I’m bipolar II. My “crazy” group has a number of bipolar I people in it, so I am pretty familiar with it. There is really no difference on the depression side between the two forms. The main difference is that the mania of Bipolar I goes a lot higher and they get a lot of significant consequences as a result.
They can get paranoid. They can completely lose any sense of awareness of who they are or what they are doing. They can go on spending sprees, or on theft sprees, or get very belligerent and combative. That’s on the downside of the mania. On the upside, they can feel on top of the world and full of ideas and plans and they feel like they have the energy to save the world. Of course, they also have no follow-thru.
Like everyone else here, except @silentwanderer, I think it is very important to see a psychiatrist who will most likely prescribe meds. It is important to tell the shrink about side effects that you don’t want and they will try to steer around them. My shrink says that Lithium is the “gold standard.”
A lot of shrinks won’t use Lithium because people are afraid of it—long term use, in the old days, led to kidney problems. Nowadays they give a low enough dosage that is still therapeutic, and they say that it is unlikely that you will have kidney problems. I’m on lithium and it is very helpful.
Therapy is as important as meds. A therapist can teach you techniques that can help you cope the mental effects of the disorder. I don’t meditate, but I do play music and dance, and both have the same effect as meditation. I find meditation to be very difficult, perhaps for the same reasons you do, but dancing and making music stops my mind and stops my judging of myself and my negative comments to myself and this is a huge relief, even if the effect only lasts and hour or two past the meditation.
It doesn’t have to be meditation. Hard exercise will do the same thing for you, as will any creative activity that you throw yourself heart and soul into. Fluthering, for example, can serve this purpose. It is easy to get totally lost in advice giving, and in focusing on others, you can forget yourself, which is very helpful.
Another technique that helps is mindfulness. Mindfulness is a way of dealing with all the negative thoughts that doesn’t require you to fight them or change them. This is good for people like me who blame themselves for failing to accomplish something. For me, cognitive behavioral therapy is very bad, because it blames the victim for not getting better. It teaches you that you can control your disease, which I believe is wrong. We can not control anything about this.
However, what we can do is learn to not be so influenced by the disorder. We can let the effects go by without becoming attached to them. We can do a kind of mental jujitsu that uses the energy of the disorder to throw itself away from us.
About suicide—no one wants to die. What we want is for the pain to stop. Sometimes the pain is so bad it seems like only suicide will end it. We have no hope of ever feeling good again. No one who hasn’t experienced this can probably understand why most people who have this kind of depression would prefer torture to depression.
When you want to die, I think it is helpful to find a friend who is in the same place you are, or who has been there. There was a time when I was really ready to check out, but I didn’t think I could do it on my own, so I called a friend to make a pact. We started talking about how we would do that, and that was probably the most therapeutic thing we could have done, because killing yourself… or rather, finding an appropriate way to kill yourself is about the funniest thing there is on earth. Again, I doubt anyone else could understand. Most people are so freaked out by people who want to die.
In any case, and this could just be me, my friend and I started discussing this and let me tell you, the search for the appropriate means of death is very difficult and…. funny. We started laughing and then soon we were laughing so hard we couldn’t breathe. We almost killed ourselves from laughing to death. Well. Maybe not almost, but still, one could see how it could happen.
Suicide is about relieving the pain, and if you find another way to relieve the pain, it is not so necessary. Hanging out with people who have been there is very therapeutic. They don’t just tell you what you can do; they provide love, and love is probably the deepest need we have when we are depressed enough to die from pain. The pain is about not feeling loved and not feeling lovable or worth while or having any reason to continue to exist on the planet. But love does make a difference, and the love of others who are sick is not bullshit. You know they won’t lie to you.
I can’t explain this. All I know is that I never believed anyone loved me, no matter how much they said it. I thought they were just saying it to try to make me feel better. But when other people who were sick told me they valued me, I believed it. I knew they wouldn’t bullshit me, because they don’t want to be bullshitted either. And it is so important for people to be honest because when you have bipolar, your shit detector is working overtime, and it is hard to believe anyone.
I hope you can find a group of people like you. There are support groups in a lot of places. Maybe one is near you. Not all support groups are the same, though, so it is important to find one that fits you.
Good luck.
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