Eecolps. Hi, I was diagnosed with Clinical Depression almost 2 years ago. It sounds as if this women is bipolar. Clinically Depressed people do not get the high’s associated with bipolar disorder and it sounds as if she did. I can only tell you what I have experienced, and having been engaged to someone who was bipolar, I know the difference between the two. My depression started well before meeting him, but it was triggered by our tremulous relationship, the loss of my business, home, life savings and a death of my best friends daughter whom I also cared for. I was sent spiraling out of control. I became suicidal for 4 months and was diagnosed with Clinical Depression and put on Lexapro. Most people that are Clinically Depressed cannot function without the anti-depressants. Or if they go off of them, at some point in their lives they will need to get back on them. Currently I am off Lexapro, but I have at least 2 days per month where I don’t want to live and think about killing myself. I am trying alternative options as opposed to taking the medicine, like making sure my life is stable and that I surround myself with positive people. The worst thing for my health was being with someone that was bipolar. For the most part I am doing well but I know if a crisis were to arise again, a death, loss of my job, breakup with my current boyfriend, etc. I would have a tough time coping. I have prepared myself to go back on the medicine and monitor my moods accordingly. I also have a very supportive boyfriend who has unbelievable patience. That has been the key I believe in keeping me healthy. People that are bipolar cannot usually take anti-depressants because it makes them more manic and they don’t sleep. It’s also a good indicator my Doctor said to tell if someone is bipolar if they were incorrectly diagnosed as Clinically Depressed. Clinically depressed people are usually put on anti-anxiety medicines and anti-depressants. Bi-polar people need mood stabilizers and a tranquilizer to help them sleep along with anti-anxiety medicines. They experience extreme highs and lows, hence “bi-polar”. The medicine they take helps stabilize their moods, but it doesn’t prevent them from experiencing them. For the most part anti-depressants in Clinically Depressed people do a better job at combating the depressive state. They don’t need a mood stabilizer because they only have one mood swing. I don’t have problems keeping jobs, or with anger outbursts. Again, that sounds like someone who may have bipolar. Hope this helps differentiate between the two.

Oh also to answer your last question, is it still normal to still feel this way? It’s been almost 2 years since my breakup with my bipolar ex and we were only together for 10 months. When I received an e-mail from him 2 weeks ago, I broke down in tears. All those emotions came running back. I know I still love him, but I also know we can never be together. He wasn’t willing to get therapy and that’s what he so desperately needs. I tend to be an optimistic person despite being depressed. I do think with intensive therapy, a change in his medication and distance from his parents, he may be able to have a healthy relationship with someone, but he isn’t willing to do that. He also has 2 enabling parents who didn’t like me, so I wasn’t only battling his illness, I was battling them. Instead of confronting his illness, they would blame the women he was with. I could have never won. I know I will never love anyone that intensely again. I have met many people like you and me on line who still after years have had a hard time getting over their bipolar ex’s. I believe it’s because when they are manic, they elude a euphoric feeling that is contagious. When my ex and I were getting along, it was the best feeling in the world. I have never found that with anyone else. I would do anything to have it again, but I also know what comes with that is the dark side they bring as well, where they blame you for everything, talk about hating life and how no one understands them etc. and to leave them alone. It’s a roller coaster ride that eventually made me sick. I have found few who have endured it. As you know the rate of bipolar divorce is two to three times higher as those without a mental illness and the divorce rate among healthy American’s is already at 50%. 1 out of 6 with bipolar disorder commit suicide. It’s very sad. I would cut off my right arm if it meant making him healthy, because I know the person he can be when I catch fleeting moments of his healthy personality. That’s the person I fell in love with and the one I continue to remember.

