When you have bipolar disorder, what makes you shake?
One of the side effects of lithium and atypical anti-psychotics is shaking. Your shoulders can suddenly go out of control and start shaking as if you have Parkinson's Disease. When you try to eat in a restaurant, your hand shakes as the fork goes in your mouth. If you have hurt your arm, healing is much slower because tendonitis of the bicep, for example, needs you to keep your shoulder still, and you can't take ibuprofen because that could bring about lithium toxicity.
It is socially embarrassing and further isolates the low-functioning bipolar patient. Patients with mental illnesses like this are not a set of symptoms, or side effects, or profit-and-loss statements. They are human beings.
They have a tough life dealing with pain, keeping away suicidal thoughts, and balancing side effects like shaking. The courageous ones take their medication in order to conquer the rage and delusions, which would put them in a hospital for the rest of their lives, and live with the side effects. For example, do you want your hand to shake sometimes, or do you want to live every waking moment in fear that you have blood cancer.
I found some resources to help people who have to make this choice. When you come to terms with this kind of an illness, which degenerates with age, you stop lying to yourself. For me, anyone who does that is a hero.
http://bipolar.about.com/cs/sfx/a/index_2.htm
http://www.nami.org/Template.cfm?Section=By_Illness&Template=/T...
It is socially embarrassing and further isolates the low-functioning bipolar patient. Patients with mental illnesses like this are not a set of symptoms, or side effects, or profit-and-loss statements. They are human beings.
They have a tough life dealing with pain, keeping away suicidal thoughts, and balancing side effects like shaking. The courageous ones take their medication in order to conquer the rage and delusions, which would put them in a hospital for the rest of their lives, and live with the side effects. For example, do you want your hand to shake sometimes, or do you want to live every waking moment in fear that you have blood cancer.
I found some resources to help people who have to make this choice. When you come to terms with this kind of an illness, which degenerates with age, you stop lying to yourself. For me, anyone who does that is a hero.
http://bipolar.about.com/cs/sfx/a/index_2.htm
http://www.nami.org/Template.cfm?Section=By_Illness&Template=/T...
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Comment by Jolyn on April 21, 2008 at 11:43pm -
You're absolutely right, Barbara! People with bipolar disorder who make the choice to be as well as they can be ARE courageous. It doesn't mean they don't still suffer from the disorder to some degree -- medications don't do it all for many people -- or side effects. It means they're want to have a life so badly that they're willing to deal with several terrible ongoing effects.
They also have to cope with medical personnel, stigma, government Social Security bureaucracy, stares, worry about making a dollar stretch, second-guessing their own judgment at times, maybe feeling unneeded by society and more. My 89-year-old father-in-law always says getting older isn't for sissies. Neither is living with a major mental illness.
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