinking into itself. It feels like I’m caving in. Taking a breath is so hard that I feel exhausted just from inhaling and exhaling.

      I feel particularly blessed in that I am smart enough and possess enough eloquence to express myself. Not everyone can. I want to be the voice for those people, my fellow sufferers. It really frustrates me when no one seems to understand me, to understand what it’s like to be judged and looked down upon. Some of my volatile incidents, when I’d get violent, before I was medicated, stemmed from me reaching a snapping point when my family was harassing me. I’d get frustrated, especially because I could not explain what was going on, why I didn’t want to get out of bed, why the tears would burst out over the slightest provocation.

      When my brother was hurling insults, ranting about how I was useless and good for nothing and just lazy, it hurt so much because I couldn’t explain why he was wrong. I’d burst in tears out of frustration. Those hurtful epithets were fallacious, but I was angry that I couldn’t give a solid reason as to why they weren’t when in all appearances he was completely right. My father would also verbally abuse me, and to this day, I can’t seem to talk to explain myself reasonably to him without bursting into tears, even though now he knows what was happening back then. Unfortunately, ignorance about my condition pretty much shaped the way my relationships with my family developed. To this day, I fear my dad, try to avoid making my brother think badly of me, and am very dependent on my mother for everything.

      I grew up. I went through high school and completed some college. I learned to express myself better, and once my condition was diagnosed, everything clicked. Talking things over with psychiatrists was invaluable. They helped fill in the blanks. They explained why this or that symptom was occurring. They explained something crucial that I would like to get across out there—depression doesn’t manifest itself only through tears and sadness. There are lots of other symptoms that are manifestations of depression, and it’s essential that people not in our shoes get that through their heads. Depression isn’t just about tears, just like the manias a bipolar person experiences are not expressed solely through irritability. Later on in this book I will further detail how my ups and my downs have manifested themselves. I feel it’s very important to pay particular attention to those chapters if you purchased this book in the hopes of trying to understand the behaviors of that family member or acquaintance in your life who has been diagnosed with manic-depressive disorder, i.e. bipolar

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