Living Better With Bipolar

At the tender age of seventeen, a giant stop sign fell from the sky and landed in front of me. Before bipolar, I didn’t have a clue who I was but after my first mania I had even less of an idea. The episode shook me to the core and left me unable to trust anything I thought, felt or said. It left me with a visceral, ongoing fear that I might, at any moment, return to those hellish states. My brain had broken once would it happen again? From the age of thirteen my life had been all about friends, fun and getting stuck into life. I had plenty of energy, drive and enthusiasm and my life reflected this. Then an uninvited mental meteorite crashed into my world, turning it upside down and inside out. My friends were moving forward with their lives, but I wasn’t included and didn’t know if I ever would be. I had been left behind by the herd, no longer enjoying its protective security, which left me feeling lonely and lost. I had planned to spend a year in America, working at a children’s holi...

          Telling a friend that you have a serious mental illness is a risk, but it can reap tremendous rewards. Until the words "I have bipolar disorder," have come out of your mouth, you won't know how your friend is going to take this news. You might think you know how they are going to react, you might hope it's going to go well, but until you roll the dice and see their reaction, you won't know for sure.            I'm the author of Befriending Bipolar and I've lived with bipolar disorder for 33 years. In this blog I share 9 tips that may help you decide which friends you are going to tell and how you are going to tell them. I am offering inspiration and ideas, it's not advice. We are all different and handle situations differently. It's up to us to figure out how we explain bipolar to our friends. 1. Use your judgement:         Some friends are more trustworthy or understanding than othe...

I wrote this poem for the closing sequence for the TV coverage of the Dakar Rally. The text was changed a little due to political correctness and a failure to understand it fully. I want to publish my original poem, which is more powerful than the edited version. Here is the original...   Be Brave Be brave my son. For the desert lays claim to your dreams, your hopes, your life. Be brave, for the dark of night is approaching and your strength will be tested.   "Fortune favours the brave," they say. But who is brave enough to test them?   You could have stayed at home, stayed safe, and watched from afar.   But you choose to stare into the jaws of death. To face the fear that defeats most men before they have begun.   Why?   For glory?    I think not. Glory vanishes like rain in the desert.   For riches?    I doubt it. Riches buy little more than problems and pain.   For eternity?   Yes, for eternity. To touch that moment tha...

          One of the challenges I faced when emerging from a manic episode was coming to terms with the devastation that was left in its wake. I felt like I was looking back on the path of a tornado that had smashed its way through the small town called “Oliver.” My world was uprooted, sucked into the eye of a storm, ripped to bits and spat out again. No part of it was left untouched by the havoc wreaked in my life and the lives of those close to me. As sanity slowly returned, it was then that I began to appreciate the damage that had been done. The episode was over, but the longer-term effects were just beginning. Discovering what I had done was like waking up from a nightmare and promptly facing another. What made it worse was that I was responsible for this chaos, a chaos that left me full of guilt and regrets. It is one thing to suffer my own losses but quite another to have dragged those close to me into the drama of mental illness too. Cruel words and...

          Before 2015 I had only met one psychiatrist who didn't want to get me on medication as quickly as possible, or who wasn't aggressively supportive of me staying on my medication. The attitude that even discussing reducing or coming off psychiatric medication was irresponsible and should be shut down asap, is all too prevalent in psychiatry. I had such bad side effects that I decided to come off lithium anyway.           I believe in being brave and not giving up too easy, but there comes a point when soldiering on becomes stubborn, pig headed and foolish. Knowing the difference is not always easy. Life can be complicated, and it’s not always easy to know when we should meet life’s challenges head on or when we should give up gracefully. As far as living with bipolar is concerned, I sometimes want to go one way, but life wants to go another. If I don’t spot this conflict, I can find myself in all sorts of trouble. ...

          In life, there are countless situations that cannot be controlled. Indeed, no matter how many resources we put into them, there are some that cannot be solved. If I can't solve a problem I only have three options. To fight it, deny it or accept it. When it comes to mental illness, acceptance is not a concept that is talked about enough. This is a shame because it is a master key to living a fulfilling life, even with a serious mental illness. I was not very good at acceptance. I prefered to fight with reality, to desperately try to change or avoid the things I didn't like. Yet, through meditation and bipolar disorder, the dawning of acceptance eased its way into my mindset over time. I don’t think I could have rushed it, or forced myself to accept some of the tougher parts of bipolar, but it happened. If I am honest, it felt like it happened by itself. So, what is acceptance? In my view, it is learning to cooperate with life rather than struggling...