Spouses of Bipolar in Active Relationships

Oh, I saw this kid on Oprah. I thought their situation was totally screwed up. It was interesting when Oprah attempted to have a "normal" conversation with the ill girl. I think she got a real hard lesson on what severe schizophrenia is like. I was surprised the parents were still together. They never really were able to be together since one had to be with the daughter and the other with the son in a separate apt. I hope they were able to find some better meds for her so she would stop attacking people. That was probably her biggest barrier to a semi-normal life.

OMG, riding, his pdoc shows a video of your bpso to his students??? You would think that alone would get him thinking that maybe he has a serious problem that needs serious attention? Ya think?

Yes, I have witnessed it. In a lot of ways, I am glad that hooba would run when he was like that. The worst one was when I had to call 911 b/c he couldn't even make out a sentence and kept hitting himself in the head as if the words would just come out if he kept doing it. He was also talking to someone who was not there. I had to explain to the 911 dispatcher what bipolar and psychosis were. It took them nearly 2 hours to get to the house.

It made me feel completely useless. It's like when one of your kids are sick when they are babies and they can't tell you what's wrong, but you know it's something really really bad. It made me sad, sick to my stomach, worried, etc. It was something I had never witnessed before and don't care to do so again. Thank you hooba for taking your meds and staying on top of your disorder. The ride is still bumpy, but I'm loving it...

He returned home from the Karaoke restaurant about 2 hours later and didn't smell or act like he had drunk anything. My stepdad is an alcoholic so I have a very sensitive nose for alcohol. He just laid on the couch and watched telelvision for about an hour and then fell asleep. But that is another strange thing he has been doing. He's been sleeping on the couch pretty much all every night since I made his nephew leave about a month ago. He got angry at me. He's only slept in bed three times I think.

But his nephew was unemployed, sleeping all day instead of looking for a job, and then we found out he was doing drugs because he left some in the bathroom. My husband kept saying he was going to deal with him on his next day off but then when that day would come he would say he didn't want to deal with his nephew and didn't want any stress, I had just started medical leave, so we couldn't afford to feed him and I certainly wasn't going to bend over backwards to help him, especially when his response was to behave that way. So finally one day when my husband went to work for 2 days I told his nephew he had 12 hours to find somewhere to go and take all of his stuff with him. Fortunately, my husband also forgot his cell phone at home when he left that morning and didn't get the chance to come get it until the next morning, so when his nephew tried to call him about what I had told him to do he could not reach him and by the time my husband found out what was going on his nephew was gone.

Anyway, after the other night when he went to the restaurant he's been sleeping most of the time and complaining that his neck and back hurt. On Thursday he couldn't even get up to drive me to a physical therapy appointment for vertigo, and I couldn't find a ride. I read in one of those books I read when he was first diagnosed that often when bipolar people are depressed they complain of back pain, so I don't know if he's actually just depressed or really has back pain. Since his PDoc took him off of the mood stabilizer it seems like he is hyper for a few days, the days he takes the ADD med and the antidepressant, and then he will sleep a lot like he's depressed on the days that he takes only the antidepressant.

Post edited by: grace72891, at: 06/23/2012 01:10 PM

This is a head scratcher...off the mood stabilizer and on AD and ADD medications yet sleeping all the time??!! How in the world does the pdoc justify taking him off a mood stabilizer? Has your husband been on AD and ADD meds ONLY in the past? Sorry to hear that you are still struggling with vertigo etc.! I stand behind your decision to kick your nephew out...that kind of crap is the LAST thing you need!

I'll have to check this show out. I generally hate the way mental illness gets depicted on television. Has anyone seen the United States of Tara? I found it to be kind of despicably bad.

My wife has definitely had psychotic features to her mania: believing that she communicates with spirits; lots of paranoia; believing that she has special mental connections to people far away; believing that we are being watched or bugged; believing that she can "mess" with people's minds; etc. During depression she's also had some unusual delusions, the most disturbing being when she believed that our older son was picking on or otherwise corrupting our younger son (each time I had to intervene and point out that her anger was based on offenses no one else was aware of).

What has never ceased to amaze me is the degree to which she can deny anything peculiar about any of it. Just the other day she met someone who sleeps from 3AM to 11AM, and suggested that maybe she's just like that person and trying to fit other people's sleep schedules is what has caused problems....