Y'all know about Bipolar as the mood disorder of Up and Down. You have seen the movies, watched the soap operas and dramas. The medications promise to reduce the number of trips around the loop de loop.
That's important, because what goes up must come down, and the fall can be mighty. But there is more to is that that.
In a person with bipolar, a
whole series of mis-timings and misalignments in our internal and external cycles results in a failure to maintain balance. The list includes: dysregulation of hormones, neurotransmitters, and immune system; irregularities in communication between brain cells and within brain cells; and wonky wiring among the networks that connect the thinking, feeling, and evaluating parts of the brain.
In other words,
Over the next few weeks, I will sample this list, especially the items that are true all the time, even when not on that roller coaster.
Dysregulation of cortisol is one of my favorites, to use the term loosely. Cortisol is the get-up-and-go hormone. It gets you out of bed in the morning and manages energy throughout the day in response to stress.
Ruby is an American-born long time television personality in Britain and comedienne whose career pivoted when mental illness caught up with her. She went back to school to study the brain and got a masters from Oxford on mindfulness based therapy. Since then she has written books, toured, lectured, using her prodigious brain and her comic chops to entertain and educate about brain health.
This loss of brain cells hits the hippocampus (in charge of
memory and emotion regulation) particularly hard. In the early years after my last mental health crisis, I talked about my “Swiss cheese brain.” At my worst, I
lost bills, I lost words, I lost everything my wife said to me on the way out
the door in the morning. She took to writing down what I said I would do before
she got home, never more than two items.
