Being Diagnosed

Body Image by Carrie Lynn Unger

I have long identified myself as bipolar.  Being bipolar has shaped so much of who I am and what I do that I can’t help but identify myself as such.  I understand that bipolar disorder is a mental illness, but rarely think of it as a totally bad thing and this way of thinking has helped me to feel secure in myself to an extent.  Now that I have been diagnosed as having an eating disorder (so says the lab slip that my new psychiatrist give me), I feel somewhat less secure.  I am relieved to know what my years of yo-yo dieting and disordered eating means, excited and ready to tackle the worst of it and overwhelmed in general.  I wonder what having a diagnosed eating disorder will mean for me as a person who has embraced her mental illness.

I call myself bipolar more often than I say that I have bipolar disorder because I recognize my disease as a defining part of my personality; good and bad.  It seems that this not a popular way of thinking.  My last psychiatrist, a man I trust and respect, seemed to want to sway me from thinking this way.  He would often say the opposite of what I felt; that I wasn’t bipolar and that many of the things I did or felt were part of my illness; not me.

As of April 13, I am being treated at an eating disorder clinic.  My treatment began with an evaluation by my new psychiatrist.  We went through my history of disordered eating, my current eating habits and a run through of my life as a bipolar person.  She identified some of my behaviors as “maybe not bipolar” and others as “likely” or “probably the bipolar disorder”.  That way of thinking doesn’t jive with me.  If I accept that the bad things I have done are because I am bipolar, how can I change my behaviors so that I don’t repeat them?  I feel I should take responsibility for my actions and try to better myself because I will be living with this disease until I die.  I understand that I may not always feel as well as I do now.  My medicine may stop working, as it has in the past and adjustments may need to be made.  I will likely come off my medicine during pregnancy and as I age, treatments may simply not work as well.  If I think of my bipolar disorder as something I need to fight rather than something I can work with, what would that mean for me if the worst happens and no future treatment makes me feel as I do now; normal?

I don’t think my eating disorder is quite the same.  I have been battling with my body and food since I was 12 (to the best of my memory).  That is 20 years of having bad behaviors with food.  20 years of looking in the mirror and wanting something different to reflect back.  I believe that I can recover from this.   I had already begun making things better years ago by trying to accept my body as is.  It has been a weird battle of choosing to enjoy my curves, ignore and accept the stretch marks on my hips and knowing that I wanted to be different; smaller, more fit, tight, athletic and at times to be tiny.

I choose to believe that I can completely or mostly recover from this and from the bit of research I have done on the subject, statistics are in my favor.  So what does this mean for me for the time it takes me to get there?  I openly tell my friends that I am bipolar.  Most of my co-workers know.  I am not sure how to handle my new diagnosis but for now I feel hopeful and ready to begin my journey to a better place.