Adnor,..I really appreciate your time and compassion in replying to my post. I am very sorry for the anguish you have experienced due to having been in a relationship with a Bipolar person.. I never realized the realities of depression, and having loved a possibly Bipolar person. It has changed my life, and I feel the affects will be everlasting. .......I feel I have grown and matured from going through what I have. The loss I feel is at times overwhelming. I have always been a person of compassion, that no matter what the circumstances, or challenges, would never turn away from someone in trouble, or think of causing someone I cared for to turn away from me. I agree with you about feeling the uphoria when I was with my girlfriend. Seemed like it was meant to be, and we were joined at the hip. Letting go has been very hard. ....A little over 2 weeks ago, my girlfriend's stepmom passed away. She was an advanced alzheimers patient. Her stepfather was in the same facility, on the floor above the mom. He was old, frail, and sick, but didn't have alzheimers. But he was pretty much bedridden all the time. ........It was very sad circumstances. My girlfriend had a hard time dealing with it so she would only visit them maybe once every 3 weeks or so. When she was young I guess there was a lot of turmoil within the family, and my girlfriend said that her stepparent's verbally abusive treatment of her as a child, and a dysfunctional environment, was the cause of most of her adult problems, anger, and depression. ....... I offered to go with her to visit them, but she didn't want to expose me in( her own words), to the grief. But she took me up on my offer,..and we went every weekend together, and she started going during the week on her own also. She said it made it easier for her to go see them with me, because I had a calming effect on her. ......... But it also did have an emotional affect on myself. The first thing I noticed during my first visit were the family pictures in their rooms. They did not seem like the horrible people my girlfriend made them out to be, per our many conversations. My girlfriend was in many of the photos, in various ages of her life, standing with her arms around her stepdad. They were a family. And I told her she should see them faithfully before it was too late. .......I found out about her mom's passing, by reading it in the obituary of the local newspaper. I felt very bad, because I used to wheel her mom in her wheelchair, up to visit with her husband. I would drive my girlfriend to an icecream shop on the way to the facility,...and buy each of the parents a small cup of their favorite icecream. Both her parent's birthsays were in November. I am grateful they were both together for their little party. ...Even though I hadn't spoken to my ex girlfriend in 3 months, after hearing of her mom's death I sent a small bereavment gift with a card. The gift was a small pewter angel with a very comforting inscription on it. ........Almost a week later I just recieved a nice Thank You card from her. I broke down when I got the card,..just from seeing her handwriting. I wasn't expecting to hear from her again. The message inside the card was very cordial. She thanked me for the gift and card,..and wished me all her best. As much as I'd like to talk to her, my instincts tell me not to contact. ...I hate to say it, but she may get the idea my condolances have a double meaning, which couldn't be further srom the truth. But I know her personality, and have witnessed her misinturpretation of acts of kindness in the past. Maybe it's just best to let it be. Do you share my opinion? ...Anyway thank you for your time in reading and writing. This is a great forum with many good people on it. I hope I can maybe be a help to others on here. Best Regards,..

Eeclops. Again, after reading your story, I am more inclined to think this woman is bipolar. If it were the case that she just had Clinical Depression, I would say contacting her wouldn’t be a problem. I know this because when I get into a depressed state I immediately call my boyfriend. I don’t push him away. He talks me through it and then comes up with positive things for me to do to get my mind off of it, like ride my horse, spend time with my daughter, etc. He will call me to make sure I did what he suggested and then will literally drop everything and come over that night to be with me. It makes all the difference in the world to me.

I can describe having Clinical Depression as the same feeling one has when they know they have drank too much and realize they are going to be sick. You can actually feel it coming on. The smallest things can trigger it. A song, an e-mail, a memory. Once it starts, there is nothing you can do and before you know it, you feel like hell and you want to die. The only comforting feeling for me now, is knowing like being drunk, it’s going to pass. The difference between just being depressed and being Clinically depressed is that in Clinically depressed people that feeling sometimes never passes or does but it happens again later in life where medication is the only thing that can help them. Mild Depression can and does go away but Clinical Depression is more apt to come back and interferes with day to day life. For me that feeling had lasted for 4 continuous months without passing, that’s when I knew I needed help. Seriously if someone had handed me a gun, it would have been over. Or if someone gave me a needle full of heroin I wouldn’t have hesitated to inject it. I would have done anything to stop that pain. I thought about killing myself every day and even starting planning it. It was and is worse then any physical pain I have ever felt.

