I am 33 and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder about 3 years ago (1998), around the same time I went into rehab for alcohol abuse. I have Bipolar II and, according to my psychiatrist, cycle much faster than the majority of people in that category. I was told in rehab that as many as half the people who come in for alcohol abuse have bipolar. It’s only natural that a thirteen-year-old with bipolar would try to quiet his mind or get to sleep using alcohol, as I did.

My childhood was hell. Apparently I cried all the time as a baby. From the age of five or six until now, sleeping was difficult. When I did sleep my dreams were violent. I never heard anyone talking about dreams like mine so I kept them to myself. At night, I played in my room, by myself, late into the night. For a period of probably two years, from eleven to thirteen, I refused under any circumstances to eat dinner with the rest of my family. My temper was the biggest issue of my childhood. My anger was enormous because I couldn't communicate with the world. I may as well have been Helen Keller. My mother had the police coming to our house just to take me to the psychiatrists. It seems like I saw a hundred between age six and twelve, when my mother could no longer physically force me to do much of anything. I fought constantly with everyone in my house, especially my sister, who was also diagnosed with bipolar disorder about five years ago. She is 30. I’ve spoken to her only once in five years. I recall losing my temper often and being locked in my room or locking myself in my room. “Leave me alone!” was my trademark statement. I was paranoid on a good day and psychotic on a bad.

For years, I spent enormous amounts of energy trying to fit it. It was more than just the awkwardness of being a teenager. I really wasn’t clued into what was appropriate. I often overreacted to things people said. You were either my mortal enemy or my best friend, and any sign of disloyalty quickly moved you from the latter to the former. Most everyone ended up as my mortal enemy, leaving little room for compromise. Thus, I drifted from friend to friend, eventually alienating everyone, which was not what I wanted, though I often swore I preferred it as such. Socializing, like recess, for me was very painful on many levels. Frequently, I would spend time with adults, children older than me (my best friend was in sixth grade when I was in first), or by myself, which I preferred. At twenty, I retreated into isolation, rarely talking to other students in my university of ten thousand, and began to drink very heavily, especially after a relationship with a woman went awry.

It must be enormously frustrating to be a parent of a child with bipolar disorder because you basically have no way to reach your child through traditional means. My mother felt and feels an enormous amount of guilt. Even today, she wants to discuss these things, but I won't, or can't.

I think she had a series of breakdowns as the years wore her down. There was no middle ground --ever. I remember getting in a fight with my mother and my sister about who was going to sit in the front seat. I was about 10 and lost the battle, so I walked home -- about 7 miles. Outside the home, I was a daredevil. In many ways, I still feel guilty about the way I behaved. As with alcohol I realized I have to forgive myself and understand that I am sick and that I was untreated. But that does not negate the sheer magnitude of hell my parents went through.

While I don’t blame myself for their subsequent divorce, I think my situation certainly exacerbated their underlying problems as the full responsibility of two parents really fell onto my mother while my father drifted into denial and resentments of his own. I am sure they blamed themselves and felt a constant and intense level of embarrassment and helplessness on a daily basis. I grew up in a town of 30,000 people with one high school of roughly 3,000 kids. At one point, my parents could no longer find high school girls willing to babysit at our house. I would regularly beat them up, grope them or yell and insult them. The “he’ll grow out of it” scenario was a dream, not a reality. By thirteen or fourteen I was starting my substance abuse and I was physically big enough to make taking me anywhere against my will impossible, though my Italian stepfather did a good job beating the hell out of me to turn me into a “real man.”

My state of mind from say, age seven to thirteen, was “mixed.” I was extremely hyperactive and uncontrollable physically. It wasn’t like something I could channel into a sport or something since any kind of structure was too much, though in hindsight, ice hockey came close, and I wish I had continued playing. Risk-taking behavior was huge with me. I did whatever it was anyone was afraid to do and if someone dared me to do something, it had to be done at all costs. That landed me in the principal’s office quite a few times in junior high. Yet threaded through it and masked well was a deep depression I couldn’t identify and things stayed that way up until two years ago.

The doctors had a tough time making any kind of diagnosis because I didn't trust them either and their ability to help. I blocked every attempt to get at me. I would barely tell them my name, and would sit there for an hour face-to-face or take them on a journey of lies for my entertainment. I became very manipulative as my intuitive ability grew. Any kind of challenge, as such, I would insist on winning, no matter what the cost. I am still that way. One guy gave me Ritalin for awhile when I was 12, but I flushed the bottle down the toilet after a couple weeks because I became depressed, a 180-degree turn from bouncing off the walls. To me, taking medication meant there was something wrong with me, and my ego/denial system wouldn’t allow that.

