Ruminations of an Aging Manic Depressive

How we see ourselves yields what we expect. Changing our view of ourselves depends on what we see in the norms society reflects. This is how self-awareness changes. For example: I am a senior citizen and have behaviors and symptom that fall into a pre-existing group. Back pain, bursitis, and chronic illness impact me. As a late, middle-aged individual, I see the evidence stack up and realize I am newly arrived at being categorized as a senior citizen. In this way, my ideas have changed. Accepting a bipolar diagnosis also utilizes this same process. At first, no insight gives way to later insight that can then give way to recognition of a new definition of self.

I remember my initial reaction to mental illness. I was manic. I was pleased and infused with the grandiose ideas that filled my head. For weeks I was on a high that was all too much to discard. When weeks later I experienced a drop in mood, it was with reluctance and dread that the party ended. It was several years before I realized these episodes had a beginning, middle, and end. It took several more years to focus on and recognize there was something amiss. Only after years of many episodes was I able to grasp that when people referred to mental illness, they were talking about someone like me. It was at that point that my view began to change. Forced into making a choice between seeing myself as someone special in a positive way when spiritually high and as a mental patient seeing himself as someone special in a negative way when acutely depressed, I arrived at the conclusion I was in a category that inspired stigma.

After innumerable ejections from restaurants for talking out loud to myself, encounters with the police, cheap hotels, and six different therapists in just as many years, I had a rude awakening. With lots of jobs and broken relationships, I was side-lined by my aberrant behavior. When I ended up in a mental hospital, the last little chink in the strait jacket clicked in; and with it came a shift in attitude, the recognition of what I had long strived to avoid. I was mentally ill. Aging and attitudes can both change.

Becoming an elder is more than a number and bipolar is more than a collection of symptoms. Attitudes serve as our identity. We don’t arrive at a time of life by chance or at an acceptance of mental illness by accident; we experience events that add up over the years to the recognition that we have changed.