Blessed with BIPOLAR?

I cracked up – for the first time - on June 4, 1988, three weeks short of completing my Masters degree in Psychology. Some would say I had a nervous breakdown. The psych ward doctors said it was major depression. I say that I saw just how evil my sin is in the eyes of God and it scared the hell out of me.

I cracked up, broke down, and de-pressed. I cobbled together some mad reality and blew a fuse. I despaired, decompensated, detached, and derailed. I lost my mind, never to be the same again. Thanks be to God! Praise to You, Lord Jesus Christ!

One year later, during my second tour of duty as a psych ward inpatient, I completed my Masters degree in Psychology, taking my final class on three hour passes from the hospital. I woke up in the psych ward, went to class at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, and returned to the hospital for the rest of the day – and night. Now that’s bipolar! Psych grad-student by day. Psych ward patient by night. Two weeks prior to completing my degree, I kicked, thrashed, wrestled, clawed, and bit – literally – to keep from being restrained. I ended up strapped to a bed with a thorazine needle in my arm.

On February 2, 1980, I signed a letter of intent to attend Georgia Tech on a full football scholarship. Six months later I left Atlanta, never to return.

I did not know it until years later, but I was steeped in depression from the time I checked in at Field dormitory for Georgia Tech’s training camp until the day I boarded a red-eye flight back home. I was sad, scared, guilt-ridden, and disconcerted, all while trying to compete at a level of football bigger, faster, stronger, and more complex than any I had ever played.

The anguish over the decision to leave Georgia Tech did not get resolved for twenty years. It hurt. I had busted my butt since I was twelve years-old to earn that scholarship. But without treatment, without some understanding of the disorder that I did not then know I had, leaving, drinking, and/or cracking-up were my only options. Toughing it out would have resulted in all three.

Did I make the best choice by leaving Georgia Tech? Maybe not. A full-blown crack-up in 1980 might have speeded my recovery. It was going to happen sooner or later. Leaving Georgia Tech may have simply delayed my inevitable and necessary crack-up by eight years to the aforementioned 1988 hospitalization.

So why did I leave? Why did I throw away the profound opportunity of a full football scholarship? Why did I give up on my boyhood dream just as it was being realized?

Fear. No, not fear of college football or Georgia Tech or the streets of Atlanta. I was afraid, in 1980, to go face-to-face with myself - alone. I was afraid to deal then with the sin God moved me to confront in a psych ward eight years later.

In December 1999, I was granted a full-tuition, merit-based scholarship to attend St. Thomas University School of Law in Miami, Florida. On March 23, 2001 I was immediately expelled without a hearing, without due process, and without notice of any charges against me. It happened within hours of the Dean of the law school learning that I have bipolar disorder.1

St. Thomas University claimed to have received allegations that I had made threats against the school. I had not and never did.

Further, when I later represented myself in my federal lawsuit against St. Thomas,2 there was no one to come forward to say that they had heard me make the alleged threats against the school.3 In fact, the woman whom I expected to be the school’s star witness against me filed an affidavit stating that I had never made any threats and that she had never alleged that I had made any threats. I lost anyway. I was a resident of Pennsylvania suing a Florida law school in a Florida Court.

I have looked at the above events, cried, cussed, and called it all a nightmare. A tale of wasted potential and opportunities blown to pieces. It is now a tale of God working in all things for the good of those who love Him (Romans 8:28); a tale of amazing blessing in the extremes. Blessings – all of it! The dizzy joy, the mad energy, the intensity in everything and the depression, despair, anger, failure, and lost opportunities. All of it – Blessing.

For me, I can see how God used it. To my somewhat atheist father, he had no God to comfort him, a very sad problem in his life. At least he had meds to help him much of the time.

I am glad you have a supportive family, and that you have a relationship with God. Might I ask why you are bringing this up on line?

Bi-polar is not always simply inherited — it is predatory. Some people drag it to themselves by unresolved moral confusions. Within the latency for it, there are strengths — but once the body’s chemistry is into it — it is no blessing. It is a difficulty, a sickness.

While at a deep level EVERYTHING is a special unique blessing, at everyday levels, and even ones not-so-everyday, there is no blessing in it.

What this means is it something a person MUST deal with, or those around him deal with. Likely you know this, having been through it.

James Otis — a man whose Mass. Bill of Rights contributed to ours today, was bipolar. In his manic phase it took a whole village to settle him down — they locked him in a garret until the mania went away and he became socially fit.

Bi-polar is not a blessing.

A man who claims to a place of argument like FR to declare he has conquered his bi-polar is likely swinging into mania. For in the mania the manic seek the rush of challenge. JMO.

And for the record I have known more than one bi-polar person, I know there are different levels, not all swing into high mania. Some linger in depression, some have a long cycle, some short.

In all cases quietude is a healthy treatment. FR is many things. But it is NOT a place of quietude.

To all who have expressed doubt about the possibility of being BLESSED with BIPOLAR, I suggest Dr. Ronald Fieve’s book, “Bipolar II,” regarding what he calls ‘beneficial bipolar.’ He wrote the book “Moodswing” in 1975 and pioneered the use of lithium in treating manic-depresssion. His practice and research support my contention that bipolar can be a blessing.

Dr. Ronald Fieve, M.D.
Bipolar II: Enhance Your Highs, Boost Your Creativity, and Escape the Cycles of Recurrent Depression—The Essential Guide to Recognize and Treat the Mood Swings of This Increasingly Common Disorder by Ronald R. Fieve M.D. (Hardcover - Oct 3, 2006)

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