Thought I Would Write About Bipolar Disorder

Bipolar is the sophisticated term for an ugly condition. Manic-Depression is how it is understood, and I have it.

This one is complex to write about. This one seems to catch people off guard and bring out the worst in them. It tickles them. They become dismissive. They will never again take the person who has it, and lives with it, seriously. There is sympathy for physical illnesses, but not for anything that remotely touches mental health.

I remember a particular day when I was waiting in the lounge for my turn see the Psychiatrist. He is a consultant at a private hospital and many patients waiting to see various specialists use the same lounge. Along with me there were four or five other patients waiting to see the same Psychiatrist.

For some reason he came out of his consulting room with one of his patients.

Just then two ladies - doctors - passed by. They waved at him, and before I could register what was happening, asked him something that amounted to, “so there you are with your lunatics!"

I was left so shocked and bemused that I have no idea how my doctor, the psychiatrist reacted.

I am done with being sad, feeling sorry for myself, but what havoc this attitude causes to the minds of the other psychiatric patients and their relatives, I will never know.

I should have protested then, but I myself was going through the lows, so before my slow brain could internalise their incredibly insensitive stupidity, they were gone.

I remember a young man in a wheelchair in the total depths of depression that day. His face was completely devoid of any expression, and he looked squeaky clean, so clean that one could clearly see the minds and hands of devoted carers. He was simply frozen.

I wonder how the relatives who accompanied him would have felt. He seemed related or a close friend to a lady who worked at the hospital – a young girl who sat at the reception in the same hospital. She was there with him.

And these women were Doctors!

I don’t know if my psychiatrist remembers the incident or who those doctors were. If he does I am sure he’d never tell me. 

*Much later I asked him if he remembers and yes he did. By then however I did not care enough to get their named. They were not ladies. They were not worthy of any space in my consciousness, but unfortunately to date, they occupy some space like a canker sore.

I would like them to know that they are beyond humanity, and that they don’t have any right to be in a caring profession. Or to be a mother, a sister, a wife or a friend, and I hope this brilliant doctor who I have known for close to fifteen years now, does not contaminate himself with their company. 

So many years later, even now when I remember that incident, I feel impure. For as long as I don't forget their inhumanity in the presence of that severely ill young man, I will continue to feel that way.

To transcend their memory is a challenge that I may have to face for a very long time.