Coping with bipolar disorder at home is not easy. It is not as easy as it might have been if I had never gotten bipolar in the first place. Coping with my bipolar disorder at home began when I was diagnosed with it in my late teens. I was prescribed mood stabilizers which helped to keep me more stable during the manic episodes but they also made me feel terrible. In addition, living on mood stabilizers made it difficult for me to leave the house because my moods would get so out of control that I would feel like a disaster.
At this point, I was at my most unmanageable and my frustration with my mental health was at an all time high. My girlfriend and I lived in different states, so it was difficult to talk about my depression and my mania. This was difficult because I didn’t want to go any further and I knew that was a mistake. I wanted to get help from a mental health professional and I wanted to start coping with bipolar disorder at home.
I knew that Coping with bipolar disorder at home was possible but I wasn’t sure how I would accomplish it. I knew I needed to find a therapist who could help me deal with the manic episodes and my mania but I also needed help with my emotional problems. I also knew I needed to change my perspective on life and stop viewing things as black or white.
Coping with bipolar disorder at home begins with recognizing that you need professional help. You may feel that you are competent to handle your bipolar disorder at home but you are not. A mental health professional can help you see that you are bipolar disorder is much bigger than just your episodes of mania and depression. It has many layers and if you don’t learn to recognize the layers and treat them appropriately, you can be on a slippery slope toward complete disability or insanity.
For instance, when my partner was pregnant with our first child, I thought my bipolar disorder was going to prevent any intervention I might have to do during the pregnancy. That didn’t turn out to be true. The problem was that as the weeks went on, I started to gain weight. My weight gain only served to make my mania worse because now I was having mood swings and not just normal periods of feeling unwell. I was finally admitted to a hospital and while they were doing some tests, I saw a nutritionist who put me on a special diet.
When I started to go back to work after the doctor’s visit, I was very pleased with how things turned out. I managed to keep my job and my bipolar disorder didn’t seem to affect me so much. After about six months, I started to show symptoms of having a depressive episode again. I was very fortunate that I had been able to manage my bipolar before going back to work and that I had a support group at work that could have probably helped me a lot more. Coping with my bipolar disorder in hospital is a lot different than coping with it at home.
At the end of the day, I had to admit that I did need a support group in the early days to help me through the worst parts of being manic and also to keep me focused on recovering. I think that if I hadn’t gone into the hospital to get diagnosed, I would have been very unhappy for a long time. Coping with bipolar disorder can be tough but it gets better. In most cases, it takes some time.
Coping with bipolar disorder in hospital is hard but it gets much easier when you are home. I was lucky enough to go into hospital for only two weeks because I was transferred on the same day as my first child. I managed to bounce back from the shock of my diagnosis and I was back to normal quickly. I was determined to learn how to deal with bipolar disorder in the shortest time possible and that is exactly what I did. I am living proof that you can survive bipolar disorder.