Bipolar diary Seven-day account of the challenges faced by one woman getting to grips with her condition. Connie Perris is in her 40s. Her first mood swings happened at school, but she only got a firm diagnosis of bipolar disorder seven years ago.

In this article

Day one: getting a diagnosis Day two: mania Day three: depression

Day four: psychosis Day five: treatment

Day six: support Day seven: recovery

My slide into severe and enduring mental illness was long and slow. At school, I had mood swings, sometimes with severe depression and also with periods of much higher mood, but these were put down to growing up and female hormones, and I learnt to live with them.

At university, a doctor explained that the mood swings through my teens had been manic depression, but it seemed no more significant than saying that I’d had German measles.

As an adult, I experienced milder depressions, but just took it as being part of the experience of doing a pressurised job; and I fought back against the depression by becoming very busy, without any sense that this might be a form of hypomania, or raised mood.

Then, in my 30s, I experienced a series of unpleasant life events. The end of a serious relationship, neighbours from hell, office politics, being assaulted and physical health problems all took their toll, and I began to crumble. To begin with, talking with a therapist helped, but then I collapsed into major mood swings and psychosis.

And so began my life in the psychiatric system with bipolar affective disorder. In the ten years since I went to see a doctor about my mental health problems, I have had therapy, medication, hospital stays, stays in respite care, home visits, and many outpatient appointments with doctors, nurses and social workers, all to help me to survive.

I have made several serious suicide attempts, some laughable in their miscalculation of how many pills it would take or how deep to cut a wrist. With others, it was a miracle I survived.

And I have acquired labels. I’m bipolar, I’m manic depressive, sometimes I’m psychotic, I have severe and enduring mental illness, I had a breakdown/have breakdowns. There are others. I’m a patient, a client, a mental health service user.

Mental health, or mental distress, is cluttered up with labels, as we try to define what the issues are and what they mean for us and our relationships with those who help us to deal with them.

For my taste, the best label to stick on a person is the label they themselves prefer: I’m comfortable with a range of labels, except, for some reason, patient. But there is no getting away from the stigma and friction caused by labels.

Fortunately, bipolar is not too bad a label to have because people associate it with creativity and intelligence, and much has been written on the subject on the internet and in books.

Psychotic, on the other hand, is a word often best avoided, because people often aren’t sure what it means. I’ll tell you later about what it means for me, as well as how depression and mania affect me.

In the meantime, I’m just me. After years of illness, the future is uncertain, and the climb up towards a healthy me is also long and slow, but one I’m making a step at a time.