Living Bipolar by Landon Sessions Read Free Book Online Page A

just talking about it is a relief of the pain.
    As a clinician we get nervous, of course, when a patient starts having suicidal thoughts, does this person need to be hospitalized? Do we need to involuntary contain the patient? And those are appropriate thoughts because we are concerned about the patients well being. But for a good deal of patients it’s just the expression of those feelings, just as you said, you have those types of thoughts. Am I nuts? Am I crazy? What’s wrong with me that I’m having these types of thoughts?
    What’s wrong with you is your illness. It’s the illness talking.
    Talk about Bipolar people and their tendency towards substance abuse and addiction.
    Well, with some of the research they're looking at right now there might be a connection between impulsivity -- there might be a commonality between impulsivity, and Bipolar disorder, and patients afflicted with addiction. The common ground is the impulsivity nature, just the same with patients with ADHD. If you look at that continuum of impulsivity, verse compulsively, that might be a common genetic predisposition. A person with Bipolar disorder can be more apt, especially in a manic phase, to be a little bit more thrill seeking, just as any impulsive person may be, and that thrill seeking side of us needs to be satiated.
    Some patients are probably treating themselves , self-medicating, and some patients’ will self-medicate in a depressed phase, and in a manic phase. The Bipolar patient might be looking for a little bit more of a kick during a depressed phase, and therefore, they will be drawn toward stimulants, and in turn, some patients when they're depressed may feel somewhat euphoric with alcohol -- even though we know alcohol is a central nervous system depressants, and vice versa. A lot of people when they're manic smoke marijuana, because they feel like it calms them down, and the marijuana lessens their racing thoughts they feel. Some patients when they are manic want to continue doing cocaine, and they really want to amplify the manic phase. Then, a lot of people after using cocaine, shortly thereafter, are calming themselves down on benzodiazepines, or anxiety medicines, or opiates, it’s a vicious circle of behaviors.
    If you look at that impulsivity strain, that might be the common thread, whether it's the same genetics, or whether it's the same region in the brain that gets stimulated. But I think research will help us understand more about this. There seems to be a group of patients that use drugs as a self-medicating form, but I don't think that's the ponderance of patients though, I think it relates much more to some sense of impulsivity, or thrill seeking side in the patients. Also, there doesn't seem to be a clear pattern of what drug a Bipolar patient might have addiction problems with.
    Alcohol is high on the list. You definitely see a lot of alcoholism with patients who have Bipolar disorder. Often when you look at a person's history, and you're suspicious of that patient having Bipolar disorder, you look back in the family history, and discover maybe the father, or mother, had problems with alcohol. For instance, there might be descriptions that the person in the family history was a raging drunk, and very irritable, and people wouldn’t know what kind of mood daddy was going to come home with -- but he was always so drunk. Chances are this person in the family lineage was an undiagnosed Bipolar person, and they were trying to medicate themselves through alcohol.
    Can drugs cause a person to become manic and stay manic? Can drugs lead to a person being Bipolar?
    I think that's a great question. There's a whole category of diagnoses in DSM-IV, where you have substance abuse induced mood disturbances, substance induced mania, substance induced depression, substance induced mixed states. Usually, you would hold back making a diagnosis of major depression, or Bipolar disorder, within a given timeframe in these instances.