I. Dirty Dyl, known for his ostentatious attitude (typical of a manic persona) wants to have a rap battle in the middle of the TV room.
Dirty Dyl, who lost phone privileges on his first night dialing 911: I’m being held hostage at South Oaks Hospital, he said & then screamed & shouted & started to cry —
I ask him if poetry will do.
II. I read my poem in art therapy.
Soon, three other patients are scribbling in the small hospital-issue composition notebooks & the backs of napkins in pencil, crayon, or markers (the washable, non-toxic kind) simply because it’s better than passing the time weakly magnetized by television game shows.
III. I know Dirty Dyl, or at least I know his face from a gay hookup app. He with his crooked swagger & snapback caps is Not My Type.
Only I know he is bisexual. Only I know that he fucks people like me.
Somehow, maybe just in Dyl’s mind, being the keeper of this secret inspires trust.
IV. Depressives squint at their words with tired souls, heavy hands & looks of consternation. It’s not beautiful, you know — it’s bedhead & stubble & hospital slippers with the little treads on the bottom — but as they write, they are inspired, their eyes grow bright,
they know of ink on the page, the spark of a fire in their blood & they are increasingly, if just a little bit, alive.
V. Dyl went home before I did. I saw him the other day. He got his job back at the dining hall, where he once came to work on shrooms. He smiled at me & asked, How’s poetry?
I smiled politely back, thinking of a line from Whitman
(I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable)
I am bipolar type 1. 🎭 That is the most severe form of bipolar disorder. (Bipolar 2 can have very severe depression, but because it doesn’t have severe mania it doesn’t progress along the same course. Something like that.) I’ve been inpatient 18 times, and I’ve been discharged from the ER a few additional times as well.
Interestingly, I don’t have what most people would think of if you said “classic bipolar disorder”. I have mostly dysphoric manias (and sometimes euphoric hypomania), so no grandiose delusions or belief that I can see the flow of energy that connects all things. Just bugs that… may or may not be real. 🐜 But, the dysphoric mania type is actually sliiiiiightly more common than euphoric (feel-good) mania in real-world bipolar 1 people, according to one study1.
The main reason my bipolar is unusual is that it is so FAST. My psychiatrist describes it as “brittle” — a medical term often applied to highly unstable diabetes patients, where blood sugar skyrockets but then drops with intervention but then skyrockets again. It follows the same kind of course.
Blood sugar in brittle diabetes
Usually, I think my cycle (including both mania, which almost always comes first for me, and then depression — most bipolar people have one type of episode almost always come first, but it’s a 50/50 split which one2) is 2 to 4 weeks long. If it’s a lot faster than that it’s considered a mixed episode.
I rarely ever have euthymic (normal mood) periods and I don’t have any asymptomatic periods. (I have persistent problems with memory and executive functioning and other stuff.)
💊 Currently every day I take: lithium, Thorazine (chlorpromazine), Zyprexa (olanzapine), Valium (diazepam), and Adderall (amphetamine salts). 💊
What causes bipolar disorder?
A lot of research links bipolar disorder to various things: a) circadian instability, sleep problems ⏰ b) inflammatory processes in the brain 🔥 c) epilepsy 📈 — they have a lot in common, and medications used to treat epilepsy are often used to treat bipolar disorder; I think you can think of bipolar as being similar to some kind of epileptogenic brain activity but on a more macro scale. Similarities to Temporal Lobe Epilepsy include age of onset and genetic cause among other things and they do have a very very high comorbidity rate. d) genetics 🧬 — 97% of bipolar disorder is explained by genetic variance alone and it is more heritable than autism or schizophrenia (I believe it might be the most heritable psychiatric disorder in DSM-5)
Most people get bipolar disorders in their 20s, but I got it early. I had suicidal depression sometime before the age of 10 and had my first clear hypomanic episode when I was 16. My parents were anti-psychiatry, so I wasn’t in treatment until I went to college and I almost became an emancipated minor because I was still 17 and it was that serious 🙃
Unlike autism, which is a fairly new concept (although autistic people have almost certainly existed for thousands of years) bipolar disorder is a very old idea for a distinct illness that occurs in all cultures that I know of. Other English names for it have been “manic depression” (a term I actually prefer), “manic-depressive psychosis”, “circular insanity” 🔁, all referring to a highly organized and unusually patterned occurrence of severe disturbances in mood.
