What I Wish Family and Friends Knew About Bipolar

Last Updated: 5 Jan 2024
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Unless you’ve walked in my shoes, you’ll never understand what it’s like to live with bipolar — but the support of friends and family means the world to me.

friends family support bipolar disorder
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I don’t know a single person with bipolar disorder who doesn’t have that one friend or family member who just doesn’t get it. They either have no idea about mental illnesses in general or believe they are something you can “fix.”

For me, it’s more than frustrating; it’s downright cruel. You would think your family and friends would be there to support you. Unfortunately, you get the usual confusion and apathy. Or you get the anger.

Here are three basic things that I wish they knew:

1. You Don’t Understand What It’s Like to Live With Bipolar Disorder

I’m sorry this sounds harsh, but it’s 100 percent true. Unless you’ve walked a mile in my shoes, there’s no way you’ll ever be able to understand.

My depressions are so dark and morbid that they drain me of all my energy. The thought of taking a shower or even just getting out of bed is overwhelming. Depending on how low I get, I honestly contemplate taking my life because I can’t bear to go on like this.

My manias are so wild and unpredictable that irritability and insomnia cause major health issues. Sure, it’s nice to have more energy — but not when I can’t control my actions. Overspending and grandiosity can get me into major trouble in my financial and social life.

Bipolar depression and mania are far more extreme levels of emotions than you’ve ever experienced or can even conceive of. Trust me when I say you don’t — you can’t — understand. So don’t even try. Just be there.

2. When I’m Manic or Depressed, I’m Not the Real Me

Everything is amplified when I’m in the middle of an episode, so it’s much easier for me to say or do things that I wouldn’t if I were well. This doesn’t by any means excuse anything — bipolar is an explanation but not an excuse.

A lot of outside stimuli are attacking my senses, and it’s hard for me to hold back the things I feel compelled to say and do. The fact is, my bipolar affects my ability to react “normally” to the world around me.

The last thing I need is anger and criticism while I’m trying to deal with my symptoms the best way I know how. My personal catchphrase is, “Don’t be ashamed of your actions; learn from them and grow.”

3. Coping Skills That Work for You Won’t ‘Fix’ My Bipolar

While there are plenty of good tips out there for living a well-balanced life, like doing yoga or eating healthy, they do very little — if anything — to help when you are deep in the throes of depression or mania.

Logic and reason go out the window. I fully believe in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT) as useful tools to help manage bipolar disorder, but these will not cure it. They just won’t. So for someone to tell you that you just need to do this one thing (practice the Tree pose, boost your omega-3s) and you won’t be depressed or manic anymore is absurd and irresponsible. It perpetuates the stigma that this is “all in your head” and you should be able to “just get over it.”

Living With Bipolar Disorder Takes Tremendous Strength

Here’s the bottom line: My brain doesn’t function the same as everyone else’s, regardless of public opinion. But that doesn’t mean I’m weak. In fact, it means I am much stronger than you think. It takes monumental courage and strength to live life battling bipolar. Every moment I continue breathing, I am winning this fight.

And I’ll never stop fighting. Having my friends and family stick by my side gives me hope that I can manage whatever happens. Through their strength, I know I have a reason to keep on going.

If they only knew how much their support means to me.


Updated: Originally printed as “What I Wish Family and Friends Knew about Bipolar,” Winter 2017

