I met with a psychiatrist today who after going through some questioning with me said that she believes that I have bipolar depression 2. And listening to it be described it just sounded like life. Everyone has highs and lows. Everyone I know is grumpy on Monday and happy on Friday, that’s normal. So what makes bipolar 2 different?
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The disorder isn’t in the highs and lows, it’s in the *extremes* of those highs and lows, and their erratic nature.
Imagine a car. A car can speed up when the gas pedal is pressed, it slows down when you use the brakes, it turns when you turn the wheel. All of these things are normal for a car, and even when the car does something unusual (stops really sharply, jerks to the side) it usually has a clear cause that makes sense (someone pulled the parking brake, or one tire blew out).
But what if your car just sometimes accelerates way harder than normal and runs at full speed all the time for a week straight? What if your car can’t go more than half its normal speed for a month? What if what *should* be a very normal issue (hitting a small rock) causes an unusually big reaction (the entire car flips over)? We’d pretty rightly assume that something was a little off in that car, and we’d want to fix it so we could to get a more reliable driving experience.
Your brain is the car. Everyone has their highs and lows, but bipolar disorders describe a pattern of highs and lows that aren’t “normal”, in as much as we can say any person is “normal”. Something in the bipolar brain is swinging too hard, too far toward high energy and low energy and it can cause serious problems in the person’s life.
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