[RonPrice]

BI-POLAR DISORDER IN MY FAMILY AN 80 YEAR STORY IN CONTEXT:
1926-2006

I will begin this account with the earliest experiences of bi-polar disorder or perhaps a mild schizo-affected problem I know of in my mother’s life, experiences that, from what she told me decades ago seem to fit into this narrative. My mother passed away in 1978 and all I have is the anecdotal references to her illness(anecdotes told me 40 years ago) going back to my mother’s early twenties. My guesstimation is about 1926. She told me she “stayed home from work and rested in the garden.” Without medication, these last decades of centuries, if not millennia, of dark ages for people with bi-polar disorder, my mother suffered mood swings all her life and in about 1926 they were incapacitating. I will say no more about my mother’s condition for now. Perhaps at a later date I will go into more detail for there is much more that I could add, much more to say on the subject.

My experience both long and short term with manic-depression, or bi-polar illness as it has come to be called in recent years, and with other maladies; as well as my personal circumstances at home in relation to my wife’s illness in recent years should provide you with an adequate information base to evaluate my situation, make relevant comparisons and contrasts to your own predicament whatever it may be and thereby gain some helpful knowledge or understandings which may be of use to you in personal terms. This wider experience which I outline here will place my bi-polar disorder in context and should provide others with what I hope is a helpful perspective on their own condition and situation. This essay of nearly 4500 words and six A-4 pages is primarily written for internet sites on mental health, especially as manifested in depression and the bi-polar disorder. I also write this essay, this reflection, for my own satisfaction, to put into words something has has influenced my life for over half a century. Originally written in 2003, this piece of writing has been revised many times after my own introspections and the feedback from various internet respondents

1. Manic-Depression: Preamble

After half a dozen episodes, varying in length from several days to several months, and many experiences on the fringe of normality of manic-depressive symptoms between 1946 and 1980, I was treated with lithium carbonate in Launceston by a psychiatrist and officially diagnosed as manic-depressive. In some ways names are not that important and to include them here in this account often causes confidentiality problems and so I leave them out. Those whose names I could mention would not be troubled by their inclusion and I certainly appreciate the clinical work of several of the psychiatrists I have had over the years. Their professional work has been invaluable and I want readers to recognize the primacy I give to the work of these specialized doctors for their help and assistance, their saving me from what in any previous age and time would have been a horrific life experience.

I have been on lithium now for twenty-six years, about half of the total time I have experienced this significantly/partially genetic disorder. My mood swings, now in 2006, take place, for the most part, late in the evening and after midnight with the death wish still part of the experience. The symptoms that affect my daily working capacity are fatigue and psychological weariness, sometimes after a night of light sleeping, tossing and turning and/or sometimes late at night after many hours of intellectual activity. Dryness of the mouth and short term memory loss also seem to affect my daily life as a result of (a) lithium treatment and (b) in the case of memory loss, perhaps due to the eight ECT treatments I had as far back as the late 1960s. My current psychiatrist who specializes in treating people with bi-polar disorder, has been providing his professional advice for the last five years, after a series of psychiatrists I have had going back to 1968.

It seemed appropriate to outline this detailed statement for several purposes since the issue of the nature of my problem and what I have called manic-depression/bi-polar disorder is a complex one, varies from person to person and has been of concern over the sixty years that I have had to deal with its symptoms in my personal and working life-as have others involved with me. It is difficult to characterize my condition and it is for this reason that I have written out this somewhat long statement for my satisfaction and the use by others. I hope the account below, in both long and short term contexts, will explain adequately my reasons for not wanting to work in any employment position or participate in any demanding social context. This account may also provide those interested with some useful information for dealing with their own problems.

2. Manic-Depression: Long-term 1946-2002

There seems to be a process, one that I have experienced on a daily basis for some 60 years. The details, the symptoms, the behaviour, has of course varied with the years, with the decades. I cross from some normal behavioural constellation to an abnormal one. The abnormal extreme position has, as I say, varied from year to year in content, texture, tone and intensity. In 1946 it was characterized by uncontrollable early childhood behaviour for my mother to deal with and my present diagnosis of bi-polarism at that early stage is essentially a theoretical position that I have come to see only in retrospect. At the moment my bi-polarism is characterized by a tedium vitae attitude and behaviour as I have come to call it. Due to this "process" over the last sixty years, due to the part of the process which occurs in varying degrees in various accentuated forms, it has often been difficult to define just where I was at any one time along that 'normal-abnormal' continuum. This was true at both the depressive end and the hypomanic end of the spectrum. It is difficult, therefore, to actually name the number of times when I have had major manic-depressive episodes, perhaps as many as eight, certainly as few as four, in my whole life, from the first episode--which may not have been an episode--in 1946 to the last brief episode in 1990 when I went off my lithium for between one and three months. Defining an episode is not easy for me to do.

Since 1990 I have no longer had any difficulty knowing where I was in this process, this swing of mood and feelings. The great intensities have gone. Total acceptance of the nessessity of taking lithium was a critical variable in this process and took a decade to achieve. At the hypomanic end of the continuum over the years there were experiences like the following: violent emotional instability and oscillation, abrupt changes and a sudden change in a large number of intellectual assumptions, elation, high energy. Mental balance, a psychological coherence between intellect and emotion and a rational reaction to the outside world all seemed to blow away, over a few hours to a few days, as I was plunged in a sea of what could be variously described as: emotional heat, intense awareness, sensitivity, sleeplessness, voluble talking, racing mental activity, fear, excessive and clearly irrational paranoia--and in 1968 virtually total incoherence at times--at one end of the spectrum; or intense depression, melancholia, an inner sense of despair and a desire to commit suicide at the other end. The latter I experienced from 1963 to 1965, off and on; the former from 1964 to 1990, on several occasions.
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[magprob]

Well Ron, thank you for sharing that. I guess as we ripen we become more comfortable in our skin. I know when I was young I was as wild as hell! People thought I was crazy but I figured if being crazy is this much fun then I do not want to be sane like them! Now that I have gotten older, I find being wild is too painful. I do not heal as quickly. I guess you could say I spent the first half of my life making the second half miserable.

[RonPrice]

Yes, the joys of youth often turn out to plague us with the years--especially the excesses of youth. But there are so many patterns in life it is hard to generalize. I wish you well coping with whatever miseries are coming your way.-Ron