What happens in the mind of a person with Bipolar? I am no doctor, nor do I have any medical qualifications; however I am now a veteran of having a loved one with Bipolar as well as having become friends with others who have the illness as well. My comments in this post are as an observer and not as a practitioner.
Imagine, if you will that our minds are like a huge building filled with hundreds of open doors and each of these doors represent a decision that one will make each day as they travel through the building. He/She enters the building and faces the first door (or the first decision of the day), let’s say that the decision is to have fruit for breakfast or the piece of cake left from last night. A healthy mind might rationally decide to “close the door” on the cake and choose the fruit. As the day proceeds they face the next door. They are running late to work and they can be 5 minutes late or take the chance of excessive speeding and risk the consequences of a potential traffic ticket or even endangering someone on the road. Again, they choose to close the door on the reckless thoughts and choose the option of being late. At lunch some of the guys at work offer to take them “behind closed doors” and share some drugs they found the night before, and again a decision (or a door) must be closed or left open. This process goes on and on each day as we are faced with dozens of decisions each day that will impact our lives in various degrees based on the magnitude of the decision.
Some of these “doors” represent simple activities with very little collateral impact, but others involve moral values, financial matters, spiritual issues, relational things and the list goes on and on. The healthy mind does not always make the right decision, in fact the healthy mind makes plenty of mistakes. However the healthy mind will learn from its mistakes and will generally adjust to a decision making pattern that is suitable for survival in a given environment. The healthy mind learns to navigate and operate its “doors” until it becomes a natural behavior for their chosen lifestyle.
The mind inflicted with Bipolar has a different perspective as they enter the building and are faced with the many doors (or decisions) that they face. The first response is possibly confusion followed by questions that flood their mind faster than they can be processed. Questions such as “why close the door on anything?” “I want the cake!”, “Why not speed….I won’t get caught” and “hmm I like the looks of those drugs and they might make my mind slow down for a few minutes”. The Bipolar mind sees only open doors and they rarely sees the handle, or the hinges or realize that the doors are mechanisms of protection that they can choose to deploy. The illness creates a condition in their brain that blocks out their ability to reason between healthy and non-healthy decisions. One of those decisions is related to the regular use of the medicines and treatment that would control this condition, as well as the very common decision to self-medicate with substances that might not be in their best interest.
To the observing world, the proper operation of these “doors”, or decisions seems very obvious so that as the wrong decisions are made many see and feel that the person with Bipolar is just a person of very poor judgment. In fairness, this seems to be the case at first glance because whatever proclivities the Bipolar patient has will be magnified and amplified due to their inability to navigate the daily decisions they must face. Sadly, it is easier for friends and family to flee rather than to cope with the resulting behavior. This is most often the case for patients with Bipolar, but let’s consider for a moment if the patient wasn’t Bipolar….let’s say that they couldn’t operate their “doors” because they had another problem such as paralysis. Most of us, if honest would go way out of our way to help the person navigate the “doors”, wouldn’t we?
Mental illness however, including Bipolar has a stigma that repels more people than it attracts. The reactions of the ones close to them can even intensify their condition and cause even greater issues. The good news is that there is always hope. There are many patients of Bipolar that learn who they can trust to help. They learn that the medicines can be their ally and not the enemy, and they can live very productive and very healthy lives. The one decision, however that no one can help them with is the decision to accept help; that depends on them alone and is the one “door” they must learn to operate on their own.