That’s actually what I study now in my PhD program! I’m looking for patterns in bipolar disorder. I’m very good at patterns 🧩
References
1. Grant BF, Stinson FS, Hasin DS, et al. Prevalence, correlates, and comorbidity of bipolar I disorder and axis I and II disorders: Results from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions. J Clin Psychiatry. 2005;66(10):1205-1215. doi:10.4088/JCP.v66n1001
2. Koukopoulos A, Reginaldi D, Tondo L, Visioli C, Baldessarini RJ. Course sequences in bipolar disorder: Depressions preceding or following manias or hypomanias. J Affect Disord. 2013;151(1):105-110. doi:10.1016/j.jad.2013.05.059
A lot of people with conditions that are defined in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) disagree with what their condition is called. In this post, I’m going to muse over changing the names of psychiatric disorders.
When the DSM-III was published, the DSM committee decided that the term “manic depression” had become overly stigmatized and abused. There was little to no change in the diagnostic features or description of the disorder (which has actually been fairly consistent for a very long time!), the only reason for changing the terminology was political. Many years later, I feel this has resulted in the term “bipolar” being just as stigmatized as “manic depression” ever was — except it’s even more abusable, since “bipolar” can be used as an adjective to describe many things, famously including the weather.
It should’ve been obvious that the stigma of manic depression didn’t originate from the term “manic depression” — and therefore not shocking that the same stigma followed, not the term that was used, but the people who live with the disorder. It was always the people, never the term. On top of that, I feel “manic depression” is more accurate as the term “bipolar disorder” doesn’t portray the common reality of mixed episodes and mixed mood presentation. “Bipolar” seems to imply a state of bistability, where two states representing opposite ends of one dimension (mania and depression) are cleanly and abruptly switched between; bipolar can be like this, but it is often messier.
ADHD is a controversial term for some advocates and it’s understandable why. While attention and hyperactivity/impulsivity are characteristics that are used to diagnose the disorder, they’re downstream of the real difference experienced by people who live with the condition — which is developmental effects on executive functioning. Broadening the term to define it by its root cause would probably feel more accurate of the experience of living with the condition.
Inadvertently, if the diagnostic criteria were changed accordingly to reflect other developmental disorders of executive dysfunction, there may be groups of people who didn’t meet the criteria before who now do. This is something to be interested in, of course. Attention and hyperactivity/impulsivity could still be used as specifiers, and the developmental history aspects would probably still be required so that people with executive dysfunction of non-developmental origin aren’t accidentally included. Additionally, we know that autism is associated with some kinds of executive dysfunction and this change would probably blur the lines between them even more — but in reality, those lines are pretty blurry.
Autism Spectrum Disorder?
There is a lot of controversy over this one, and to be honest I don’t have all of the answers. I think “Asperger’s” was a term of limited utility because many studies could not find clear differences between “Asperger’s” and “High Functioning Autism” even though supposedly the Asperger’s group had no language delay and the HFA group did. Their outcomes, though, were the same. So it was decided that we would collapse autism into one diagnosis that represents a gradient or spectrum of features and levels of impact on the person’s life.
However, I actually agree with some advocates who say that this has proven obtrusive for people with high support needs as the common conception of autism drifts further and further from Rain Main to Sheldon Cooper. There are many people out there who no longer believe autism is a disability. I can’t fully reconcile myself with this stance when we’re talking about a nonverbal adult with an IQ of 40: this person’s life is much, much different than mine, and I genuinely want to help them in the most effective way I can. At this venture, I believe we need a term for people with high support needs. But, the options thus far have been problematic (for example, I do see the reasons why “high functioning” and “low functioning” are much too simplistic to capture meaningful differences).