About the author
​Jess Melancholia is a bipolar blogger who resides in San Diego, California with her husband and cat. All throughout college, she struggled with depression and anxiety. She found it extremely difficult to balance school, work, and singing in her university gospel choir. This pattern continued after graduation for years with short intervals of hypomania scattered in between. Only when her father, a Navy veteran, was diagnosed with PTSD and Major Depression did she look into her own mental health. In May of 2014, she was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder 2. She experienced her first major manic episode in January 2015. For 9 months, her mania kept increasing and was left unnoticed and untreated. During this time, she struggled with hypersexuality. When her mania subsided, she crashed into a severe depression and became suicidal. It was after this that she did intensive outpatient therapy and started to blog about her struggles with bipolar disorder. Since coming to terms with her illness, she has found the strength to take charge of her health and be more proactive in managing her triggers. Nowadays, through medication and a strong support system, she works tirelessly to live a “normal” life and keep her manic and depressive episodes under control. Her favorite hobby is playing horror video games. Her daytime profession is a molecular biologist at a biotechnology company. She writes for The Huffington Post and The International Bipolar Foundation. She also writes about her personal journey on her blog, The Bipolar Compass.
214 Comments
  1. Thank you for sharing so honestly.

  2. I have been stable since June which is a record for me – 7 months. I went to a med spa in Tampa, FL that was all day group therapy and about 3 hours of 1:1 therapy with med management. I call it a med spa because while we were “locked in” and unable to leave unaccompanied it was not a place for anyone in crisis. i arrived flying high with mania and they were able to bring me down gradually with the right med combination and therapy. My new Dr. offers genetic testing for to determine what medication is best for you based off of your DNA from a cheek swab. I happened to get a massage, apologizing for my inability to be quiet to having the masseuse admit that she too had been diagnosed with BP. What are the odds? She had the DNA testing done and it shows the meds that are green, yellow or red. i want to get it done so the next time I have to switch meds, it won’t be like throwing darts at the board.

    1. Wahhhhh??? So what did your dna testing reveal about the meds? Where the meds, they said would work for you from the swab, the same as meds you had taken in the past.

  3. I am going through it with my partner/ex partner. I am a therapist, and it’s so hard not to just think I understand despite my expertise and my own illnesses. I had major surgery in November. Since then a switch flipped and he broke up with me. Said he had never wanted to be with me. Said I forced him into it. Was totally not himself. We spent weeks apart. Now I am finally seeing the real him, or the him I know coming back, and I feel a sense of hope. I don’t want to abandon him when he pushes me away, but in romance it’s so hard to say it is because of their mental illness. But when someone acts like a different person. I would appreciate if anyone could make suggestions of the best way to support him.

  4. Thank you for sharing. I am the parent of a newly diagnosed daughter with bipolar 2. She is now 23 and has suffered from depression since middle school. She was diagnosed with extreme depression during high school and has been working weekly with a therapist since then. However, she was never able to manage her depression which caused her to do poorly in college. She has moved back home last fall and was trying to finish her degree online but wasn’t able to focus. She finally shared her thoughts of suicide with our family physician who suggested we take her for a psychiatric evaluation. It was then that she was correctly diagnosed and admitted to an in patient facility. This has been a difficult diagnosis for her in many ways yet also providing some validation for why all her work with the therapists had not been working.

    As her mom it’s heartbreaking to know she has been trying to manage this for so long without medication and proper therapy. I feel sad for her thinking how different her high school and college experience could have been. I am doing everything I can to educate myself so I can be as supportive as possible as she accepts her diagnosis and learns to manage it. I feel that she is in the beginning stages of acceptance and would call it almost a grieving process to know this is not something that can be “fixed” or “cured” but something that can be managed. I just want her to have hope that a happy and fulfilling future can be hers. However, I get nervous for her also, as right now, she is not in the mindset of hope.

    1. We have almost the same story…. daughter correctly diagnosed right after high school graduation after a particularly difficult trip to Greece where the irritability was so bad that there was no way to explain it other than a mental health problem. My daughter is 27 now and she is well medicated but still has ups and downs that need to be managed. We have hope and she is living a fairly comfortable life and found a job she is good at and enjoys. There are still many challenges we continue to deal with. I wish we could find out each others’ information…. I still need a support group and have yet to find one near me.

  5. This is written quite well! Suffering from this illness isn’t even easy to verbalize, all I can say is I take every day and moment by exactly that because I don’t know what tomorrow would be like.

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