I was never one in the past that could understand or sympathize with suicidal people. I used to think and say they took the easy way out. Well now I know exactly how it feels. I know there are a lot of people that have never been suicidal or have never been depressed that have a hard time understanding it. I tell people the pain is no different if someone were to come up to you and chop off your leg and leave you there suffering with no pain medication. You are in so much pain you would do anything to make it stop. Take any drug (alcohol, pain pills, etc, to numb it, which is why a lot of people self medicate) and if you didn’t have those things the pain would get so unbearable that you would kill yourself if a gun was the only way to stop it, if jumping meant it would end it. If hanging yourself meant you didn’t have to feel it anymore. You aren’t thinking about anyone or anything except that pain. That’s why many people may not understand why Mrs. Jones who was seemingly happily married with three children, and who didn’t seem like the person who would have committed suicide, did. Certainly she never stopped to think about her husband and kids, why? Look how selfish she was. People stereotype and what they fail to realize is what was going on in Mrs. Jones head and don’t know that Mrs. Jones couldn’t stop to think about her kids and husband because the pain was too overwhelming to do so. The pain was the only thing she was feeling. That’s why it’s so important for Clinically Depressed and Suicidal people to be in a relationship with a healthy person that can identify the signs of depression and can get them the help they need. We really don’t want to kill ourselves, but when the pain doesn’t stop, at times that feels like the only alternative. So that’s what it’s like to be Clinically Depressed and suicidal. Your mind is hurting just like any other part of your body would be. And just like with any other part of your body, when one suffers for instance a knee injury and it hurts and has to be operated on, etc. The next time you get hit in the knee, it triggers that pain again. You can only take so many hits to that injured knee before it doesn’t quite work like it once did. That’s exactly what happens to the brain. One crisis after another, and the brain doesn’t fully recover. That’s why many people with dysfunctional childhoods like I had become Clinically Depressed in adulthood. Our brain can no longer handle the emotional bruising and they stop recovering. We stopped producing serotonin so chemically our brains feel blah.

But in regards to having this illness, I do welcome my boyfriends help and by him showing me how much he loves me, it makes me less depressed and I spend less time thinking about negative things. In bipolar people however, it’s different. And the following scenarios will probably more closely match the reaction you received from your girlfriend. When my ex went into a depressed state, he said no one could help him and it’s a place he must go alone and find his way out alone. He would send several dark e-mails telling me how going through life half alive is a waste. That he hates his job, and how all the passion has gone away in our relationship, but we continue to hang on because there is nothing else to do. That it appears to him, that I have felt pretty good lately, but he feels like hell (almost making me feel guilty for feeling good). I would reach out to him and practically beg him to let me help him, telling him I was on my way over, repeatedly telling him how much I loved him and that it scared me when he would get like this and he would become angry and say no, I won’t be here, and if you come over and I am here, I won’t answer the door, so don’t waste your time. I don’t want to see you. I am going out drinking (he doesn’t drink). I would remind him the effects that drinking has with the medications he is taking and he would say, well if 3 shots don’t kill me, then I must be too mean to die. Leaving me feeling lousy at home worrying about him. Like I said just completely bizarre and opposite of what someone would do if they were just depressed. So I would feel totally hopeless while my fiancée was out drinking and feeling sorry for himself. He refused my love and help. It’s almost like he enjoyed feeling that way and he certainly wanted everyone else to feel just as lousy as he was. So you can see why I got depressed, and why that relationship pushed me over the edge. This was a cycle that went on for 10 months. After a couple of days like this he then would become manic, and for instance, I would come over and he would be talking a million miles a minute. He would be overly happy and say, let’s go see a movie, it starts in 4 minutes, but we can make it. Then we would hop into his car and he would drive like a maniac to get there. We ran from the car door all the way to the theatre. He grabbed my hand and held it all the way through the movie. Would give me kisses throughout. It was exhilarating. He was fun to be around. He had ideas and intense thoughts and we would talk endlessly. We would return to his house and we sit side by side in front of the tv eating dinner together, then curl up on the couch, just to retreat to the bedroom to make passionate love. He was captivating, intriguing, loving. The next morning I never knew who I was going to wake up to. There would be days he wouldn't want to make love or said that's all we ever do. There would be stretches of time when things would be fine and then out of the blue, he would get pissed off if I didn’t follow through on the smallest of things. This is where I think his parents or parents of bipolar people in general can come in to trigger episodes. They were very negative people and said very negative things about others, not just me. They had extremely high expectations of their son, so in turn he had high expectations of others. I think it exasperated his illness.

So the long answer to your simple question is, no, I don’t think you should contact her again, and I know it’s hard not to. If you push too hard, she will turn on you and they can get very, very nasty. My ex used to explain his illness as a high performance car. He can run really fast and for long periods of time, but if you push it too hard, you will blow the engine. He also said it felt at times like he would want to crawl out of his own skin. These were his analogies of what it was like to be bipolar.