Writing this is causing me to have to face my childhood as I have never faced it before. Since I am now being treated for my bipolar and my alcoholism, I have some semblance of being centered, allowing me perspectives that most take for granted. Until recently, this was not a luxury I was afforded by my illness.

I was particularly angry at the education system. I sought intellectual nourishment and asked 'why' frequently, but got only a blank stare back from my teachers. I was bored and stubborn, unwilling to take in information and regurgitate it without adding some interpretation. Thus, I was judged as stupid when I was desperately craving intellectual stimulation. The first time I ever read anything that actually made me interested was in eleventh grade when I discovered literature, Gulliver's Travels and Shakespeare—stories with allegory and symbolism and puzzles. I am still angry about many things. I have written to the SAT people and told them how they contributed to my life being screwed up, and that typical book-smart people can fail miserably in the world when faced with irrationality and something outside their paradigm of understanding. I realized in college that what I was yearning for was philosophy. I wish someone had given me Plato's Republic at age eight.

I really only have one piece of advice for parents: Never, not even once, lie to a bipolar child. My parents lied and tricked me and I never trusted them again past about age five so they had no chance of ever getting me to talk honestly about anything I ever truly felt. I remember one time when I opened up just a little and told my mother, at age nine I think, that I wanted to commit suicide. And she told me that that was how my grandfather died (he also had bipolar but I didn’t know that until much later). He had shot himself. She had previously told me he died in a car accident. This seeming hypocrisy led me to conclude they were the enemy under all circumstances. My childhood continues to be a topic that our family of five never speaks about and several of us don’t talk to each other at all. I don’t think my parents intentionally did this to cause harm, rather, at the time, it was to appease me so I would behave long enough to get the grocery shopping done without incident.

I only scored 830 on my SAT's and I took them 3 times. So getting into college was difficult and put me into a depression. Finally, as the classes got harder, I did better. It was strange to go from getting D's my freshman year in Psych. 101 or Econ. 101 and then A's in Theories of Human Nature and graduate courses where I was the only undergraduate. I went through a similar process when going into the world and getting a job. I found a back door to Wall Street without an MBA, bought stacks of finance books and taught myself accounting. I am not trying to be arrogant, but just trying to illustrate how poorly society judged me.

I've been lucky, in my adulthood, interacting with the world. I work on Wall Street now, which is a casino, a war zone, and a chess match rolled into one. I was not surprised to find many bipolars, most undiagnosed, managing the nation's financial assets. Understanding stock movement is an intuitive process which bipolars understand more easily. I was making six figures by age 26 up until I ended up in rehab. Maintaining a four bottle a day wine habit, working 80 hours a week under extreme pressure with untreated bipolar disorder, took its toll. Now, I work part-time forty hours a week.

My wife is a second-grade teacher. She gets all the bipolar kids in her class and I have taught her some useful tools, like using pictures and music with them. The sooner the child finds that outlet, the sooner that child has a chance at happiness. I think television and movies, for a bipolar child, can also be a tremendous relief. There is some level of serenity that can be gained from having a moderate level of external input to keep you out of your own head. Having “flight of ideas” in your head is like sitting in a living room with twelve televisions going at once on different channels and at high volume, so having one turns the volume down on the other eleven. At night, it feels more like thirty televisions. Who can sleep with that racket going on?

When I meet people in AA who have bipolar, especially younger people, since it seems they are recognized and dealt with earlier now, I make a point of telling them that I am bipolar and trying to help. One needs to apply a similar 12-step process to dealing with bipolar disorder as with addiction, i.e., admitting to yourself that you are powerless, which is no easy feat. Staying sober and having the meds working correctly takes time, but once you get there, and you cannot have one without the other, life becomes much better. I didn't get sober to be depressed, which I was, and I am not taking medication so I can drink, so both must be addressed on a daily basis—because they are linked. Avoiding the temptation to manipulate my meds is also tough.

Today, I am back at my job, to which I feared I would never return. Through AA and medication, eventually I got better. I try to have the Twelve Steps in my life every day. And I am better now than I ever have been. My wife and I are expecting a baby. I work fewer hours than I used to. I try not to be obsessed about work.

I try to have balance.

[The pseudonym "Skippy" is being used to protect the privacy of the author's family. - Ed]