In the end, the best I can come up with right now is to include Verbal IQ score as a specifier. It’s not perfect (we know IQ means something specific, and can’t be generalized to “intelligence”), but it’s one of the better indicators we reliably have of how disabled this person is, how many barriers they’re going to face to get treated fairly and with respect. And, it doesn’t create a competition where someone is more or less autistic than I am. We’re both autistic; it’s just that one of us has an IQ of 40 and that information isn’t trite. Despite the risks of increasing discrimination, I think we’ve seen with the bipolar fiasco that changing terms merely to avoid stigma (which is attached to people, not to terms) is not a good idea.
I had always thought I had ADHD inattentive type. However, when I recently asked my psychiatrist (out of curiosity) she chuckled and said that, in her clinical opinion, I have the combined type.
Part of my perception may come from that fact that, due to my mild cerebral palsy, I move at a much slower pace than other people — thereby masking some apparent “hyperactivity”. To complicate matters, I’m currently taking two antipsychotics (Thorazine/chlorpromazine and Zyprexa/olanzapine) both of which can cause side effects that are phenotypically similar to hyperactivity (this is called akathisia). But how much of that is the drug per se, and how much of it is my ADHD (which may, in turn, be worsened by the drug)?
I think there’s a broader misconception at play. We simply do not know how to identify hyperactivity in developmental adults.
The image of a hyperactive child is alive and well in our collective consciousness, but what happens to us when we grow up?
First off, let’s get some facts straight. In adults with ADHD, it’s more common to have symptoms of inattention (about 90% have these kinds of symptoms in a prominent way) while only about half of adults display clinically relevant hyperactivity or impulsivity1. By implication, we can assume that the population of adults with ADHD breaks down something like this: 10% have hyperactive type, 40% have combined type, and 50% have inattentive type. Those numbers may be a little off, but it’s a good place to start.
Yet, even though it is acknowledged that adults have hyperactivity and impulsivity, these symptoms are not well understood in adults — at least, they aren’t characterized as well as they are for children. And the presentation of these symptoms changes over the lifespan. It is thought by researchers that hyperactivity decays as the ADHD child becomes an adult, while inattention persists1.
Here are diagnostic criteria for hyperactivity and impulsivity in ADHD1:
Without a doubt these symptoms intentionally mirror those used for children, with some addendums (instead of running and climbing excessively, we just think about doing it — leading to “subjective feelings of restlessness”). Somehow, some adults with ADHD have internalized our externalizing behaviors. Instead of running from wall to wall like a four-year-old, I just feel this incredible tension in my body created by Not Moving. But it’s all inside my head. You can’t see it unless you look very closely.
I can see myself in this list of symptoms, nonetheless. I fidget, I stim, I stand when I’m supposed to remain seated, I feel restless constantly, I interrupt others when they are speaking, I feel a kind of somatic pain or intense pressure and frustration when I have to wait a long time for something that’s right in front of me.
But there is an element here that we are not capturing.
Inattention and hyperactivity stem from a common dysfunction of the executive systems.
We know from literature in children that hyperactivity/impulsivity and inattention are correlated. But, it’s not so clear what the relationship is, and it really gets at the core deficit we’re trying to get at with an ADHD diagnosis: poor executive functioning and self-regulation. I can’t focus my attention, so I pace around for hours, smoking cigarettes on the patio. I feel like I have to keep moving; I constantly have to be doing something, even if I’m doing nothing. I can’t relax. That isn’t good for a child, and it’s even less so for an adult. My body feels tense and worn, like a pair of old shoes.
