Author: Cassandra Stout Are you bipolar? There is a day on the calendar to celebrate your struggles with the disorder. World Bipolar Day (WBD) is celebrated each year on March 30th, in honor of Vincent Van Gogh’s birthday, as he was posthumously diagnosed as...
If you suffer from bipolar disorder, then you may already know how difficult managing romantic relationships can be. Even being a partner with a bipolar disorder sufferer is difficult. The manic and hypomanic phases of the disease can include lapses in judgment,...
Both in my profession and as a mother of a 22 year-old daughter who has been living with bipolar disorder since age 12, I have personally seen the difficulties experienced by both the loved one and those who care about him/her, particularly at the outset. My hope is...
By: Cassandra Stout The holidays strike fear into many hearts, especially those of us with mental illness. But they don’t have to. People with mental health conditions, including bipolar disorder, can thrive during the holiday season. Don’t Neglect Basic...
By: Thea Madeline Porter I grew up in a typical middle class neighborhood in southern California. During my childhood I enjoyed being creative, playing sports, taking Irish dancing, listening to music, watching movies and hanging out with friends and family. I was...
By: Cassandra Stout Medication interactions are serious business. You could take two medications which counteract each other, which could make you sick enough to end up in the emergency room, or even die. October 21st is National Check Your Meds Day in the US. Making...
By: Greg Walshaw I was finishing my first year of a Master’s program when things started to change. The first time I stayed up all night to work on a paper, I thought nothing of it: the paper had to get done, and this was the cost of getting it done. I remember...
By: Cassandra Stout Seeing a therapist can be enormously helpful in sorting out issues you may have in your life. You can also develop coping skills in therapy to deal with serious problems, or just the less-serious issues of everyday life. But how do you start...
By: Sophie Prosolek Self-discovery is an important part of learning to be an individual, but in my opinion it’s all the more important when that individual has Bipolar disorder. Bipolar, in its many guises, can be a really two-faced friend; it occasionally allows you...
By: Cassandra Stout As a parent with bipolar disorder, you might worry about the effects of your unchecked mental illness on your loved ones, especially your children. The devastating mood swings of bipolar disorder can cause instability for your kids. One example, a...
By: Laura Sanscartier (Trigger warning for sexual assault) There’s a song by Sarah MacLachlan called “Hold On”. The first line is “Hold on, hold on to yourself, for this is gonna hurt like hell.” I often think of it when it comes to hard...
By: Brandy Higgins, RN,BSN National Sleep Awareness Week is March 10-16, 2019 this year! I love to sleep. Unfortunately, I have battled all of my life to sleep normally. My mental illnesses make it really hard for me to sleep like an average person. I have insomnia....
By: Sydney Batt Students living with Bipolar disorder have challenges not many people see or understand. Features of bipolar disorder make it tough to thrive in school, so it may feel like a lonely battle in the classroom. School stressors can contribute to triggering...
By: Courtney Davey, MA, LMFT The holidays are a wonderful time: family, friends, feelings of good will etc. However, these additions to your schedule also can create high levels of stress. Holiday movies are notorious for making gags out of the difficulties with...
By: Andrienne Kennedy This is the most wonderful time of the year! For many people the holidays signifies happiness, family and fun. But what about those who struggle when holiday time comes around? While the meaning of the holidays is beautiful, it can be a rough...
By: Megan Malfi
By: Danielle Workman I’ve said it in many other posts and even in my book, but the day I received my diagnosis and was told I had Bipolar Disorder, I truly felt alone. The days that followed, the feeling remained. The more I searched online and the more I dug, the...
By: Emily McGuigan “If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.” ~ Edward Hopper As an artist with Generalized Anxiety Disorder(GAD) and Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), I have primarily used drawing and painting to help me cope with and explain...
By: Conor Bezane There are 5.7 million bipolar people in the US, and 60 percent of them are addicts, according to the Epidemiologic Catchment Area study. Co-occurring addiction is more common in bipolar people than in any other psychiatric group. We drink and use...
By: Michelle Vasiliu In 2015, my first picture book, My Happy Sad Mummy, was published. My Happy Sad Mummy is a Picture Book for 3-8 year olds. It is a story that portrays the emotional response of a young girl living with a mother who has bipolar disorder. The book...
By: Danielle Workman The day I received my diagnosis for Bipolar Disorder, I felt so alone. I remember it vividly, because it was so incredibly painful. I didn’t know anyone with Bipolar Disorder I could talk to about it. The people I knew that had anxiety and...
By: Serena Goldsmith As a peer counselor, speaker, and mental health clinician, many people have shared with me that they feel stigmatized by having a mental health diagnosis and they feel reluctant to tell others about it. I felt that way too for many years after I...
By: Allison Strong When I first did intake for group dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), I sorta ‘flunked.’ Temporarily. It was determined that I’d been traumatized and I was transferred to their Trauma Resolution and Integration Program (T.R.I.P.) for individual...
By: Megan Malfi Check out Redefining Success Part 2, here! For more vlogs from Megan Malfi, check out the playlist here.
By: Allison Strong A year ago, I wrote about Zen, Mindfulness and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). DBT is an update on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy—both written by Marsha M Linehan, Ph D. Originally, DBT was strictly for the treatment of borderline personality...
