Jump

I've touched on this topic before, but there's a lot more to it. Suicide is one of the least understood acts a person can commit. Those with no history of suicidal ideations or attempting it often can't grasp the motivations behind it.

I've heard it time and time again: suicide is "cowardly," "I don't understand-it makes no sense," or "there was no reason for him to do it." Well, to someone who has never experienced the seemingly unprovoked thoughts, not being able to make sense of it is understandable. In this photo, someone might see a gate or a good vantage point over the city (it's 7 stories up, one of the taller structures in the area), but to someone who's having suicidal thoughts, it's a place to jump off if the need arises. Contrary to belief, those thoughts just kind of appear, completely unprovoked. At times, they can be dismissed, but look at this photo a little more. Notice your eye being drawn to the gate. That's kind of what starts to happen-slowly these thoughts start to take control and can't just be brushed away. It's almost as though you've lost control of your own mind, and can even end up unexpectedly driving someone to attempt even if there are no other outward signs. The worst part: those thoughts can pop up at the most random times. Sometimes all it takes is seeing something the right way, like this gate, to conjure up thoughts about what death is like or what it would feel like gliding through the air on my way to a particularly solid landing, knowing what is going to happen.

I would like to end on this thought: even if it seems like he or she had no reason to jump, or they had everything going for them, there was a reason. There were signs. A lot of people can't talk about their problems with suicidal thoughts due to the fear of stigmatization, losing their job, or being pushed away by their families. I ask you reading this to do me a favor: if you have a friend or loved one you suspect is dealing with suicide in any way, shape, or form, reach out to them-don't push them away, and don't punish them. They may not be able to help it, and may need your help more than you even realize.

Given up

Depression has some very well known costs, such as suicidal thoughts and social withdrawal, but there's one symptom that's rarely discussed: loss of interest. Every one of these objects either is or represents something I've given up. The car represents two things: model building and racing. I've given up on photography quite a few times, but I've always come back to it. Unfortunately, music didn't meet the same fate-I don't feel inspired with an instrument in my hands anymore, and haven't for a very long time. Also, given my experiences with depression, giving up firearms (that's a BB gun) was probably a good idea.

It's a fairly predictable cycle. During hypomanic phases, I have a tendency to take on new projects, new delusions of grandeur, or find a new hobby. I would pour my heart into it at first, putting it ahead of things I really shouldn't put a hobby ahead of. But each time I'd go through a depressive phase, I would come out with less and less interest in my hobbies. Eventually, I'd feel so uninspired that they began to feel more like work and less like hobbies. When that happened, I put down the trumpet, the guitar, the dreams of being an aviator, the camera, the baseball bat, the guns and left the drag strip, and, with the exception of the camera, never picked them up again. Luckily, with medication, I don't think this will be a problem again.

On a side note, bipolar disorder itself is known to induce a creative streak in people. That's probably part of the reason I find photography (particularly film-this image was done with one of my film cameras) to be a good release, and why I was drawn to music. That's another topic for another post, I think.

Solitary nonconfinement

Often, some of the external symptoms, like endless and inappropriate talking with hypomania and excessively depressing commentary with depressive states, can push others who don't understand away. Throw that on top of the stigma that mental illness very wrongly carries, and you have a recipe for being quite alone. One look at today's photo should give a pretty clear idea of what I mean. The rocks symbolize a wall that gets built after years of losing friends and relationships and unintentionally pushing people away. For me, it became an automatic defense-be crazy and nobody will come close, so I wouldn't have to endure people walking out. Snow and ice can be the inhospitable environment created by the stigma that all of us with mental illnesses face on some level.

Stigma is one of my biggest irritants. Sure, there's little jokes here and there, and I'm not THAT thin skinned, but the fact of the matter is people just don't understand and so many just don't care to. Worse than that, there's the segment that assume that mental illness makes an individual either a bad, immoral person, or incapable of raising children. If you're reading this, do me, your friends, your neighbors, and maybe even your significant other, a favor and take a moment to try and get into the mindset of someone suffering from mental illness. The majority of people suffering from one (even depression is characterized as a mental illness) don't even realize they are. I'm lucky that I have someone who knew to send me to get help, but not everyone does.

Seeing things

One of the more worrisome symptoms I've been noticing lately has been hallucinations. No, these aren't dragons coming down from the sky or flaming skulls coming out of the kitchen with sandwiches or unicorns. These are different. They're little movements I see in my peripheral vision. Imagine a mouse suddenly moves from a standstill, and you see it out of the corner of your eye. Now imagine you see this, but there's no mouse, and nothing there to cause that little flittering motion. It keeps happening a few times a minute when in one position. In today's photo, we see some lightning bolt looking things in the corners. These are issues with the film. Much like the little movements, they're not real, and weren't captured by the camera. Take a nice, long look at this photo, and imagine that those aren't really there-you're imagining them, your mind is playing tricks on you. Kinda freaky, isn't it? To say the least, this is one of the most unsettling little things I've been dealing with as of late. If those movements aren't real, what else am I imagining? I may never know.

Forgotten

This car has quite obviously suffered some damage. It's been sitting in a lot for a while, forgotten, left behind, because of that front end damage. Other than that, the car is in fairly decent shape, though the extent of the damage is unknown.

Due to the ups and downs of bipolar, I often had problems socially interacting with others. Basically, I often found myself left behind and forgotten in social activities because of it. I relate it to the car this way: Just like the car's been left to rust away because of the damage, I was left alone because of the social impediments of bipolar disorder.

The Blender

This photo has a rather dreamlike quality to it with the way the red flower blends so well into the blurred background. With bipolar disorder, at times it's quite difficult to pay proper attention to things, similar to attention deficit disorder. When attention is not applied properly, the information available doesn't make it to the first stage of memory, and therefore doesn't get stored. If something does get stored, often only tiny bits of it do, so much to the point that long expanses of time turn into one big blur, blending together without an ability to separate the events and get a proper timeline or even a complete picture of an event.

High school is a particularly good example of the blended concept. I have little memory of a lot of it, and what I do have memories of are rather difficult to place in time. The same thing happened with college. The two seem like massive blurs with little chronologically disorganized tidbits here and there. My childhood is another example, with very, very few memories that are complete and make sense. There are very few big events I have complete memories of, but the ones that do I do everything I can to hold on to. This may explain the previous post entitled "Stuck in the Past," where I discussed difficulties letting go of artifacts from my childhood.

Distracted

Initially, I was diagnosed with ADHD, and a lot of people with it will relate to this post. When I look at this photo, I see the beautiful flower, but I can't help but be distracted by the streaking caused by a bad seal in the camera's film magazine. No matter how much I want to concentrate on the flower, it's incredibly difficult not to be distracted by that bright white streak. This effect is quite similar to everyday life during hypomanic episodes. No matter how much I want to concentrate on something, just about everything else acts like those streaks. This is what caused a lot of my issues with school work/homework. It's not like I wasn't trying to sit and concentrate-believe me, I was-but as with the streaks, everything else was just overwhelming. I remember that music helped extend my attention span, but even that didn't entirely work.