It turns out, too, that ADHD in adults is associated with lower socio-economic status, lower levels of academic achievement, problems with relationships, and even poorer driving ability and more traffic violations1.
Not long ago children with ADHD were presupposed to exist in a liminal state: it was thought that ADHD was a disorder of childhood, and that it diminishes with developmental advancement. Yet research (including various brain anatomy, neuroimaging, and genetics studies) is showing that this is not the case1.
Ironically enough, it’s time to turn our attention to adults with ADHD. Although it does make some sense that classic symptoms of hyperactivity decline with age, I am interested in how hyperactivity later manifests in adults who no longer fit the typical, child-centered definition of hyperactivity.
Personally, I think inwardly-turned hyperactivity may be one of the driving forces behind high levels of depression and anxiety seen in adults with ADHD. Around half of adults with ADHD have had one or more major depressive episode, and around half of adults with ADHD have one or more clinical anxiety disorder2.
There’s also a fascinating overlap with bipolar disorder, which may be a blog post for another day!
Are you an adult with ADHD? Have you ever met criteria for hyperactive or combined type ADHD, either now or as a child? Share your experiences!
Sobanski, E. (2006). Psychiatric comorbidity in adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, 256(SUPPL. 1), i26–i31. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00406-006-1004-4
Caution: this post contains explicit discussion of suicide
Two days ago (on September 10th) was World Suicide Prevention Day. Although it is important to address prevention of suicide attempts, the strongest predictor of a fatal (or “completed”) suicide is a history of previous, non-fatal suicide attempts. The risk factors for suicide attempts are more diverse and include: family history of suicide, early onset of bipolar disorder, extent of depressive symptoms, increasing severity of affective [mood] episodes, the presence of mixed affective [mood] states, rapid cycling, comorbid Axis I disorders, and abuse of alcohol or drugs1
Most suicide prevention effort focuses on people who are naive to psychiatric treatment and have reached a crisis point: people who don’t already have a psychiatric point of contact, and usually people who have never been treated in an inpatient setting before. In my experience, most people do not continue using crisis lines or similar services after they have been hospitalized once. Surmounting the fear and stigma around hospitalization itself is a primary reason crisis lines exist. Crisis lines are staffed by severely underqualified volunteers, who are usually following a script, and only have two action moves: call an ambulance, or tell you to go talk to someone else (sometimes your health insurance company). Yet, people find calling a crisis hotline less formidable than simply admitting themselves voluntarily.
But what about those of us with chronic illnesses, with volumes of psychiatric history, who have been admitted many times? This service is clearly not meant for me. If I spoke to a crisis line on what to me is an an average day, I might find myself being dragged to the ER and with an $800 ambulance fee to boot. There is no exception for chronicity. The stakes of a mistake are high, and the crisis line operator is equipped with a high school diploma.
There’s a gap between services for first-episode patients and services for profoundly disabled people who live in an institutional setting. After my close-to-fatal suicide attempt about two and a half years ago, I had to navigate what exactly life looks like after a serious suicide attempt. I consumed an amount of lithium equal to the 50% lethal dose in rats, and an antidepressant that is also a potent anti-emetic (anti-vomiting) drug. I knew I would absorb more of the lithium if I delayed the onset of (inevitable) severe vomiting.
I was hospitalized for only 16 days. The attending physician treating me thought I should go to a residential treatment program, but I was supposed to be at an academic conference and I begged to be realized in time to go. The head of the clinic evaluated the situation and decided to release me. I was discharged within hours of my flight to Europe. After the conference, I was enrolled in a partial hospitalization day program. The official length of the program was 8 weeks; I was probably enrolled for 4 months. My psychiatrist met with me nearly every day.
We tried a lot of medications, but for quite some time I was not permitted to take lithium. This was unfortunate, because lithium is probably the single most effective drug I take. I have cycled through almost every atypical antipsychotic: Seroquel, Abilify, Vraylar, Zyprexa, Saphris, Geodon… I’m sure I’ve forgotten something, it’s more than I can keep track of. I tried Depakote and Lamictal. Nothing has the same effect as lithium. Ironically, lithium also has a specific anti-suicide effect.
