The Diagnosis

My life changed when I was diagnosed with type 2 bipolar in the fall of 2022. "Fun With Bipolar" is my effort to make sense of it and understand it.

"Many individuals experience several episodes of major depression prior to the first recognized hypomanic episode, with typically more than a 10-year lag between illness onset and the diagnosis of bipolar disorder." 

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition

Everyone has a handful of days when life takes a hard right onto a brand-new path. Sometimes we don’t know the day is significant: the day you got assigned a cabin at summer camp and grabbed a bunk under the kid who become your best friend for the next 25 years (July 6, 1985). The day you met your spouse (August 2, 2010).

And then there are the days you know it’s happening: the day you get married (October 12, 2013), the day you find out you’re going to be a father (October 2015). They’re not always happy days: the day you learn your own father has a rare form of cancer and a bad prognosis (March 6, 2004). The day your mom has a stroke and checks into the hospital, permanently (May 26, 2018).

And October 17, 2022, the day I got diagnosed with type 2 bipolar disorder.

The diagnosis seems like the best place to start this story. The diagnosis is likely one of the most significant before and after days in my life. The diagnosis is still fresh. It’s too early to tell if the day of the diagnosis will be one of the best or worst days of my life.

Less than two weeks after getting fired and finally admitting to my wife I had been hiding a growing debt problem, we were sitting in my therapist’s office listening to her go through the screening questions for bipolar disorder.

“Has there ever been a period of time when you were not your usual self and...

• “You felt so good or hyper that other people thought you were not your normal self or were so hyper that you got into trouble?” Yes.

• “You were so irritable that you shouted at people or started fights or arguments?” Yes.

• “You felt much more self-confident than usual?” Yes.

And on and on. Sometimes K would answer before I could. My mind was slow, trying to reshape all the mood swings, fights and impulsive behavior that had gotten us there as something else — people with bipolar are great at bending the truth to shape the narrative. More than a year earlier, K had suggested I may have bipolar; I took an online screening test and lied on enough of the questions to get a clean bill of mental health, as well an excuse for putting off finding a therapist.

But it was much harder to lie to my therapist than myself, so on October 17, 2022, I was answering honestly, or K corrected me when I tried to rationalize my most shameful moments as anything other than a mental health disorder. With each “yes” answer, I felt my slipping into a new life phase I wasn’t ready for.

I was already fighting and medicated for previously diagnosed depression, anxiety and ADHD. I didn’t think I had much more fight to give. I didn’t have time to be bipolar: I had a job to find and a mountain of bills to tackle. I had to work on being a dad and saving a marriage that was in tatters.

The hardest part of the diagnosis to accept was that I had had little control over my actions and my brain. We’re raised to own their mistakes and try to fix them. The rational side of me understood mental illness, understood no one wanted to pick pointless arguments or let a dark mood take over the life. No one wants to hurt their loved ones, and most of us don’t want to hurt other people. In my 30 years as a reporter, I had mostly had empathy for the criminals, addicts and downtrodden I had covered: a lot of them had some form of mental illness, and I understood that most of the broken I wrote about were as much a victim of their circumstances and environment as they were perpetrators of acts heinous enough to be newsworthy.

But I didn’t want to extend that empathy and rational thought to myself. I preferred being an asshole over being sick. I wanted to own my decisions, words and actions.

“This is not your fault. You were born this way,” R, my therapist, said in repeatedly in the following months. It was like Matt Damon getting pounded by Robin Williams in the third act of “Good Will Hunting.” But I wouldn’t let myself cry or accept the comfort; I preferred — and often still prefer — to blame myself.

I use writing and stories to process and understand my world. I’m still processing and trying to understand my world, and “Fun With Bipolar” is more about helping me understand the diagnosis and how to live with it than it is about anything else.

Self-indulgent? Perhaps. Narcissism is, after all, a trait of bipolar people. But maybe it’s also a way to start believing this is not my fault and that I was born this way.