I’m still not quite sure why she went off the medication. She lost the prescription, or forgot to get a refill, or maybe she just didn’t think it would matter. She has never given me a clear answer. At any rate, she was unmedicated. The speed with which she lapsed into manic-depressive psychosis was astonishing.
Within days, my life was a war zone.
As with any period of intense turmoil, I don’t have a clear, linear recollection of events. Instead I have a random assortment of flashbulb memories and moments in time that float in a haze of conflict, strife and misery.
One time, she came out from the bedroom to get herself food, having not eaten in over 24 hours. Standing naked at the bench, she scooped huge lumps of strawberry ice cream into a bowl, almost the entire tub. But as she was picking up the bowl, something she had put in the microwave finished heating and the beeps distracted her. She dropped the bowl: it smashed onto the bench leaving a melting puddle of ice cream dripping onto the floor. That’s when she started screaming.
“I wanted that ice cream!” she shouted, then let out out an inchoate wail of grief, a long piercing cry.
“There’s nothing to eat in this f—ing house!” she bawled, then opend a cupboard door and slammed it so hard it broke, and fell to the floor. She shouted more obscenities and stormed back into the bedroom.
Another day she called me several times in a row from work. The calls were about stupid things, like asking if we had milk in the house, or to find out when the rent was due. Another time was simply to tell me that she thought I was a loser. I don’t know how she got any work done that day. In between phone calls she was sending me emails with messages like “Look – I know you view yourself as this warm, loving, wonderful husband that is so caring for his wife and child = NEWSFLASH – your not.”
another message: “The bottom line is you thought it would be “cool” to have a chick like me, and you faked who you were. Well, you killed that cool, fun chick = she is dead. And what is left living is miserable – and YOU are a large part of that, but do you care – Nope, you just care about how its gonna affect you. You are selfish, lazy, irresponsible and a liar.”
This is pretty tough to take, and I was getting it through multiple channels: email, twitter, phone, text, and in person.
Then came the paranoid fantasies. She deleted me as a friend from Facebook, as well as my mother and other friends (although she missed one, who was able to see her facebook page and report back what was going on). She posted how unhappy she was here in this city with me and that she wanted to move back home. She also posted on Facebook that I was holding her and our son prisoner here. I wasn’t, by the way. It was just a delusion created by her psychotic state.
But, amazingly, people on Facebook bought it. Her post quickly resulted in a long thread, with people writing things like ”OMG! That’s terrible!” and “I read this whole thread and feel sick.” Her sister, of all people, was the only one who wrote in questioning the reality of the situation.
Anyway she’s back on the medication, and called me from work an hour ago to tell me how sorry she was about her behaviour. “That wasn’t me” she said. She feels ashamed.
This wasn’t the first manic-depressive episode I’ve experienced with my wife, Dee, nor was it the worst. In some ways, these things were tame. If I had to pick the worst moment, it would have to be when she put our baby son in the car and left without saying where she was going, booked into a hotel – paying in cash so she couldn’t be found – then called me and told me she was going to kill herself. That would probably be the worst. I called her sister and told her what was going on, but she didn’t believe me!
When I first figured out what the problem was, that my wife was bipolar, I searched for information. I wanted to learn more about this disease and what it meant. Most of all, I wanted to hear stories from other people. I felt that by hearing what others went through, what decisions they made, and what the outcomes of those decisions were, perhaps I could gain insight into my own situation. unfortunately, online information about bipolar is often of poor quality. The big, official sites such as those set up by medical organisations, health departments, and drug companies are too sanitised. They talk about how hard it must be for someone going through bipolar, but don’t really talk about the specifics. There are references to health and wellbeing, but they’re lacking in the details.
Now I know the reason. it’s because bipolar is a dirty, ugly disease and the specific behaviors associated with it are unpalatable and unpleasant to describe. In fact they’re often r-rated or beyond. It’s also because sufferers don’t want to read about all the terrible pain and embarrassment they’ve inflicted on themselves or others. The result is that the people who get hurt by them are ignored.
One reason I created the site www.bipolartalk.org was to address the gap between the reality of bipolar and the airbrushed, vague descriptions that are provided in so many places. It’s painful and embarrassing to talk about the damage done, but pretending it isn’t so, or downplaying it, is not helpful at all.
If you don’t face the truth about the present, you cannot make a better future.