I came across a story this week about Bipolar UK Simon Kitchen’s upcoming charity walk to raise awareness for bipolar disease and the astonishingly long time it takes for it to go diagnosed.
Kitchen is taking a 9.5 day walk to raise awareness that the average time for bipolar diagnosis in the UK is 9.5 years from onset.
Those years can wreak havoc in nearly every area of one’s life, and the tragedy is that it doesn’t have to. Good treatment is available.
I looked up U.S. statistics, and it turns out the average time for diagnosis in the states is a similarly depressing 8 years, according to Professor Kay Redfield Jamison at Johns Hopkins.
Jamison notes that the delay is often due to the fact bipolar is associated in the popular imagination with a kind of constant, manic impulsiveness that’s an incredibly crude, simplistic description of the disease.
You know, as if you’re doing this 24/7 when you have an $8/hr job.
That’s….not the way it works.
Also, many have bipolar II, which is difficult to recognize because the highs aren’t as obviously high as those in bipolar I. Thus, the “hypomania” might look very much like great productivity, focus, or intense creativity.
Another reason why the delay is so long is that patients tend to swing from feeling really good to really bad, and it can just feel like a normal rhythm of life.
When they’re feeling good, they resist getting help.
“Oh, it was just a rough patch, but now I’m great,” one might say, and who could blame you?
At the moment, the sun is shining as if it rose for you, birds (robins, in fact) are singing as if it’s your nuptials, and the bees are indicating either a metaphoric or literal new life could be forming.
Everything is great!
Then, the darkness hits and when that happens, patients will often self-diagnose themselves as dealing with depression — not a bipolar disorder.
Or, they can just call it a rough patch and perhaps even have the foresight to know that that brilliant sun will come out again and “isn’t this just the way life is?”
No, not for most people (or to be specific: 97.6% of people, in a cross-sectional study of eleven countries).
And the truth is — the exhausting yo-yo, the swings, the harmful effects on one’s life — none of that has to be one’s destiny, if diagnosed and treated appropriately.
From childhood, I always suspected I had some form of depression, and when I finally tried medicine in my 20s, went through all kinds of SSRI’s that didn’t help.
I never dreamed I could have bipolar II, because I didn’t fit the Youtube above, at all. That popular misconception.
Then a sharp doctor one day said, “Mmm, I think you might have bipolar 2,” and although the words shocked and didn’t ring true to me, I took the medicine and, lo and behold, the Rx worked. And when I read about hypomania and depressive episodes, the clinical picture fit, as well.
But it was quite the wait.
So there are so many really exhausting barriers to clinical diagnosis and treatment.
If you think you might have the disorder…
For readers from the United States….
Find a psychiatrist here.
Find a therapist here.
For readers, internationally, seek help from a local resource.
Also, I put a picture of the great 19th century preacher Charles Spurgeon at the top because, although he was obviously never clinically diagnosed with a form of bipolar, he certainly wrote about his depression as though he might be someone suffering from it.
In his sermon, “Israel’s God and God’s Israel,” he says:
“I suppose that some brethren neither have much elevation or depression. I could almost wish to share their peaceful life. For I am much tossed up and down, and although my joy is greater than the most of men, my depression of spirit is such as few can have an idea of.”
Of course, Spurgeon had far more to write and say about his mental condition and for that, check out one of my favorite books of all time on the subject, Zack Eswine’s Spurgeon’s Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who suffer from depression.
