Month after month, year after year, I’ve heard someone in my NAMI support group state this principle of support: “We will never give up hope.”
It’s a nice thought, one I sometimes even believed. I’ve hoped my wife’s severe late-onset bipolar disorder would improve.
Other times I’ve figured the only thing we family members can hold hope for is our own well-being.
And sometimes, through my wife’s four hospitalizations with two episodes of bipolar mania and two of severe depression, I have all but lost hope on the whole damned business, including our three-decade-long marriage.
In 2015 during my daughter’s wedding weekend my wife was manic but still undiagnosed. She was sleepless, irrational, grandiose, wired, confrontational—with her family, the TSA, airport cops, a flight attendant. (See the DSM-V. That was her.) Waiting to walk up the aisle with my weeping daughter, I whispered into her ear, “Honey, she’s sick. If it were cancer we wouldn’t blame her.”
That was a nice thought, too—one I’ve clung to during the worst of it. After all, mental illnesses are medical illnesses. She didn’t ask for one. And I’d rather be me than my wife.
Four-plus years later, my son and his girlfriend decided to get married. As recently as August, through a half-dozen psychiatrists and psychologists, a truckload of med changes, through ECT and two rounds of DBT, my wife remained flattened by unrelenting depression. Although my kids and I hoped we’d get their “real” mom back, as my son’s December 31 wedding approached, for self-preservation we were relieved she was depressed rather than manic.
In September her psychiatrist added Zoloft to the mix. It’s risky: an antidepressant can flip the switch to mania. I kept a close, paranoid eye on my wife’s behavior. My son was terrified we'd have a fiasco like at his sister's wedding.
But during the fall of 2019, for the first time in almost five years, we finally got my wife back. She now spent her days volunteering, practicing yoga and daily meditation, taking care of our granddaughter. At night she got adequate sleep. At last—for now—she has found the right combo of meds, therapy, and support.
It’s now January 3, 2020. Not everyone at the wedding recognized the bipolar mountain the groom’s mother had conquered. But for the dozens of us who did know about my wife’s mental illness, those buckets of tears we shed as my son and daughter-in-law took their vows were nothing less than a celebration of a New Year’s Eve miracle.
Honestly: As I'll say tonight in my NAMI support group, we will never give up hope.
Originally published in the Depression Fallout Message Board.