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    Bipolar Wellness: How to Recover from Bipolar Illness
    Bipolar Wellness: How to Recover from Bipolar Illness
    Bipolar Wellness: How to Recover from Bipolar Illness
    Ebook342 pages4 hours

    Bipolar Wellness: How to Recover from Bipolar Illness

    By Michael Rose

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    About this ebook

    For All those Struggling with Bipolar Disorder: families, friends, individuals. Here’s help!
    With new information on lifelong recovery from Bipolar Disorder, this book holds the keys to hope.
    It offers five gifts to move a person toward recovery:
    •Practical tools for recovery including worksheets that help you go beyond mere survival to wellness—even happiness
    •Comprehensive and understandable explanations of how to turn Bipolar Illness into Bipolar Wellness
    •A promising nutritional approach that’s being tested at advanced psychiatric facilities.
    •The author’s personal story of being stuck in a dark pit, finding his way out, and creating this book as a roadmap for you
    •Most of all, a new mindset to help you find a happy, steady reality in the Mid-Polar Zone between mania and depression, with clear tools on how to get back there whenever your pendulum is swinging wildly.

    “There are virtually no books that include an organized system for life-long recovery from bipolar illness. Michael Rose has done just that. Bipolar Wellness is written from the ground up by one who suffered many years with the problems of bipolar illness” Phillip Springer, M.D., Psychiatrist

    Before accepting his bipolar illness, MICHAEL ROSE, M.A led an over-adventurous life as a New-Age jazz flautist producing four albums, a children’s songwriter, a cook on an ocean-going tugboat, and a college ceramics instructor. After accepting and treating his illness, he became a master’s-level teaching psychologist and a board member/administrator at a peer-staffed psychiatric recovery and support facility. Using nutrition in his own recovery and in treating others, he became licensed in Florida as a Nutrition Counselor. Happily married, he develops products in the health food industry and is a professional life coach specializing in bipolar recovery. He hopes that this, his second book, will have a powerful impact on the treatment of bipolar disorder.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMichael Rose
    Release dateAug 5, 2018
    ISBN9780999111246
    Bipolar Wellness: How to Recover from Bipolar Illness
    Author

    Michael Rose

    Michael Rose was raised on a small family dairy farm in Upstate New York. He retired after serving in executive positions for several global multinational enterprises. He has been a non-executive director for three public companies headquartered in the US. He lives and writes in San Francisco.

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      Book preview

      Bipolar Wellness - Michael Rose

      Chapter 1 - My Story: From Bipolar Illness

      Bipolar illness can have a strong genetic component, which predisposes us to the illness to one degree or another. It doesn’t have to be genetic, but it certainly seems to run in my family. My father was probably one of the first people in the USA to take lithium when the FDA approved it for bipolar illness in 1970. He first became manic as a soldier in World War II while under heavy aerial bombardment by the Japanese in New Guinea. They shipped him back to the States on a boat, immersing him in tubs of ice-water to calm him down. At least our treatments for bipolar illness have progressed a bit since then. After returning from the front, he recovered and led a fairly normal, over-active life until age 50, when he began serious cycles of depression and mania. Extreme stress can precipitate the illness earlier than it might normally appear.

      His brother, my Uncle Aaron, killed himself in California during the Great Depression. He had been fired for trying to unionize his uncle’s tie factory in Boston while working there, a fairly risky behavior. He then left for California where, from family legend, he had a heartbreaking relationship that resulted in his jumping off a cliff. My father’s Uncle Charles, who suffered trauma in World War I, killed himself on the day of his son’s 13th birthday. Sadly, there are many others on my father’s side of the family with symptoms of bipolar illness, some with various degrees of dysfunction. My brother, though never hospitalized, had a few episodes of mania, which was sufficient for us to be included in Columbia University’s study of siblings to identify the genetic markers. My father’s nephew, my cousin Steve, who inspired this book with his questions and theories of his own bipolar illness, jumped in front of a train a few years ago. Suicide is the most common deadly consequence of bipolar illness spinning out of control.

