But bipolar drugs might change who I am

On the fourth day, my world caved in when I was unceremoniously diagnosed with bipolar disorder type I by a psychiatrist who looked like the breed of kindly yet secretly dangerous headmaster you'd see in a John Hughes film like Ferris Bueller's Day Off. That was frightening enough ... but more frightening was the fact that I was prescribed medication to control it. Medication that I would probably be taking for the rest of my life. At the age of twenty, that's not (aha) easy to swallow.

Okay, so it was my tempestuous moods, my furious seasons and my bouts of psychosis that landed me in hospital in the first place. But that wasn't the point. It may have been a solution but I wasn't happy.

The episode that got me hospitalised wasn't my first - that was some eight years earlier. I'd been living with this stuff for quite some while. There was no 'before shot' of me cowering in the splendid revelatory halo of the beaming after. As devastating and painful as my illness was, it was already part of me, it was all I had ever known, and being told that part of me had to change, and may cease to exist altogether, was galling.

Having never been really "well" meant that wellness to me was rather like a badly developed photograph of someone I didn't quite recognise. And so began the war.

Being a writer, some would say that suffering from bipolar disorder -the so-called "artists' disease" - would be the proverbial angel on my shoulder. It wasn't.

Like many people who suffer from mental illness, one of my first fears was for my creativity. I had always expected to work in the creative field. Most of my manias were as black as my depressions - terrible, lonely insanities - but it was this frantic energy that gave me the desire to write, and I would write almost constantly, on my hands, on my legs, on anything I could find.

Would medication turn me into a zombie, unable to hold a coherent thought, let alone a pen? Would I become numb, and would it not only stabilise my moods, but anaesthetise my emotions? I was terrified that drugs would make me lose the spark that made me, me.

Over the course of the next three years, I took such a vast array of pills that I resembled a walking, talking gumball machine. On first name terms with my chirpy pharmacist, I barely bothered to scan the list of possible side effects on the patient information sheet.

I went through many different classes of meds looking for some calm. Lithium, for example, was not the miracle cure we were hoping for. Weight gain, hair loss, drooling, tremors, vomiting, plus months of spending fourteen hours asleep and the associated frustrations. Amidst all the drugs and their side effects, I kept asking myself ... which bit of all this is the true me and why am I experimenting by burning away bits of my personality. How was this going to end and how much of me would be left?

The only medication that worked for me in any way was an antipsychotic. It took some time, as most psychiatric medications do, but I began to feel calmer. My moods were still unstable, but the violent extremities were lessening.

I found myself reading a novel. And another. My concentration, badly affected by passive depression and distractable manias, had pushed that particular love of mine far back into my equally damaged memory but I was once again engaging with books, and enjoying them. My family and friends were able to follow my speech again. People were less afraid of me. I slept. I began to feel more in control of my behaviour and emotions. And I discovered, to my surprise, that my mercurial nature, impulsiveness, restlessness, shyness and creativity, were due to my underlying personality. It was - as dull and unfascinating as it is - just like that. The drugs weren't destroying the essential me.

Naturally, then, I decided that the only reason I was feeling much better was because I didn't suffer from a mental illness after all. Never had.

I proceeded to conduct what I like to call the "Mad? Me?" experiment in which I petulantly toss my prescriptions into the bin and pout into a mirror.

The last time I performed this little experiment, the results were disastrous. I took a week's holiday from my medication. I even went to the coast to celebrate. On the sixth day, having reverted back to my natural insomniac state, I was wobbling precariously over the stones of Brighton beach, the chiming laughter of my friends drifting through the air back to me. I had been happy, watching the teaming salt spray dance in the sun, and very suddenly, I wasn't happy at all. It was as though I had been shot.

I began to convince myself that my friends were laughing at me. The glances of passers-by started to burn into my skin. I thought about how to kill myself. I stood under the bluest skies of that summer, watching those friends become small, as I became paralysed by terror and paranoia.

The damage was done. The black mood hastened into a mixed episode (the special hell reserved for the manic depressive, it is literally a mix of mania and depression) that became so severe that I took a massive overdose and ended up in hospital.

I loathed my dependence on medication. Wouldn't talk about it to anyone. It was surely unnatural. I thought I should have been strong enough to cope without it. But why do we worship nature anyway? As well as beauty, nature gives us hell too: cancers, diabetes and cystic fibrosis to name but three - physical conditions which cause suffering and truncate lives. You need medication to survive them, so why do so many of us look down upon medication designed to ease mental suffering - a suffering that also truncates the lives of a lot of people.

According to bipolar.com, bipolar disorder alone will kill, by suicide, nearly one fifth of the people who remain untreated.

Do we have to accept pain just to prove our own strength? No. It is BRAVE to ask for help.

I wouldn't be writing this article if it wasn't for my medication. I would have most likely become distracted. I am still sometimes at the mercy of my moods, but the severity is reduced to the point where I can function.

My medication, as much as I resent them, are the stabilisers on which I balance as I learn to live with my illness, making lifestyle changes as I go. It doesn't fix everything. It is not a cure, but it is partly responsible for my continuing existence.

The decision to take psychiatric medication is a highly personal one. In my case, I think I made the right choice.

Ruby Wax explains the four different types of bipolar on the BBC's mental wellbeing site, Headroom. Click on her image to see her explain it on video (transcript available).

• Bipolar one: this involves at least one high or manic episode lasting at least a week, some people with bipolar one will only have manic episodes, although most bouncing depression.

• Bipolar two: this involves at least one episode of depression but only mild manic episodes which are called hypomania.

• Rapid cycling: this is where you have more than four mood swings across a year this effects more than one in ten people who have bipolar disorder it can happen with both types one and two.

• Cyclothymic disorder: this is a milder form of bipolar you may go back and forth between mild depression and a slightly elevated mood. But these mood swings are shorter and less severe. Some people with cyclothymic disorder go on to have a stronger type of bipolar disorder, but this doesn't happen to everyone.

- There's also bipolar disorder not otherwise specified this really means your experiencing bipolar disorder but it doesn't fit easily in the four main types.