I have probably had bipolar disorder all my life, but I was just recently diagnosed. Normally, I am kind to myself and others, except when my symptoms are bad. I can remember being in my teens, and my mother telling me every time I had a manic episode, "You need to go to a psychiatrist." I hated it when she would tell me that, because in my mind psychiatrists were people who put you in mental hospitals and away from your family. My family never saw any of my depressed moods. I was really good at going to my room and locking myself away for hours, and I had more manic than depressed episodes when I was younger.

After I graduated from high school, I went to college for a year. That’s when the depressions started hitting me hard. I was living by myself, 85 miles from my family and friends. Plus I had run up some bad debt. I started panicking about the debt, which caused me to become manic and not sleep for days, sometimes weeks. One time I went two weeks without sleep. Then the depression would set in, and I would begin contemplating suicide. After my first year at college, I moved back home with my parents. By that time, my illness was out of control. I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know how to fix it. I lived with my parents for another year. Then I moved away again. I began drinking heavily, even though I wasn’t of age. I also was working a 10pm to 6am shift and not sleeping during the day. That was how I controlled my problem.

Then I had a couple of bad experiences. Within one month I was pulled over for Driving Under the Influence, and I rolled my pickup when I fell asleep at the wheel. I messed up a ligament in my knee and cracked my sternum. I was confined to bed rest for a month. I think the confinement made it really apparent to my family that I had a mental illness. I would rage at them at times, and at others just sob uncontrollably for hours. Even so, they couldn’t make me get help.

After I had healed, I returned to work and was living the same life I had before the wreck. Then my current husband came into my life. I moved in with him when we started dating. There were several times I would lash out at him for nothing at all, or I would get upset about something and he would find me several hours later in a closet cutting myself with an Exacto knife.

Right before Christmas, about six months later, he proposed to me. We set our wedding date for June. In January he couldn’t take any more of my mood swings. He gave me a choice, get help or the wedding is off. I called my Mom, all upset at this turn of events. She told me that they had been talking about it, and she agreed completely with him. She even told me she thought the problem was bipolar disorder. I decided to look it up on the internet. When I looked it up, I found out that all of the symptoms fit me. So I made an appointment with my husband’s doctor. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and put on medication. It has helped immensely and to top it off, I actually got married in February.