      My own story began in 1967 when I was 19 years old. I had been depressed and anxious the previous year, dealing with a lot of personal issues. I didn’t know I had the genetic predisposition for manic depressive mood swings. One day I became manic after smoking a lot of opiated hashish. This triggered my first manic episode, and I ended up being hospitalized for almost a year. In those days, long-term psychiatric hospitalization was the norm rather than the exception. This experience included such pleasures as solitary confinement, being tackled and choked by four University of Miami football players who worked part-time as psychiatric aides, and then injected with an overdose of Thorazine, a powerful tranquilizer. I had the additional pleasure of receiving Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) multiple times. The only resulting good was… I survived. There must have been angels watching over me, as the outcome was never assured. Though ECT was a lot more brutal in the ’60s, it is much less intrusive now. I have even met people who swear by it to cut through their drug-resistant depression.

      Looking back, I was a danger to myself and others. I was acting violently, kicking down doors. I was driving recklessly. I was delusional, talking to flowers and waiting for a flying saucer to pick me up. When I was first brought into the University clinic, I thought the psychiatric nurse was a witch. I threw water on her to make her melt, which I learned from The Wizard of Oz. That is when I was first transported to a psychiatric hospital.

      My manic psychosis was triggered by street drugs, supposedly harmless marijuana and hashish. Despite the move to legalize marijuana for medical use, every street drug known is a clear and present danger to any individual who is predisposed to bipolar illness. DON’T LET ANYONE TELL YOU OTHERWISE! I have seen good people with bipolar illness destroy their lives defending their right to use marijuana and other street drugs, when clearly their drug use was the precipitating and driving factor in the severity of their illness. I also know people who use marijuana and street drugs and do not have severe problems, but when the predisposition is there, watch out!

      When I was finally released from the hospital after a year, I decided to stop taking the recommended medication. This is not an uncommon phenomenon. I mean, who wants to take medication that is the very proof you have a mental illness no one would want? Besides, there were side-effects like having a dry mouth, which irritated the heck out of me. However, I now have a different perspective, and I’ve dedicated a special chapter in the book to meds.

      For the next 20 years, I was very unstable, surely because I decided to skip the medications. If I wasn’t suffering from actual depression or mania, then I was hypomanic, keeping just under the radar of behaviors that could get me in trouble. Or I was in the mixed state where depression and mania blend. I was full of angst, uncertainty, and indecision about life choices: education, career, and marriage. I was continually immersed in conflicts with friends and romantic partners. I rarely finished projects. I was excitable, irritable, temperamental, and angry. I was a poster child for the classic description of dysphoria, another word for the mixed state that blends both the depression and mania of bipolar illness.

      I was hospitalized again in 1989, 22 years later, but for only eight days. I had been seeing a trusted psychiatrist because I had grown a huge business and was exhausted, overworked, and depressed. He put me on an antidepressant. I felt better, but being the old hippy I was, I read the Physician’s Desk Reference and saw I was only taking about half the allowable maximum dose, so I just raised the dose without asking my doctor and ended up extremely manic. I was driving everyone around me crazy. I finally called my doctor and said, Hey, I want to check into the psychiatric hospital. He asked why, and I replied, I want to get over the trauma of my hospitalization as a teenager, and I think I can work through it there.

      He said, Good, because I’ve been getting calls from your family and friends, and they think you’re not acting like yourself.

      I checked in voluntarily. Once in, of course, I couldn’t check out, though I tried; they had a legal right to hold me for observation for 72 hours. So I drove the nurses as crazy as I could until my shrink came in, yelling at me, You have a mother complex the size of a battleship! I think he meant I was transferring all my childhood frustrations with my mom onto the long-suffering female psychiatric nurses. In my hyper state at the time, most of them seemed to me like Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The inflexible rules on that locked ward struck me as unreasonable. For instance, my doctor convinced me to check into the psychiatric hospital because I had sleep deprivation. I brought half a dozen books to read and some music tapes to listen to with a tape player. When I checked in, they were all taken away to protect me from becoming more hyper, whereas they were exactly what I needed to relax. I was incensed.

