Fast Girl by Suzy Favor Hamilton

Author:Suzy Favor Hamilton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

Diagnosing bipolar disorder is a very tricky thing. There’s no biological or genetic test, and the average time between when a patient shows her first symptom and receives an accurate diagnosis is ten to twelve years, according to recent studies. Misdiagnosis happens all the time. In my case, there was the added complication of my competitive running, which I now believe helped to keep my own symptoms at bay for years. When I stopped running competitively to have my daughter, the combination of this change to my system and my postpartum depression kicked my bipolar disorder into high gear. Not that anyone in my life—including my doctors—knew it at the time.

Because I thought I suffered from depression, which had been successfully treated with Prozac, it made sense when I was later prescribed Zoloft for my recurring depression. Little did we know at the time that giving a bipolar person Zoloft is worse than leaving them untreated. The drug not only made my symptoms worse, but it gave Mark and me the illusion that it had knocked out my illness and everything was great now. So when my behavior became more and more extreme, it never occurred to us that there was anything wrong. At the time, I didn’t just feel not depressed. I felt on top of the world. Of course I wasn’t going to go see a doctor when I felt this energetic and alive. It’s only now that I’ve been successfully diagnosed as bipolar and medicated appropriately for my condition, as well as having so many triggers removed from my life, that I can see how dangerous the combination of bipolar disorder and Zoloft were.

I think the hardest part of my recovery has been looking back at my behavior that was so destructive to my marriage, my family, and myself, and finding a way to make sense of it as the illness working through me, not something I consciously chose myself. While Mark has helped me to reach a place where I have no shame about anything I did—because that would in essence mean being ashamed of being bipolar, which I absolutely am not—it’s still difficult to forgive myself for the pain I caused, because of my illness, to people I love so much. Mostly, these days, I just try to focus on gratitude. I am so incredibly grateful that I was eventually diagnosed and treated, and that my loving husband and family stuck by me through all of this, because I know how easily I could have ended up like my brother Dan or so many other casualties of the disease.

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