Bi-Polar Depression Unplugged

Description

This autobiography is a highly honest and personal account of one woman's life and experience of bi-polar, but at the same time this book has been researched in detail and will be of informative value to anyone with an interest in bipolar and in particular its depressive aspects.

About the Author

Susan graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from UCLA. She has worked as an author, editor and researcher during an illustrious career which has included work with Nobel Peace Prize nominees. She is a wife and mother.

Book Extract

If I were at a Bipolar Anonymous Meeting, I guess I’d just say, “Hi, my name is Susan Bernard, and I’m bipolar. I experienced my first depressive episode when I was an 18-year-old freshman at the University of California at Berkeley. Although I sought help, and survived two six-week semi-annual depressive episodes for the next 25 years, I wasn’t diagnosed as bipolar until 1993.

Prior to my diagnosis, I was the happily married mother of a four-year-old son, and I had friends and family members whom I loved and who loved me. After my diagnosis and the medication merry-go-round that ensued, my life rapidly deteriorated.

For the next decade, I was treated by four different psychiatrists who prescribed 25 different medications in different combinations and different dosages. And I experienced the attendant side effects. The medication also increased the severity and duration of the depressive episodes and produced a wide array of erratic behaviour I’d never experienced before.

The illness was destroying my life. I was getting sicker and sicker. My husband, son, and I were becoming socially isolated. I could no longer work, and I was becoming desperately unhappy.

Although I had spent years researching bipolar mood disorder, I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t getting well. At the time, I had no idea that during all the years my psychiatrists had been prescribing medications for me, there had been no major studies on its efficacy.

In fact, until 2003, bipolar depression had been largely ignored.