I continued to be suicidal throughout and beyond the partial program. I am lucky that my psychiatrist works well with me.
Chronic suicidality is probably more common than people realize. It doesn’t appear in the media. It’s taboo. You fear to acknowledge it exists somewhere. When we talk about improving mental health services, let’s give a little more attention to the people for whom posting a status update with the s-word in it is reason to panic and report it to Facebook headquarters.
References
Hawton, K., Sutton, L., Haw, C., Sinclair, J., & Harriss, L. (2005). Suicide and Attempted Suicide in Bipolar Disorder: A Systematic Review of Risk Factors. The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 66(6), 693–704. https://doi.org/10.4088/JCP.v66n0604
Recently, on Twitter, I confessed that I had not been able to complete reading NeuroTribes (a very interesting book, and also a lengthy one). The other person insisted that a PhD student should be able to read a book and accused me of lacking academic integrity — basically, that I am lazy and don’t deserve my PhD.
I’m here to say that attitude is inherently ableist. But to give the benefit of the doubt, perhaps most people don’t know that bipolar disorder actually can affect your ability to read. I learned to read early as a child — I was a prolific consumer of text, and I had a college reading level in elementary school (this is called hyperlexia). But after being medicated for bipolar disorder, my ability to sustain focus and momentum while reading a long document has been very limited.
Lithium is probably the biggest offender. It kind of affects how you see words on the page — like a pseudo-dyslexia, the words seem kind of blurry and distorted. It can be impossible to read full books. I can still read journal articles because they generally have a defined structure and an abstract. I can also read poetry, which I enjoy. I recommend seeking out these kinds of texts if reading is something you struggle with.
Most of all, I want you to know that this is common, you are not alone in having an acquired inability to read and you still deserve your career, whatever that may be. It’s not a matter of “intellectual thoroughness”; it’s part of a disability, and it’s more common than you think.
I also find it difficult to watch videos, TV, or movies. The information conveyed through video media covers many modalities — sound (music), speech, visuals, movement (spatial), and the overall plot you’re supposed to be following. Sitting for the length of a movie is hard, but it’s also just hard to follow so many things at once. My brain gets overwhelmed with too much information of different kinds to process (evidence of poor sensory integration, a symptom of autism). But it helps to reduce the overload by using captions (combining speech with visuals, thus reducing the number of information modalities) or watching something animated, which compresses the demands of visual and spatial information greatly.
There is much that could be written about the damage done by bad psychiatrists, but this post will specifically focus on non-psychiatric medical professionals: doctors, nurses, everyone involved with it.
Once I presented to the ER with a large abscess from a skin infection, and in great pain. I told the triage nurse that I had this abscess, and showed it to her (it was not subtle). She proceeded to look through my chart and started asking me about my bipolar disorder. I told her what she asked, and of course we got to “Are you planning to hurt yourself?” and I said no, because I wasn’t, I just really needed my abscess to be drained by a doctor.
Naturally, then, she put me in psychiatry and had a psychiatrist come speak to me. I told the psychiatrist what I told the nurse and showed him the abscess. He was horrified by it, and said he’d call my psychiatrist. After he spoke to her, he moved me to the medical area and gave his psychiatric stamp of approval. Finally, a medical doctor arrived and drained my abscess.
In retrospect, is it a big problem? I think it is. What if my condition were even more time-sensitive? They wasted significant time getting me a psych eval when I was not presenting with any major psychiatric symptoms, I just happen to have a chronic mental illness that I will have in my chart forever. What if I was having a heart attack? Would I have to get a psych eval because I’m bipolar?
