Overcoming bipolar with support and treatment

Marina:

By the second year I was seeing a Psychiatrist in the Army and he was successfully treated with an antidepressant, but it wasn't until when I got out that in retrospect I knew that I was going through full-blown mania, just going out every single day, just dancing salsa away, literally six nights a week on three hours of sleep, and then I hit rock bottom. I crashed and that's when my mother, she dragged me to go get help.

When I got better I was attending an intensive treatment program where it’s not a 24-hour thing but you go for a half a day and you do group sessions and then the one-on-one with a Therapist. And then one day I was just going through all the different depression online and then I happened to come upon, bipolar. I was like, “Oh, I remember studying that in undergrad in college ten years ago,” and I realized I had checked off all but one, and then I went back to my Therapist.

It just really didn’t occur to me but he said, “This is common, because people usually don’t seek treatment when they’re going through a manic episode because that’s when they’re having fun.” The upside, yes, you have a lot of fun, you’re the one with the lampshade and the dancing on the table that everybody wants to hang out with because you’re just funny and fun, but on the ugly side of it you’re also very irritable and you fly off the handle easily. You tend to say grossly inappropriate things, especially in a professional environment probably. I was put on a mood stabilizer so that kind of helped also curb those tendencies, so that really helped a lot.