      After I got out of the hospital, I wrote, The only thing that’s changed in mental hospitals in the last 20 years is me. I think I meant that the arbitrary rules and strict enforcement in an institutional setting never feel good. I wish there was some way psychiatric hospitals could address the needs of each patient sensitively and individually. Someday, perhaps.

      Besides getting properly medicated, I did get another huge gift from my stay. I was in a group run by a psychiatric nurse. After sharing the story of my first hospitalization twenty years before and the subsequent decades of my chaotic and colorful life, she looked at me and knowingly said, Oh, you’ve been hypomanic! It was like a long line of dominoes falling. I got it! I understood both that I had the illness and how it had made my life an enormous experience of chaos. I could suddenly look back at those twenty years and finally admit to myself the intense, disastrous reality that I had lived through—crazy relationships, wild schemes, constant antagonism, extreme emotions, mood swings, wild love, and extreme heartbreaks.

      Through this revelation, I could see that the last twenty years of my life had been extraordinarily painful, swinging back and forth like an old tire tied to a tree, between mania on one side to depression on the other. Depression hurt like a deep cut, or even as much as a broken bone. Mania led me into brick walls at high speed, and recovery from the crash always took months or even years. As you probably know, the crash can be emotional: a broken relationship, divorce, or family feud. Or it could be a legal entanglement: eviction, traffic tickets, physical fights leading to assault charges, or disorderly conduct. Reflect on your own consequences. There are so many types of accidents.

      Beginning with the acceptance of my illness, I spent the next 25 years focusing intensely on how to recover from bipolar illness and hypomania. At the end of this period, a surprising gift came to me while participating in a support group of the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance (DBSA). Everyone was sharing about their diagnosis. In a flip of the frontal lobe, I blurted out that my diagnosis was Tripolar Wellness. At that moment, my path towards high-level recovery began to crystalize. (I’ve grown to love the term Tripolar Wellness. Nevertheless, I have used Bipolar Wellness in the title and throughout this book, to be clear that the book is about recovery from bipolar illness to Bipolar Wellness.)

      Since having this realization and experiencing Bipolar Wellness, I have been working on accepting my bipolar illness more and more and have been helping others accept their illness in the role of peer support rather than as a therapist. I did get my master’s degree in psychology and have taught college-level psychology courses, but I never applied for a license to practice counseling.

      At this point, my recovery is so solid that most people cannot guess that I have the illness unless I tell them. I have been invited several times to speak as a guest lecturer about bipolar illness in the Graduate School of Educational Counseling at the University of Florida. After the lecture (in which I do not disclose my illness), I always ask the students what they imagine someone who is well-medicated and in recovery from bipolar illness might look like. They always describe a significantly disabled person and are surprised when I say, No, they look like me. I am in recovery from bipolar illness.

      I still see a psychiatrist and psychologist, but I treat them like coaches rather than authorities. They consider me to be in a very high state of recovery. However, recovery is not a cure; it does not mean that the depression and mania disappear. Recovery is growing the middle ground, the Mid-Polar Zone, to such an extent that the poles of depression and mania become less extreme and less frequent. To maintain Bipolar Wellness, I continue to watch my cues all the time to make sure my Mid-Polar Zone is stable and hopefully expanding, and that the polar ice-caps of north-mania and south-depression are kept at a safe distance.

      RECOVERY ACTION SHEET

      CHAPTER 1:

      MY STORY: FROM BIPOLAR ILLNESS

      TO BIPOLAR WELLNESS

      GOAL:

      Tell Your Story

      You can use your own Recovery Journal to write your responses to the Recovery Action Sheets. Or you can purchase The Bipolar Wellness Recovery Journal in digital or print format from our website,

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