Diary Tuesday 7th February 2017 Talk On Living With Bipolar

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After some very routine job searching my day centred on attending a talk at the Ingol Intact Community Centre in Preston, on Living With Bipolar presented by Mick Evans, who has struggled with the condition. This diary entry therefore summarizes this excellent talk given to an audience who kept cutting in with questions that were likely to be answered in the talk anyway, but Mick coped very well. He traces the condition to bad reactions he had to anti-malaria medications he took during his merchant navy work on cruise ships on voyages to Columbia. The condition, described as a mental illness is largely related to reduced fluids in the brain, creating chemical imbalances leading to dramatic mood swings causing sufferers to veer from high elation and giddiness to manic levels of utter despair. Mick carefully charts his moods daily, with graphs mapping where he stands to be sure of maintaining the middle ground of moods as much as possible. He feels as if the phases of the Moon affect his moods too, so he carefully notes the moon phases (we are approaching a Full Moon period soon as I write this). Sufferers are often very bright people, such as the noted British writer and comedian, Stephen Fry. In a bipolar extreme everything tends to speed up. Food cannot be eaten quickly enough. If dancing, a bipolar sufferer will often move far faster than the music would call for. Four hours sleep suffices when highly over-elated while the sufferer can barely get out of bed in the more lethargic states. In extremely hyper-states sufferers can start feeling invincible and behave recklessly. Mick once took to the idea of swimming in the deep wide fast flowing River Ribble dock-waters and plunged in, clothes and all. He just fancied a swim, but his action was treated as attempted suicide and he was arrested once rescued and even handcuffed despite assuring the police that he was going with them quietly in full co-operation. The story was both funny and quite a stark illustration of what someone affected by bipolarism can end up doing. One lady in the audience also suffers from bipolarism so she was able to confirm that she shares many of the daily struggles Mick endures with great warmth, bravery and good humour. He talked of the struggles to get sickness benefits too, with one regular welfare trick being to send anyone claiming to be bipolar or suffer other disabling illinesses to have a medical examination in a distant city. Mick noted that these check-ups can easily take place in local medical centres but the trap is that if a patient can make the arduous complicated journey they can then be dismissed as fit to get around more than they claim and thus lose some or all benefit entitlements. Arthur Chappell