Interesting post at Furious Seasons recently (heh, as if there were not an interesting post there nearly every day!) regarding manic depression as a dangerous gift, as a personality disorder, and as something from which one can completely recover.

I know I am going out on a limb here that someone will likely chop off for me, but I believe that much of what we call bipolar disorder is in fact a personality disorder or constellation of behavioral issues.

I’m not looking to chop off this limb. I view manic depression as a dangerous gift as well, and as something that maybe at least some people can completely recover from. I also understand that Philip is not saying all a person with bipolar disorder has to do to recover is pull themselves up by their bootstraps:

I think bipolar disorder can be a personality disorder–and, nitpickers be warned, I am using the term very broadly–more often than it is a mental illness.

Depression–and here I am not discussing major or clinical depression–is widely known as having a huge personality component.

Mania itself–and here I mean the bad old wild delusions, hallucinations and declarations of Godhead mania–is not a personality disorder. When it’s in full flower, mania is straight-up insanity.

Dysphoric mania is possibly the least fun thing in the world, but there is at least one good thing about it: once you’ve recovered from an episode of psychotic dysphoric mania, it’s really hard to convince yourself that it was a character flaw. You can easily convince yourself that you weren’t depressed, just stupid and lazy, and that you weren’t hypomanic, you were just being a silly, reckless whore… but after having auditory hallucinations for a few weeks straight, once I finally stopped, I realized that something had been really wrong and that this time it wasn’t my fault.

I was aware that most of the time, medication either made me a zombie or made my moods even worse. So sometimes I would stop taking medication, be fine for a few months, and then be much, much worse than before. I learned to do things that sometimes stopped mood episodes, but more often just allowed me to cope with the symptoms I experienced, so that I functioned very well as one of the walking wounded. For quite a long time, I honestly believed that there was no such thing as getting better, there was only becoming a better liar, so that you could hide your pain from others and even from yourself. Or at least I thought that was the only option for me, because I’d read about other people who were asymptomatic for long periods of time, who claimed to experience “growth” and “healing.” I didn’t disbelieve them, but I didn’t think that anything would work for me. I tried CBT, DBT skills, family therapy, couples therapy, group therapy, exercise, meditation, hospitalization, acupuncture, journalling, medication, medication, medication, and other stuff… but the hits just kept coming. I kept getting depressed, I kept getting hypomanic, and I kept getting manic.

Some of those things helped. Some didn’t. (Acupuncture, for instance, was supposed to make me less stressed, but instead it turned me into a stressed person with needles in her ears.) For nearly a decade, though, none of them prevented me from having mood episodes, which I dealt with using a combined method of actual coping skills plus being way, way too hard on myself. I have been essentially non-syndromal for the past year, though, and it seems to be solely because I’m finally on medication that’s working for me.

I am better, and I want this to be an accomplishment. I wish this were something I could take credit for. But it’s not.

The journey to get to this point was so long and arduous that I want the current solution to be complex. (I say “current solution” because although this has been the solution for the past year, I don’t assume it will be the solution that works best for me forever.) It’s not complex, though. It’s not intricate. I-take-two-pills-a-day-and-now-I-am-well. If I am experiencing any side effects, I am not aware of them. I still have emotions. I can cry when really bad things happen, I can take joy in something as simple as seeing furry gray squirrels race across tree branches, and I can write really bad fiction.

Despite how hard I tried to get better, I still can’t take any responsibility for it. It’s true that I learned plenty of things along the way, including just how vast the extent of my own ignorance is (and how ignorant many of my doctors were), but nothing I learned was instrumental in my actual recovery. I tried and tried and tried to save myself, yet I did not.

I wish I’d fixed it. I know I should be careful what I wish for. I’ll say that I wish I’d slain the dragon myself and the next thing you know, the meds will poop out and the dragon will pop back up, all scaly and fire-breathing, saying, “You called? Here I am, bitch. Come and get me.”

But still. I wish I’d fixed it.