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Bipolar Disorder Treatment

I have and am on medication for bipolar disorder. Usually I'm pretty good but then winter comes around and my relative sanity comes crashing down around me. This year isn't so bad (I got a therapy light and am in a generally better and more stable state of mind) but I'm still feeling aftershocks from last year. Skip down to the last paragraph for the actual question if you'd like.

Long story medium: After a recent-at-the-time (and awful, and unnecessarily prolonged) breakup and while not realizing that I needed a (received, eventually) medication adjustment and suffering from SAD, I met a girl. Cue brainfire, limerence, intense crushing, whatever. She kept me at arm's length all the while (as we irregularly slept together,) and I remained incredibly determined to win her over if for any reason then because my previous relationship spent four months decaying into a mutual enmity and she was the first girl since to have shown me genuine (if limited) affection. Barely any of this 'relationship' was remotely healthy, 75% of it taking place entirely in my mind. She was always there, intruding on everything, all the time. I tried all sorts of mental tricks to get her out, to no avail.

(NB: one of the biggest components of my mental illness is thought-feedback-loops. The utter inability to get thoughts out of my head. It's usually limited to abstract things: song lyrics, phrases, etc. but this time it was experiences with a person. The mood stabilizers work wonderfully to stop that, but, like I said, I needed and adjustment and didn't realize it.)

Six months later, my perseverance having worked out somewhat, we were seeing one another regularly, meeting one another's friends, etc. I couldn't stand it being 'unofficial' anymore and told her that I was in love with her. The sentiment was not returned. I broke it off then and there, at the very apex of my feelings for her. If I had ever done anything in my life that made me consider myself a Man, that was it right there. It was the right thing to do and I have never doubted or regretted it. My relationship after her was intensely colored by her memory. All the time. Having recently left this latter relationship (on the mutual grounds that neither of us were actually into each other and just keeping up appearances for sex and comfort) I more-or-less got over her (the person) as well.

I can't get over the desire to be in a relationship as INTENSE as that one. Even though I'm well aware that the intensity was almost entirely due to a flare-up of the symptoms of mental illness. No part of the relationship was healthy and I felt mentally stressed and exhausted and generally shitty most of the time, mainly from feeling "neglected." I feel like a recovered addict trying to adjust to a drug-less life and missing the ephemeral highs while ignoring the horrible, ever-present withdrawal symptoms (and considering this is a neurochemical thing, I pretty much am.) I'm surrounded by close friends in generally healthy relationships (relationships that I have watched form) I know I shouldn't expect to have my heart go up in an inferno like it did. How do you, person who isn't me, deal with this? How do you acknowledge that luke-warm mutual appreciation and attraction can be a good start for a relationship?

"Therapy," unfortunately, isn't a workable solution just yet. I'm having a rough enough time paying for my psychiatrist (who is very, very good,) going to school and holding down a job.

Last year I interviewed Carlton Davis, author of Bipolar Bare, a unique, award-winning memoir that details the author’s lifelong struggle with Bipolar Disorder, a painful yet hopeful book that I believed deserved more attention, and I was glad to share it with the reading community. 

In the interview, however, Davis revealed the vital role his wife had played in the long and painful healing process of this powerful disorder…and I started wondering about her responsibility in all of this: the love, the hate, the frustration, the hope, the disappointment and the thousand other constantly competing emotions that must’ve attacked the secret well of strength (or weakness) she’d called on again and again in order to endure her husband’s illness and ultimately aid in his recovery.

At about that time, I had met and begun a correspondence with a young poet in Palms Springs, California named Stephanie Lynn Hilpert. She said she wanted me to review her book, Daughter of a Rogue & Poems of the Dung Beetle Girl, a collection of poetry she had written over the years to address her feelings about her father’s battle with Schizophrenia – at the core of which was a powerful delusion that he was the second son of God – which would cause him to lose everything and leave him homeless when Stephanie was just 14 years old. You may remember the video footage of Stephanie and her father on the last show of MTV News Unfiltered. Either way, after my interview with Davis, I agreed to review her book and interview her for the LA Books Examiner – and I’m glad I did.

“Daughter of a Rogue” is the title poem of the short collection of 21 poems. The remaining 20 poems make up the “Poems of the Dung Beetle Girl”, a collection of traditional prose poems that are filled with traditional images of angst: bears, bees, beetles, birds, even alligators. In “Daughter”, however, we get the real story discussed above (the silence of suffering, the loneliness, the shame, the love) in a 29-page rant of raw emotion stripped down to single-word lines of poetry arranged down the center of the page like a spray of bullets. Normally, this would annoy me. I like the rules. I prefer structure and order – there’s a couple of typos, too (arrgh!). But something about these separate but connected words kept pushing me along. After all, it’s not a sonnet or an ode. It reminds of those games of association we all sometimes play – What’s the first word you think of when I say? – only it’s dozens of words at a time, dozens of images, and dozens of emotions. I took it as a reluctance, not a refusal, to conform.

There’s no doubt you’ll either love or hate this unusual presentation right away. Stephanie will tell you that herself. Personally, I like it. It’s short enough to appreciate but not overwhelm. Sure, I don’t think this is something I’ll turn to again and again like my beloved traditional rule-following poems. Instead I see this poem more as an experience – a positive experience – a quick trip to a world in which I don’t belong, a world of loneliness and pain, a world of mental illness we’re not supposed to talk about in polite company – a tour the world of those among us who don’t have a choice but to live there, secretly and quietly loving and hating the family member whose mental illness holds them all hostage.

To read the full review and interview, visit LA Books Examiner.

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