RealMental

Every once in a while, you run across something that makes it easier to explain yourself. I belong to a huge support group for the loved ones of people with bipolar disorder.  I share and receive information from lots of other people who are in similar situations.  I read just about every study that gets published, and every opinion piece that I see on bipolar disorder, its treatments, its ramifications, etc., because I have learned, since my husband’s diagnosis, that some cliches (“knowledge is power” and “forewarned is forearmed” both come to mind) are borne of truth. But it was a passage from a pop novel last year that crystallized some of my own feelings about loving someone with a mental illness–a Stephen King novel, at that: Lisey’s Story.

“There’s a period of time–two weeks, maybe–when she goes on trying to believe that things are getting better. Later she’ll ask herself how she could be so stupid, so willfully blind, how she could mistake his frantic struggle to hold onto the world (and her!) for any kind of improvement, but of course when straws are all you have, you grasp them.”

“…when straws are all you have, you grasp them.”  I read that passage over and over, tears flowing, because it GOT me.  Right in the heart.  My husband, the man that I love more than my own life, is saddled with a heavy variety of the mental illness that is bipolar disorder, and like the writer character in this book, he is highly conscientious in his dealing with what is basically one of life’s “unfair” afflictions, and he does what he can to shield his loved ones from the worst of it, sometimes to his own detriment. Read more »

This story is re-tooled from a post on my personal blog, and illustrates the importance of finding the right therapist. Unfortunately, sometimes that requires some trial-and-error. You’ll have to excuse the overuse of CAPITAL LETTERS in this post–it was right before my hysterectomy, and aside from the emotional/mental turmoil in our lives at that time, I was hormonal, in pain, and frightened to death about what was to come. Just setting the context.

Today, Alex and I saw our new “potential” therapist, for about the third time. And we frightened the living wampus out of him. I kid you NOT. He is not our new “potential” therapist any more, though he is not yet aware of that.

We have been with a psychologist that we both like VERY much for over three years. He’s local, accessible, “gets” us, KNOWS OUR RIDICULOUSLY INTENSIVE “HISTORY”– much of which you would not believe in a million years even if I decided to tell every bit of it to you, which I most certainly ain’t gonna–and most importantly of all, we always leave his office feeling better, like a weight’s been lifted off our shoulders, than we did when we went in. He’s not an M.D., but he is a doctor, and he practices the type of therapy that is said to be most effective with bipolar patients (those who, like Alex, are stable enough for therapy to be helpful–never ask me how much therapy money we tossed down the proverbial rat-hole without FIRST achieving chemical stability–ever), and he seems to keep up with peer-reviewed studies and texts that are current in the profession. He sees us both as a couple and individually, depending on whatever that session’s circumstances seem to dictate, and he’s quite intuitive as to what issue most needs attention at any given time, and then getting to the meat of it, and helping us work it out. Read more »