Traps: Our Latest Bipolar Moment

Though I don’t dwell on it, I have made no secret of my affliction with mental illness. I don’t like it when people stigmatize mental illness by using it as an excuse to behave stupidly. Yet, part of my coping mechanism is to cry laugh at myself when I do. Laughter is far more effective in many instances than meds or therapy ever could be.

My husband is also bipolar, so the two of us can get into serious trouble. Even on medications. We don’t have healthy boundaries. Someone hurts our bitty feelings and we’ll be morbidly depressed for weeks. A tiny triumph and we are ready to take on the world.

I am not trying to belittle the agony mental illness can cause. I am no stranger to that either. My mother, severely depressed, committed suicide because she believed she had cursed my father’s unborn child when it was born with deformities and died. My first cousin offed herself after a manic episode in which she cashed all of her husband’s savings bonds and ran up $50,000 in credit card debt trying to redecorate and furnish her house. I worked psychiatry for years and saw families and lives ruined, slaughtered by this disorder. It is one of the most damaging and consequential disorders in the DSM-V.

This is real life heavy duty crap.

And yet I laugh.

People who know avoid you. It changes how you are perceived. People don’t want to think about it. They don’t want to talk about it. Yes, it is disturbing. It is the sad truth. People are afraid. One in four Americans is mentally ill. Those are just the ones who are officially diagnosed and treated. The other ones, who aren’t, scare me more.

Please! Tell me you can’t check off on a few of these:

Manic phase of bipolar disorder

Signs and symptoms of the manic or hypomanic phase of bipolar disorder can include:

• Euphoria
• Inflated self-esteem
• Poor judgment
• Rapid speech
• Racing thoughts
• Aggressive behavior
• Agitation or irritation
• Increased physical activity
• Risky behavior
• Spending sprees or unwise financial choices
• Increased drive to perform or achieve goals
• Increased sex drive
• Decreased need for sleep
• Easily distracted
• Careless or dangerous use of drugs or alcohol
• Frequent absences from work or school
• Delusions or a break from reality (psychosis)
• Poor performance at work or school

Depressive phase of bipolar disorder

Signs and symptoms of the depressive phase of bipolar disorder can include:

• Sadness
• Hopelessness
• Suicidal thoughts or behavior
• Anxiety
• Guilt
• Sleep problems
• Low appetite or increased appetite
• Fatigue
• Loss of interest in activities once considered enjoyable
• Problems concentrating
• Irritability
• Chronic pain without a known cause
• Frequent absences from work or school
• Poor performance at work or school

Anyway, if you can check off on a lot of these you should probably get yourself some help. If you already have, good for you! I did. My husband did. But there is really no way to totally avoid symptoms, so we have learned to laugh. I am happy we found each other. Now we can laugh together, and put each other in check.

What do we find to laugh about, you ask?

We laughed when we bought a cabin cruiser on first sight without a surveyor’s inspection, and one of the motors blew up on its maiden voyage.

That was a bipolar moment. We already had a boat, like we needed two. We don’t even live on the water; it’s moored 150 miles away growing barnacles.

We laughed when my husband sent $500.00 to China via Western Union for some iPads we just had to have before a vacation. No, they never came, but the rocket scientist and some guy in Beijing exchanged emails for weeks in broken English.

That was a bipolar moment.

I once painted every room in the house beige before realizing it was pink, which required a repaint of every room in the house neutral.

That was probably a bipolar moment, or two, or three.

And our latest bipolar moment: Our dog was attacked by raccoon. We think (we don’t even know). She had a seven inch gash in her chest requiring anesthesia and sutures. So we hired a trapper to come to our home to catch the varmints…for $500.00. He set out three traps with “protein” bait for three weeks.

Traps are $17.00 at Ace Hardware. Vienna sausages are less than a buck a can.

Ha, ha, ha! Could that have been a bipolar moment?

That was a week ago. Maybe the dog scared them all off. This is our haul so far:

 

Humor is one of the most effective coping mechanisms. Let us laugh.

Yes, sometimes the meds need tweaking. Laughter really can be the best medicine.

So laugh with me.