Ask me about growing up with a Bi-Polar parent

[Shadowrun]

Fish you mentioned not having friends over your house because you weren't sure how your mom would be, can you elaborate on the social implications of having a bipolar parent?

Some questions that come to mind:

Did your mom go to any of the PTA stuff at your school, or other functions?
Were you worried about your mom interacting with other people parents?

[Blarg]

[ QUOTE ]
my dad takes lithium and is diagnosed as bi-polar. he also has never acted like the people being described in the posts above. he has never, to my knowledge, been in a mental ward. he doesn't talk to me about it much, but says that the medication saved his marriage and probably his life. I don't want to go into details because I want to respect his privacy. I do believe he is bi-polar. and i think the disease can manifest itself in a wide range of behaviors/emotions/etc.. etc..

i think more people are being diagnosed as bi-polar because they used to be diagnosed as crazy/ass holes/psychos/depressed. now there is just a more specific diagnosis.

the disease most likely does have some kind of hereditary link.


it is sometimes very scary living life wondering if one day you will start having serious mental problems. my dad is bi-polar. i have two grandparents who were alcoholics. and an aunt who commited suicide after a mental breakdown. she was most likely schizophrenic.

i was severely depressed in my late teens. I am not bi-polar but it can be a scary thing to think about sometimes.

[/ QUOTE ]

My family has had some problems in the past that have made me and at least one of my brothers admit to each other that we worry about the same thing. It's probably largely a waste of time, though, unless taken as a gentle reminder to live the best we can. If something happens, then it happens. Worrying about it all one's life, or closing down the possibilities of one's life in a fear-response, isn't going to help anything or decide anything one way or another. But merely being conscious of what to watch for gives us the best chance at controlling negative possibilities. So we probably have a better shot at dealing with things well than did the people who made us wonder if we'd ever have anything to deal with. We can't do anything about the fear, so maybe we should just say, Hey, thanks for the heads up!

[Blarg]

[ QUOTE ]
Fish you mentioned not having friends over your house because you weren't sure how your mom would be, can you elaborate on the social implications of having a bipolar parent?

Some questions that come to mind:

Did your mom go to any of the PTA stuff at your school, or other functions?
Were you worried about your mom interacting with other people parents?

[/ QUOTE ]

Curious about that too. A friend of mine had a really bad alcoholic mother and no father, and as a kid he had to handle the police when they came over because of her craziness. Tough to be the voice of reason in the house when you're 10. I'd be interested to hear someone else's take on what rough situations like that were like.

[adsman]

Fish,

I saw your thread and I clicked on it immediately. My brother and I suspect that our mum is bi-polar. We had a pretty tough time growing up, our dad had an aven worse time. They divorced when I was 13.

For the last 20 years my mother has been heavily into new-age stuff. Not crystals and that kind of rubbish, but more the mind improvement, spiritual stuff. She has been on the verge of a huge "break-through" for 15 years now. She disdains drugs and the like.

My question to the forum is how can we get her to take a bi-polar test? I'm sure that her reaction will be to laugh in our faces when we tell her this. We have to approach her in the correct way the first time or the opportunity will be lost. Any ideas?

[Blarg]

Mind improvement and spiritual doesn't sound too bad. You're bringing that up in a thread, and post, about serious mental disorders. Why are you conflating these things? It stretches credulity that you brought the new-agey stuff up purely by accident.

[SoloAJ]

katy,

I can attest that psychiatrists (or ologists, I forget which in this case) will diagnose varying degrees of the disease. The aunt I spoke of earlier was pretty much the degree of Fish's mom by description. The person close to me was (their aunt) is a mild case of it according to the diagnosis. They simply put her on an anti-depressant rather than anything like lithium. It made her apathetic toward life in general. I'm not really sure that it was an improvement, but at least she wasn't going through the depression and the manic times anymore I guess.

[Blarg]

I had a manic/depressive roommate. It wasted his life. But all of my roommates agreed with me that he was worse on his medication than off.

On it, he slept his life away, day after day. Woke up to eat and sh*t more or less. This happened every time he started feeling up. He would drug the bejeesus out of himself and do virtually nothing but sleep for at least three days. Thing is, feeling up just meant feeling normal. We never once saw him being anything I could describe as manic. This included the long periods when he was off his medicine.

But once he decided to do what he was supposed to do, his life was essentially over. Lucky he had a rich dad, because he was unemployed.

[Fishwhenican]

[ QUOTE ]
Fish,

I saw your thread and I clicked on it immediately. My brother and I suspect that our mum is bi-polar. We had a pretty tough time growing up, our dad had an aven worse time. They divorced when I was 13.

For the last 20 years my mother has been heavily into new-age stuff. Not crystals and that kind of rubbish, but more the mind improvement, spiritual stuff. She has been on the verge of a huge "break-through" for 15 years now. She disdains drugs and the like.

My question to the forum is how can we get her to take a bi-polar test? I'm sure that her reaction will be to laugh in our faces when we tell her this. We have to approach her in the correct way the first time or the opportunity will be lost. Any ideas?

[/ QUOTE ]

I am not sure there is any way to trick or talk someone else into taking any sort of test short of sitting down with them and trying to reason with them and convincing them to do it.st of the time a person is not going to get help until they either decide to do it on their own or are so wacked out that they are forcibly committed. The forcibly committed thing is what generally happened with my mom and by th at point there was no doubt that there was something seriously wrong.

[Fishwhenican]

[ QUOTE ]

i think more people are being diagnosed as bi-polar because they used to be diagnosed as crazy/ass holes/psychos/depressed. now there is just a more specific diagnosis.

the disease most likely does have some kind of hereditary link.


it is sometimes very scary living life wondering if one day you will start having serious mental problems. my dad is bi-polar. i have two grandparents who were alcoholics. and an aunt who commited suicide after a mental breakdown. she was most likely schizophrenic.

i was severely depressed in my late teens. I am not bi-polar but it can be a scary thing to think about sometimes.

[/ QUOTE ]

I am sure you are correct in that is is more exactly diagnosed now than years ago. In the early years they just said my mom was depressed.

It is very scary living with the thought that you may end up like what you have seen in a relation that has a mental illness.

[Fishwhenican]

[ QUOTE ]
Fish you mentioned not having friends over your house because you weren't sure how your mom would be, can you elaborate on the social implications of having a bipolar parent?

Some questions that come to mind:

Did your mom go to any of the PTA stuff at your school, or other functions?
Were you worried about your mom interacting with other people parents?

[/ QUOTE ]

Sometimes I was worried sometimes not at all worried. It really would just depend on what she was acting like at the time. There were stretches when she would be, for the most part, very normal. She would come to the concerts and all the school events then just like any normal parent. Every now and then she would say something out of wack at something like this and you would start to wonder what was coming next but usually it was nothing.

I remember as I got older and understood what was going on with her more I would get to where I could start to see breakdowns coming a long way off. I couldn't even tell you anything specific but I remember more than once thinking that things were going to start going downhill. When this started I just made really sure to not have friends over and all of that