By Melanie Luxenberg You don’t want anxiety to win, but let’s face it; sometimes it happens. I say don’t be hard on yourself when it does. Anxiety and bipolar disorder seem to really like each other- a lot. Or at least that’s what my experience has been. Anxiety...
By Megan Malfi
By Megan Malfi
By Janet Coburn You may think that your psychiatrist and your psychotherapist constitute your treatment team. You can add your caregiver, your bipolar friends, and your online groups and call them your support system. But there’s one person you’ve left...
By Megan Shultz I have Bipolar Disorder. At the end of January 2016 I finished a course of 15 ECT treatments for a severe episode of depression. A couple of weeks after I finished the ECT I started to become very angry and irritable. The mania was setting in. You...
By Pieter Steyn I want to ask you, how are you? What heaviness are you carrying? What tears are you holding back? What pain and what fears are you keeping inside? People often ask you how you are and you reply “fine”, but you are not fine. They will never know that....
By Jen Teh In a recent conversation with a good friend, we talked about a mutual friend who appeared to be showing signs of bipolar disorder but who was quite closed to the possibility of a problem. The conversation meandered to what it was like when I was first...
Q: How do you support your partner when, in the midst of a hypomanic episode, they tell you that they want to end the relationship and move out on their own? How can you tell if that’s what they’re truly feeling, or if it’s a result of their episode? Beka: From a...
By: Farida Raj “My son needs help. He has bipolar disorder. Bipolar! How can a seven year old child have bipolar?” I, a Remedial Educator, was sitting with a parent who had recently relocated from Canada to Hyderabad, India. A pediatric psychiatrist had diagnosed her...
Long time married couple Ron and Beka Owens answer your questions about relationships and bipolar disorder. Do arguments about issues in your relationship with your husband ever trigger manic or depressive episodes? How do you deal with any issues you may have if you...
By: Karen Meadows In retrospect, during my daughter’s battle with mental illness, I wasted a lot of energy worrying about things I couldn’t control. When I learned about a framework called Three Concentric Circles at work, I realized this was a powerful approach I...
First, let me say that I hate shopping. Not just grocery shopping, which I assume pretty much everyone hates, but all the kinds of shopping that women are stereo-typically supposed to love: clothing shopping, shoe shopping, makeup shopping, and furniture shopping. I...
“Youth is wasted on the young,” Irish playwright Oscar Wild is quoted as saying. It may be true, too, that happiness is wasted on those who have had no real trouble. Memories of my own youth surged through me recently when I met a 27-year-old woman who has her own...
Help us win Healthline’s Best Health Blog of the Year! Vote for International Bipolar Foundation here. Traveling can be difficult for everyone, even more so for those that struggle with mental health conditions. Between packing, leaving your normal schedule,...
This is Part 2 in a 5-Part Series: “When the World is Too Bright: An Intensive View of Mania from On the Ground” (Read Part 1, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5 here) I recently came across the poetry of Nayyirah Waheed. I follow her on Instagram and she posts...
Episodes can occur in patients with bipolar disorder for numerous reasons; sometimes episodes occur for no known reason at all. I have learned to pay attention to my triggers so I can try to stay ahead of my episodes; sometimes it’s helpful, sometimes it’s not. I also...
It’s inevitable at times for something to happen that will shatter the beautiful recovery we’ve worked so hard to maintain. This is life. Reclaiming that recovery after a crisis will happen, but it may take some time. I recently had to deal with a few crises that...
Help us win Healthline’s Best Health Blog of the Year! Vote for International Bipolar Foundation here. I was diagnosed with bipolar type I disorder when I was twenty-three after experiencing nine years of symptoms, a diagnosis of depression, and then a...
I remember the period before I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a seriously confusing, conflicting time. If you are unsure if you have any mental illness, you probably feel very confused and conflicted also. But the best thing I ever did was get help, and you...
These past few years have been a season of waiting and stress for our family. My husband has struggled to find a permanent job, which has left us with no real sense of where we will settle down and start to build a life. The uncertainty of the situation has produced...
One part of being a mental health advocate that I pride myself on is being a walking pamphlet of resources for people struggling with mental health and being able to help them help themselves. As a student on Binghamton University’s campus, I am well known among my...
I was sitting in my psychiatrists office recently in a large, oversized chair staring at the slightly crooked pictures on the wall. A boat. A beach. African figures. I could hear the ticking of the clock as I scanned the piles of books and patient records underneath,...
Does the title of this blog scare you? Does it make you laugh? Does it make you cry? Make you shudder? It might do one or all of those things. Most people never want to admit they have been to a psychiatric hospital. I can’t say I would have ever dreamed I...
I want to start by saying that this list of spiritual traps accompanying bipolar disorder is no scientific article. Rather, it is a list of my own experiences and those of my clients searching for ways to integrate spiritual wisdom gleaned during times of madness...
Although I sometimes wax nostalgic about bygone days when screens did not dominate my life and my attention was not as divided as often as it seems to be lately, the fact is I think a healthy social media community can be a great asset to persons suffering from mental...
