About This Website

29 Mar 09

LivingManicDepressive.com is privately owned, maintained, and written by one person, and has been so ever since it was created in 1997. The website has no sponsorship and takes no advertising. There are no commercial, government, or non-profit affiliations.

Some of the views here on managing being bipolar or depression contradict mainstream ideas of what being manic depressive is. That's because there is a huge difference between writing about manic depressive people you have studied and writing about being manic depressive from personal experience.

I've added details about being bipolar and pitfalls in trying to manage drugs and daily life that no researcher would ever think to consider in any study, but which are nevertheless important in coping successfully to have a productive and, well, a good life.

However, I am not a doctor. I hope the information here can provide you with support in coping with day to day problems and even in dealing with doctors and drugs, but the information here cannot replace a doctor / psychiatrist. To get a proper diagnosis and medical advice for your treatment, please seek the advice of a doctor.

I maintain the website as an ongoing project because of a promise made in 1999 (see my Awards page). However, I've also realised that working on the website and answering e-mails helps to keep me more stable, which is a good thing. And, it's fun too.

My e-mail address is livingmanicdepressivemail@gmail.com. I'd rather you contact me by e-mail, so my address and phone number are not listed on the website. However, I do own this domain and the registration information is publicly available - if you need additional information, you can do a whois lookup.

Who I Am and My Experience

My name is Jinnah Mohammed, and I'm forty-two years old. I live in Trinidad and Tobago, an island paradise in the Caribbean. I would like to say that I live in idle luxury sipping tea and watching hummingbirds and butterflies and iguanas from a porch in a forest house, but in reality I hold the post of Director of Operations in our family's business. I have a Master's degree in City Planning, but I haven't used it since 1997 when I had a major depression episode (or nervous breakdown - same thing).

As far as I can tell, the onset of my manic depressive mood swings started when I was about 16 or so, but I was not diagnosed until 1997, fifteen years later, since it had not been a substantial interference in my life. Or rather it had interfered substantially, but I survived those thirteen years in a manner that did not arouse major concern from friends or family. Even I never considered the problem substantial because it always went away (though it always came back).

However, over the years the mood swings associated with being bipolar became worse and worse until finally in a series of domino like effects from 1996 onwards I lost my lover, then my self control, then my job, and almost my friends. And I tried to commit suicide.

I am a rapid cycler - which means that without medication I spend about one week mildly manic and one week depressed. Or at least I used to. In what I consider a rather disturbing trend, since about 2006 the depression part of the cycle sometimes extends towards 10-14 days, or longer, so I'm starting to spend more time being depressed.

Separate from the being either manic or depressed, living on a two week cycle where I was alternately efficient or incapable was quite enough to drive me crazy. Though I have learned to live with it (the two week cycle that is, not the being crazy part).

My mania tends to be mild, probably more accurately classified as hypomania. I've gotten very sensitive to the onset and symptoms of mania and I can pretty much control it without resorting to drugs. I do use Tegretol (carbamazepine), an antimanic, to calm me down if the mania begins to exceed my level of control. Though that's fairly rare.

My depression cycles are another matter. I've never found anything that can pull me out of my depression cycles - and that includes antidepressants. But because my depression cycles were short, I would usually live with them, miss 1-3 days work during the worst part of the cycle, and come out of it a few days later.

That's not exactly great, but it's acceptable. You can still pass as pretty much normal to the rest of the world if they can't contact you for three days every two weeks, and you can catch up on most of stuff you missed out on. And compared to the early days after diagnosis when it would take months for me to get back to "normal" after a bout of depression, missing a few days sounds pretty good.

However, since the depression cycles have been extending, I'm now missing up to 5-8 days of work. You can't catch up on so many lost days. And even casual acquaintances notice something is wrong.

The years 2006 to 2009 actually have been less good than the period 2003 to 2006. I'm now back to trying drugs to manage my depression.

I started going to therapy in 1997. It worked well, but not well enough on its own, and I started taking medication in 1998. The drugs I tried didn't work very well or produced unexpected and annoying side effects.

For quite a while (measured in years), stopping old drugs, starting new ones, and trying to deal with the ever present mood swings inflicted its own brand of madness upon me. It wasn't until January 2003 that I finally found a drug (Wellbutrin / Zyban) that worked fairly well in alleviating the depression and the mania.

From about 2003 to 2005, Wellbutrin worked and life was pretty reasonable.  It wasn't normal by any standard; I still had my periods of depression and mania and my days when I could barely get anything done. But it was a lot better than it used to be.