He also made me out to be someone and something I wasn’t. I knew I wasn’t a stalker, or a bad person. But he made me feel that way. I mean what person doesn’t try to work something out with someone you are engaged to be married to, when the day prior he was telling you how much in love he was. It’s hard to comprehend. I would show up after a fight at the recreation center he worked out at so we could talk, because he wasn’t answering his phone, and he would say, What now, are you stalking me? He over reacted to everything and put me down constantly. To this day he feels I was just a horrific girlfriend, and the sad fact is, I never did anything wrong, besides perhaps having too many things on the burner at one time. He wanted me and all of me and when he couldn’t have that, he acted out in bizarre ways, like posting profiles on line and listing sexual acts he was into on a sexual dating site. You must realize everything they ever say to you, you have to take with a grain of salt, because the very next day it can change. I reached out so many times to my ex, I’ve lost count. I know he still loves me. Otherwise he would have never of e-mailed me recently to tell me he is moving. And although I didn’t get the exact apology I was looking for, I know he realizes what he did was inappropriate. He will never fully admit that. But what he really wanted to know was if I still cared. It was nice to know I wasn’t the only one having a hard time moving on and clearly neither has let the other one go. But just receiving his e-mails sent me back into such a deep depression that I had to call my boyfriend back up just for support. He seriously is just a boy that is a friend. For my own health, I know that I will never have that kind of love I had with my bipolar ex with anyone else nor would I ever want to. I have kept my distance emotionally and physically from men. I am just not ready for that sort of relationship again. That’s what makes my relationship with the current guy I am with so special. He has supported me through many difficult times and is patiently awaiting the day I love him back as much as he has loved me.

Eeclops:

I just re-read your post and this quote caught my eye and I believe it’s something we both have in common, which probably has prevented us in moving forward in other relationship because we still care so much for our bi-polar counterparts.
“I have always been a person of compassion, that no matter what the circumstances, or challenges, would never turn away from someone in trouble, or think of causing someone I cared for to turn away from me”. You know what my first thoughts were when my ex wrote me? I was so elated, I thought, I don’t care where he moving to, I just want to go with him. He could be moving to the North Pole and I would go. Because that same mantra comes into effect immediately. I don’t want to turn away from someone I care about. I want to be there with him and for him. This is what has prevented me from having another relationship with someone else. I haven’t been able to stop caring for him. This is how two people should feel when they are in love. He once told me that no one could show him the unconditional love that both his parents have. But when I try he pushes me away, makes me out to be something I am not, and shuts the door. I know he deserves to be loved like this, but then again, so do I.

Hi,..Adnor thank you for your insight to all of this. I did just read your post about thinking before dating a bipolar person. I agree with a few of the other posters, that all questionable behavior cannot be globally attributed to being bipolar. I believe in a few instances you were misinterpreted. I also feel unless someone has lived through all the unique , and bizarre episodes, of a person in a Bipolar relationship,..that words alone cannot describe the experiences of each individual case. ... I do believe however, when a person has other personality disorders coupled with a Bipolar diagnosis, underlying personality problems can be intensified by the disorder. ...I have seen this for myself. I have been the victim of paranoia and accused of things I didn't do. If I said hello to a neighbor in passing, that my girlfriend had been fueding with, I would be questioned, or even hollared at because of suspicion of taking sides against my girlfriend. She thought it strange I would be nice to someone that she was fighting with. ...She also thought a buddy of mine had a crush on me, because by coincidence, while jogging by my place, he dropped by a few times, over a 1 month period. She and I by coincidence happened to be on the phone, each time, so she thought it more than just a coincidence. She would scream at me out of control on the phone, to get rid of the guy,..while he was only standing a few feet away. She was adamant that if we went out for a beer, he considered that a date. ......We both knew the guy ,...and he had a history of crossdressing. He was also involved in relationships with women, was straight and was not a threat to me. He was a good friend, very kind, and I accepted him for who he was, unconditionally. ........ She wanted me to drop him as a friend even though I knew him and all my other friends knew him for 15 years, and she a little over 1. She also accused me of spending more time with my other friends, and giving them preferabe treatment over her. She said I was forgiving of their flaws,..and didn't accept hers. Even though I gave her most of my time and support, both emotionally and monitarily. ...But the latest is even after 3 months of no contact, she is suspicious of my mtives, because I sent a card and a small berievment gift after her mother passed away a few weeks ago. She sent me a nice thank you card, but has since told someone we mutually know, that she thinks I was being nice, as an alterior means to get her to contact me or me her. Even when we were together, she was questionable to small gifts I would buy her. She didn't understand why I would impulsively do that, even though I explained it was because I loved her. .....So I do believe that other underlying personality problems can be intensified by bipolar affects. Although I have never wanted to accept it, some people may be just mean, selfish and ignorant, in general, despite their high intelligence level. And because it may be a major part of their make up, it cannot be soley attributed to any one disorder. ....I agree with what you told me adnor, about making no contact with her. After all this time it seems she is still unappreciable, angry, unpredictable. and still looking for a reason for conflict. She still looks at kind acts as a threat, or at least with conditions attached. I will heed your warnings,..Thank you....