If you have a label like “bipolar disorder type 1” they will always look for a psychiatric cause for your symptoms, even when the evidence doesn’t suggest it’s psychiatric (like, the huge abscess). They assume you are professionally crazy and anything you say is cause for suspicion, instead of an honest report of symptoms. Putting patients presenting with tangible physical illness in the psych area just because they have a diagnosis, but are not presenting with symptoms, is discrimination.
Recently, The Mighty published an article about the differences between anxiety and hypomania. However, I wanted to complicate the discussion by bringing up something that breaks the juxtaposition of anxiety and mania: primarily anxious mania, which is most likely a mixed episode associated with bipolar type 1.
The author describes how her anxiety leaves her “immobilized”. This can actually happen in mania, too — but usually not in hypomania. Hypomania is often very productive. Full mania is no longer productive — it’s frantic, potentially confused, and may be characterized by manic stupor. Emil Kraepelin used this term to describe a flight of ideas and elevated mood (not necessarily happy, but revved-up) combined with psychomotor slowness or immobility. I’ve been in this state, and I experienced it subjectively as intense feelings of anxiety paralyzing my every move. This might also be referred to nowadays as catatonia, and something similar can occur in severe depressive states; however, the catatonia that coincides with mania is likely excited catatonia (characterized by purposeless movements rather than being completely still).
Hypomania isn’t rare, exotic, or exciting to me. It’s just part of my life, and I take advantage of it when it comes around — which it will, no matter what. But, to me, full mania is to be avoided. Anxiety is also a daily part of my life, but the anxiety and paranoia I experience during a manic episode is even more excruciating than it usually is. Juxtaposing them as discrete, separate states can only take you so far in understanding what mania is and how it affects people.
Currently, I take 8 medications for psychiatric reasons. I’ve also been on many others — including most of the atypical antipsychotics, several anticonvulsants, antidepressants, and more. These are my current drugs ranked in terms of how essential they are (if, for example, I could only get some of them, perhaps due to a catastrophe):
Lithium — Big Pharma has yet to come up with something better. It could never be patented, it wasn’t paid for by anybody. It actually works. And it’s all-natural. But also, it sucks. Nature is brutal.
Haldol — Indispensable, though I might be switching to Thorazine in the near future. I don’t picture myself living without an antipsychotic again. Typicals seem to work better for me than atypicals did, though I’ve notably NOT tried Risperdal (even though it’s a good fit for my symptoms) or clozapine. Both were considered, though.
Ativan (lorazepam) — My symptoms tend to cluster around anxiety, insomnia, and irritability — maybe paranoia — all things helped by benzodiazepines. If it were not so problematic, I might have ranked it #2. It’s the best immediate symptom relief I can get aside from maybe sublingual Zyprexa (olanzapine).
Adderall — I would never actually achieve anything in life without Adderall. That said, my need to do something with my life is inherently superseded by my need to be alive, which is why it ranks #4.
Lamotrigine (Lamictal) — An anticonvulsant medication. It seems to be doing something, because I become depressed without it. Though I’m not exactly sure what it’s doing.
Gabapentin — I’m supposed to be using it for anxiety to offset my lorazepam use. It’s also useful for severe headaches. I still feel the pain, but I kind of don’t care, like the pain just doesn’t command my attention.
Clonidine — It’s a blood pressure med, but I’m using it for insomnia. I cycle through medications for insomnia because they all lose their effectiveness eventually. I haven’t been on clonidine before so I don’t know how long it will be useful for. Other drugs I’ve used for sleep: Trazodone, Remeron, Ativan, Seroquel (and other atypical antipsychotics)…
Diphenhydramine (Benadryl) — An OTC drug! The original antihistamine. I take it as 50mg softgels (two of them, which is slightly more than the bottle indicates — consult your doctor). Sometimes works for sleep, not super reliable and fades quickly. Useful if I have a cold or flu because Sudafed is not the best choice for my wiring. Also potentially protective against Haldol-induced side effects. So overall, something I take regularly, but not every day.
BipolarCoaster 