Should I
Tell People

1 Jun 04

It's not easy to come to tell people that you are bipolar. Our society has too many hangups about depression, mania, and mental illness (a term which I hate) for any of us to ever feel completely comfortable saying we are bipolar. I always have the feeling that if I tell someone they will see the label of "manic depressive" before they see me. I don't want that - I am myself and I want to be known as myself and not a label. Particularly one that has negative connotations.

What I have found is that telling other people you are bipolar is something that you grow into with time. At first, I didn't want to let anyone know about it. I was too ashamed and too worried about what they would say or what they would think of me. Suppose they thought I was crazy. Suppose the didn't want to associate with me. Suppose they wanted to pity me. Suppose they didn't think I was reliable or responsible any more. Suppose they didn't want me to play with their kids any more.

Worst of all perhaps, suppose they started to think that everything I do is an offshoot of being manic depressive and I start getting comments like "Don't worry that he is angry with you, he is just being manic." Suppose that start ignoring my opinions or start treating me as if was a child or an invalid.

At first I didn't want to chance any of this.

What I did find out is that as I learned coping techniques and started to get a handle on my mood swings, I gained the confidence to tell others about what I was going through without worrying about what they might think. I eventually trusted myself enough to believe that if people respected and cared for me, they would still respect and care for me even if I was manic depressive 

I also realised that I needed to open up and talk to people. I needed people to whom I could describe what I was going through. I needed to be able to describe my feelings and my fears and I needed the reassurance from others that I was still a worthwhile person even if I was manic depressive.

Eventually, I also found out that since the mood swings were an everyday part of my life, to NOT tell my friends if I was doing fine or if I was depressed would have been to hide part of who I was from them. Trying to hide because I was ashamed felt a bit like lying. I wasn't telling the whole truth to my close friends and it felt as if I was cheapening the friendship or at least being friends under false pretences.

Now, I grant that all of us have private happenings in our lives that we don't share even with our friends or family. However, being manic depressive isn't as private an event as we would like. The reality is that our being manic depressive affects our our friends Looking back, I realise that I grouped the people I knew into roughly four groups and I told each group about being manic depressive at different times. The first group of people consisted of my very close friends, my immediate family and some of my aunts. The second group was  my social circle, even the causal friends you meet tiem to time. The third group was the genral public - I would not bother to hide it at all. The fouth group were the people at work.

It helps to have a close circle of friends to support you when you are depressed or to rein you in when you are manic. Do you have that. You don't need to tell them that you are manic or depressed. But you could tell them about specific symptoms and what to do when you are exhibiting them. I have close friends who keep an eye on me. When I am manic, they take away my car keys and drive me home. Or tell me I'm behaving silly and stick with me until I calm down (using medication). You need friends when you are depressed. Not necessarily to do stuff with, but to be with. Have three or four people you can call up and ask to come over to hang out with you for a while. Or whom you can just visit? If you can, could you tell one close friend about everything and ask him/her to look out for you. It's not a sign of weakness, it's a sign of trust.

The part where you mentioned how forgetful you are...oh that reminds me of myself TOO much.  People at work stare at me and  can't believe I forgot what they told me to do 5 minutes ago.  I feel so stupid. If you can accept is as inevitable, it's not so bad. My friends and the people in office work around my lack of memory, and it is actually a huge joke to them. Don't even keep a stiff upper lip, just accept it and be comfortable with it.

Even though I told my close friends about being manic depressive within months of my diagnosis, I'm only now starting to tell people at work that I suffer from depression - and this is nearly 5 years after I was diagnosed.

A practical suggestion. If you are unable to work or attend social functions because of the depression, the correct way to phrase your excuse was "I'm sorry I couldn't make it, but I wasn't feeling well" (or "I was ill"). That is the truth. Most people won't inquire about the details of why you weren't feeling well. If some people do insist, you can get away with saying "I'd rather not talk about it." At this stage you are under no obligation to tell people the gory details, unless you want to.

Having said that, it is probably useful to tell the people whom you interact with the most (immediate family or close friends or parents) that you have a problem. You can get away with telling them that you are manic depressive - I've found out that most people don't have a clue what that means, but they will react to support you because they care for you. After that, if you are feeling depressed or manic, you can tell these people any of "I'm not feeling good, I'm feeling down, I'm feeling hyper/irritable, I'm slow today." You need to be able to tell them how you feel so that can know how to react to you properly.

Tell others at your own pace.

We deal with this step by step.

The first thing is that you are depressed. Until you come out of the depression, you aren't going to make much headway in straightening out the mess in your life. If you want, you can certainly try to fix some stuff, but do NOT expect to get much done and do NOT make yourself anxious by feeling that you should be doing more to help yourself. The whole thing about depression is that it makes you incapable of doing the stuff you can do normally with little or no effort. It is an illness, just the same way that asthma is an illness. Do NOT be anxious that you are just staying in bed now - if you had an asthma attack you wouldn't think twice about staying in bed to recover.

My personal experience is that there is nothing I can DO to get out of depression. The only two things I can do is that I can wait for the depression to lift on its own. Or, I can take antidepressants to lift the depression. I have not found anything I can do or any internal resouces that are strong enough to let me pull myself out of the depression. Hopefully, you'll do better than me, but it you are in my same situation, don't fret over it.

But do make sure to take your meds. It is very handy to get someone to oversee you to make sure you take them since us depressed people don't usually feel like doing anything, including taking the meds that would make us feel better. Once your depression lifts so that you can start to function again, you can start straightening out your life. Do NOT expect that the mess will untangle easily or quickly. Give yourself the time to resolve things and resolve them one at a time. Slow and steady wins this race. The absolutely worse thing you can do is to get anxious about things which are not being done. Remember that 99% of all the things you have not done are not critical or life threatening. You CAN let them slide until you are able to do them.

You can learn to deal with being bipolar and you can have a fulfilling and normal life (well, not quite normal, but normal enough). I can assure you of that much. It may not be as easy or as quick to learn the coping mechanisms as you might like, and sometimes you'll backslide a bit. But, that's how learning to cope is. But you can do it - even if you don't feel that way at the moment. Trust yourself. Or rather trust that the person you remember yourself being - the good, kind, competent person - is still there. That person is only hidden somwehat by this illness called bipolar disorder. Once you learn to deal with the being bipolar, that person will shine through again.