Beneath
A conversation on living with bipolar disorder Written by Tyra Bosnic & Brooke Pawling
What would it be like if we systematically silenced Wisconsin? Approximately 5.7 million people wouldn’t be able to talk about what it was like to live in their state. All those tales of cheese and silent pastures would go untold, replaced by insidious lies spread by outsiders. The rest of the country would always view the state through a lens of misconceptions, thinking of Wisconsinites as terrifying and “other.” Eventually, they would begin to believe these myths themselves and become too ashamed to discuss the issues that affect them. It sounds ridiculous, but a group of people comparable in number to residents of the dairy state already faces such stigma. Approximately 5.7 million adults in the U.S. are living with bipolar disorder, and many feel shamed into silence about their illness. It just so happens that two such adults are on Echo magazine’s staff. Although we have long wanted those around us to understand what we go
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through with our illness, stigma has kept us from speaking about it. That’s a mistake, according to Alexa James, MSW, director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness Chicago. “It’s much more impactful to hear from folks who have actually been on that journey,” she says. “In fact, that’s how you reduce stigma. You come out and you talk about it.” And so we talked about it. We compared our highs and lows, how we cope and how our experiences with bipolar disorder have shaped our lives. During our conversation, we noticed many similarities in our stories— and we discovered how empowering a candid conversation about mental illness can be.
Diagnosis
We were both diagnosed after being admitted to psychiatric wards. Considering the ways people in inpatient facilities often are portrayed, getting admitted carries its own unique form of shame.
“There’s definitely a different level of stigma when we start to talk about more serious mental health conditions in which you would need inpatient to stabilize or get more comfortable with medication,” James says. Tyra: I was first diagnosed when I was 14. I started showing symptoms when I was about 11, and around the same time, I started exhibiting really self-destructive behavior. I was put into inpatient care at Lutheran General Hospital in the suburbs, and this one patient who was just about to be discharged was talking about his symptoms. He said something to the effect of, “It’s like there’s a tape recorder fast-forwarding and rewinding over and over again, and it’s never-ending.” For some reason, that resonated with me, and in the middle of him talking, I blurted, “That’s what I feel like.” At the time, the therapist I was seeing was in the room, and when she heard me say that, she pulled me aside and said, “Let’s go talk.” As