However, somewhere in late 2005 and early 2006, the patterns of my depression and the cycles started to get milder, but longer - sometimes measured in weeks or occasionally months instead of days. And unfortunately the change interfered with the efficacy of the Wellbutrin and it stopped working well.

Since I had gotten complacent about controlling my mood swings, and because the depression made it difficult for me to rationally look at what was happening, it took me nearly a year to figure out that something was radically wrong, and another year to realise that my old, tried methods of coping weren't effective.

My experiences in 2008 with two new drugs, Lamictal and Seroquel, were both hilarious failures because of my hypersensitivity to drugs.

At present, I'm sort of back to square one in terms of managing my moods. Except that I now have lots of experience in dealing with mood swings and the stress they cause, and lots of experience with drugs as well.

I have been experimenting, and so far the antimanic drug Tegretol, combined with a support network to ensure I take it, seems to be pretty effective against my depression. Though of course nothing is quite that simple - the side effects aren't so great, and I get resistant to it after a while so I'm on a weird stop start drug regime.

At least I don't stress over stuff like this any more.

I've gotten used to the fact that I will always be manic depressive - and it's something I'll have for life. The mood swings are always just there under the surface and if I relax, they come right back. I can appear mostly normal because I constantly monitor for signs of being manic depressive and take action to counter any emerging symptoms.

I've accepted that even under the best case scenario, each year I will spend about three months in total being non-functional due to the mood swings or in catching up on tasks not done while I was depressed. It's a lot of time to lose from my life, but it is a vast improvement over the early years after diagnosis.

I'd love the magic solution that would reduce this lost time, but I've tried so many things that I am now extremely skeptical and cynical about any wonder claims for drugs or therapies. I'll stick to what I know, and add in new things cautiously.

Even after all these years, my mood swings still make it difficult for me to predict what I will be doing or liking or thinking next week or next month with any certainty. I used to say that I lived only in the now, with the future in view but not really accessible. That has changed somewhat - I have systems that keep me on track and a list of long term goals displayed prominently near my computer. The future is no longer completely beyond my reach.

But even with all my experience, it is still difficult to plan long term, or plan a trip six months into the future, or realistically say I will attend five weeks of classes.

A year or two after being diagnosed, I had to come to the very difficult realisation that perhaps the goals and dreams I had in my teens and twenties might not be realistic any more. I have gone through the traumatic experience of evaluating each of my goals, determining which ones I probably won't attain, and discarding them. It wasn't easy - one of the goals I had to discard was opening my own office as an Urban Planning consultant - but I don't have what it takes to be that reliable.

Back in 1997 / 1998 I thought it would be hopeless to try to plan a career, or organise my life. Thankfully, that is not true and I have been able to set new goals for myself. These are no less ambitious than my original ones, but they are different.

I regret that I will not achieve some of the dreams I've had since my early twenties, but I've learned to accept that and move on. That may be a sign of learning to live with being manic depressive, or perhaps it is just one of those things that one does as a thirtysomething.

Over the last few years, I've made peace with myself and I am no longer consumed with guilt over my failures. I still get anxious about many things, but the anxiety is down from an intolerable level to a manageable level. I've developed an easygoing attitude to life and I am happy with myself most of the time. My self confidence has finally recovering and in spite of the many setbacks I have had and will have, I refuse to lower my ambitions. My life is going to be great. My life is great.

After ten years together, C. and I parted company in 2008 (for reasons mostly unrelated to my being bipolar). I'd like to say I've moved on, but I haven't and C. hasn't and we are in that bizarre limbo state that can only exist when two people live in different countries.

I live a few minutes away from my parents and my brother, and I belong to two groups - a Scrabble club and a cycle club. Taken together, they provide me with a network of family and friends that I can call on for support without burdening any single person.

I'm very open about being manic depressive. All my friends and family know I'm manic depressive so they aren't surprised by my behaviour any more. My mood swings are just one of those things they know about me, just as they know that I am a pretty good cyclist. To them, my being bipolar is nothing special.

The persons at work now know that I have mood swings, but it took me a long time to tell them the whole picture. I only did it in the latter part of 2008 because I needed others to continue projects when I wasn't around. The office manager also has a stash of my drugs now in case she thinks I need them. But I'm lucky to be in a family business - I don't get into trouble for missing days frequently - and my boss is my brother.

This website started as an outreach program. After I was diagnosed, I didn't know any bipolar persons living close by to talk with. The people who e-mailed me prevented me from feeling lonely, helped me out, and kept me sane (well, as sane as I get). The site has since taken on a momentum of its own and I keep it going because there are people who were once in my position. It's my turn now to provide support.

One last note. I'm a guy - my name confuses many people.

So, there you are.