Families in Limbo: living with bipolar disorder

Mental illness like bipolar disorder has a profound effect on the individual diagnosed with it but few realize the equally severe impact it has on the families of the patients.

Families of bipolar sufferers tend to be forgotten

Books are written for bipolar sufferers, support groups are formed, websites posted with advice, medical journals added to on the symptoms, treatments are discussed. Yet the fall-out happens at home with the families – parents, siblings, partners, spouses, and children.

They are all suffering the effects, and there is no medication for them to take to alleviate the stress.

How many wives lie awake at night wishing that their husbands illness would get worse, so that the police can be called and he can be taken away to a mental institution?

This happens during a manic episode of my bipolar 1 husband. The chaos of the leading months is so stressful, that I almost cannot wait until he becomes psychotic so that I can commit him.

When I said my marriage vows, “in sickness and in health”, to me it meant dispensing of a few panado’s here and there, a few possible hospital visits after an operation or accident.

At no time did I think that it would mean visiting my husband in a lock up mental ward, looking into his two mad eyes that were two of the 80 staring back at me through the bars.

Forty psychotic patients jostling for space in a lock up room at Valkenburg, and my husband and father of my children was one of them.

When he was committed I felt relief

When the police had picked him up that morning, to commit him, I was relieved. What kind of a wife did that make me?

Mental illness does strange things to relationships – it rips us apart with such force that it takes years after an episode to trust each other again.

The verbal and emotional abuse during a manic episode is incessant, twenty-four hours a day. Because of course he does not sleep. Crazy projects get started and never finished. There is always some area in the house that gets bashed down, in preparation for some renovation that never gets done.

Denial is also one of the first symptoms, so there is no “pull yourself together” or “get a grip, take some medication” as is so often advised by friends and family who have no idea.

As far as he is concerned, he is fine and the rest of us are over-reacting

During a depression our children are just as wary of him as during a manic episode. He is irritable and lashes out at them. He needs peace in the home in order to sleep through the day. I have to keep the children quiet and away from him.

Eventually that becomes easier, as they don’t want to be around him anyway, for fear of getting shouted at again.

The air around him is so heavy with depression that it feels as if the whole house is sinking. Month after month of deep rambling sighs, and sleep and boredom and irritability.

During his bipolar episodes I isolate myself from people

Their layman advice makes him worse, and they do not understand the stress our family is under. Our extended family fight about what should be done, so every family relationship is strained to breaking point.

Throughout all of this I have to find it in myself to not blame my husband for the chaos and abuse, but rather blame the bipolar. This is difficult, as they are so rolled into one.

After nineteen years I do blame him though, as it is his choice whether or not to take medication, and take responsibility for his disorder. Nineteen years of excessive ups and downs, clinic stays, state care commitments, psychiatric visits that meant nothing, as he never took their advice.

Nineteen years of stress, living in limbo, never knowing when the next episode would start. Finally he realized that it was medication or divorce, and the difference in his character after two years of medication is nothing short of a miracle.

The loving man I knew was hidden in there somewhere is surfacing, and it was worth the wait

www.bipolarsupporters.ning.com is an online support group for family members of bipolar sufferers, started by myself. We share advice and support, but most importantly just understanding of what each other is going through whilst supporting a loved one suffering from bipolar.