Tag: blogathon 09

Following on from my last post, I thought I’d just write a quick one (I hope!) covering what’s “normal” and not when you have bipolar.  In my experience, that is.

As I said before, “normal” is when you can function.  But in a way, that’s a reasonably wide definition of normal, and you could be in a manic or depressive phase while still meeting the criteria for being normal in that case.  If you’re want to define “normal” as “not manic or depressed”, how would you do that? (I would actually call that “stable”, rather than “normal”, probably because normal is such a fuzzy label, but anyway.)

I think perhaps being manic or depressed means that you’re not in control of your moods or emotions any more.  You can’t “just snap out of it” or “cheer up” or “calm down”.  Your brain chemicals are out of whack, and you’re stuck on that rollercoaster until something happens to stop it.  That could be outside intervention (from medication, to therapy, to just someone letting you know that you’re not well – because sometimes you can’t tell yourself ), it could be a sharp mood swing in the other direction, or it could be that you are able to put coping mechanisms in place yourself and start to haul yourself out by your bootstraps.  So yes, it is possible to take control back if you catch the mood swing early enough, or at the right point when you’re going back in the other direction.  Cognitive Behavioural Therapy helps you do that.  The meditation that I spoke about earlier is one of my coping strategies.  Getting it out of my head and into paper or screen is another.  Knitting and spinning are another.  And getting out of the flat and socialising is a very very important one.

Perhaps one of the problems with bipolar is that when you’re manic, it’s very easy to “fake normal”.  Everything’s brilliant, you can do anything and everything right now if you’re at the “right” stage of mania.  And it feels good.  It’s actually harder to admit to mania when everythings awesome like the awesomest thing ever, than it is to admit to depression (which can be pretty hard if you can cope with talking to anyone!).

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Listening to: KT Tunstall – Miniature Disasters
via FoxyTunes

Ptyx asked me: How do we know what’s “normal” and what’s not?

Before I got started answering that, I thought I’d better make sure I understood what she was asking, since there were a couple of different ways I can see to come at it (How do I know when I’m “normal” instead of in the grip of a manic or depressive phase; or how do we define normal as opposed to not?).  When I asked her, she replied: “The question was mostly general, that is, the second option: how can someone tell who is normal, or what behaviour is normal? I think the first option is part of the problem, too. But I guess that, before deciding if someone is behaving normally, we have to decide what is normal and what’s not.”

I think my answer to that will have to run very much along the lines of something my psychiatrist once said to me.  To give some background to that conversation, I’d been having what I like to call mild “reality issues” – and yes, I have degrees of reality issues, but when I’ve had the most severe ones, it’s been when I’ve been the most ill – so Mum was concerned that I might be heading in that direction.  Which is very bad no good stuff.  Anyhow, I’d been having some very vivid, lifelike, repetitive dreams.  Repetitive in the sense that I went to the same place every time: what happened wasn’t the same.  My sleep was a bit all over the place, so it all seemed a bit dreamlike when I was awake too, so it was making sense to me that both places were equally real.  YMMV.  However, in general, I was doing OK.  I was sleeping every day at some point, I was eating and going out, I was getting other things done.  There was just the risk that I might end up going too high.  So, I went to see the doctor, and after going through it all with me, he asked if it was distressing me?  No, it wasn’t, because the other place was perfectly nice and interesting, just different to here.  Was it stopping me from functioning when I was awake – taking care of myself, eating, socialising?  Nope.

In that case, he said, it doesn’t matter.  Don’t worry about it, just carry on as you were.  Make sure you keep taking your meds, keep track of your moods, and if it gets worse: becomes distressing, stops you functioning, makes you do things that are risky to yourself or others; that’s when there needs to be further intervention.

So I think that’s become my definition of “normal”.  Able to take care of oneself and function safely and well in society. Does that make sense?  I can be manic, I can be depressed, Person X can be a bit eccentric, Person Y can be schizophrenic, and so on, but if we’re all doing well enough that we’re not doing ourselves or anyone else any damage physically or mentally… then that’s “normal” enough for me.

“Normal”, of course, is just as much a  label as anything else.  And it’s a subjective thing – different people will have different definitions.  Often, that definition will be “like me”.  That’s too restrictive for me.

Once again, I’ll point you to Cia’s post on the subject – it’s a good one!

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Listening to: Florence And The Machine – Dog Days Are Over
via FoxyTunes