2023-06-21 09:20:23
The bipolar disorder is a chronic psychiatric illness characterized by recurrent mood disorders. How to build your life when you are affected by this disorder? We met Emmanuel Urbu, a patient recovered from bipolar disorder, on the occasion of the release of his book Taming yourself, confessions of an ex-bipolar in consultations (editingEnrick B. Eds).
What are the symptoms ?
An alternation of ups and downs: manic crises, it’s the top and depressive, the bottom. One could say that the manic crisis, it’s a euphoria that sets in and continues when there is no longer any reason to be euphoric. We think very quickly, we have a feeling of omnipotence. We are not afraid of anything, we start to sleep less. Imagine that in a manic attack, I happened to not sleep for a week, without drugs. The body, the mind, ends after 3 months of exhausted crisis. The body’s logical response is depression. We have a brain that burns very quickly. We go from rooster to donkey. There is also an increase in libido. I was going out and not coming home. I was spending money that I didn’t have. Then we can go into debt because we are on a rhythm that we want to satisfy.
What has been the impact on your life?
The consequences of a manic crisis are not just exhaustion.
Since we are not afraid of anything, we take enormous risks. I had an accident that took me to the hospital for a year and a half. I had a lot of car accidents, five or six car accidents, colossal debts. Because we don’t realize it, we very often have compulsive purchases. Everything I tell you, imagine the result in social, friendly and above all romantic relationships.
I sum it up like this: we have a problem taming our emotions. I was wandering, which is called medical wandering. Me, I was in the wandering of my life.
It’s like I started creating life beginnings four times and fell all the way back each time.
I was a human being who still had jeans and a T-shirt, that’s all. And no more friends, no more nothing. Fortunately, a family that allowed me each time to find refuge and restart my life. And I started again. I found a job, I found a woman in my life and everything was going well. And as soon as it went a little too well, I exploded and I put everything back on the ground.
What triggered these troubles?
There is a genetic ground, a fragility that causes people to declare unrest. When the relationship you have with the world is shaky, mine was particularly shaky without me realizing it. I lived in London, I worked in , a fairly difficult environment in terms of work: you are put under a lot of pressure, there is alcohol and there may be drugs. This environment, on this personality construct that was flawed with no doubt genetics, has created a favorable ground for the emergence of disorders. And on that there was an emotional shock in my life, a breakup that blew up my lifestyle and my way of relating to the world. And that is what directly caused the beginning of my troubles.
So it’s an emotional shock on a very shaky personal ground, in an unstable environment. This emotional shock takes place at the age of 26. I will be diagnosed at 36. From the age of 26, I began to alternate manic crises that I described to you with all these symptoms and depressions. And even a suicide attempt. Whole months under a quilt not moving and being terrified with a sort of extremely painful lump in my stomach.
Where did you find help?
I think at some point, my brain was fed up. This fed up, for me, is the main cause of the click to change. Or we stop everything. Me, I asked myself the question and I even tried to stop everything. Either we have hope and a little more strength, we say ok, I will continue, but something needs to be changed. At 36, I met a psychiatrist who had specialized in monitoring bipolar disorders. I went to see him, he told me “Listen Emmanuel, I really think I can help you. I think I understand what is happening to you. We can team up.”When we had ten years of non-life, we tell you that… It really marked me.
How did you get out of it?
Today, I say I am no longer bipolar because I no longer have seizures. Obviously I’m still fragile and I’m potentially bipolar. But it’s still been 4 years that I have no more troubles. For 15 years, so from 36 to 48, I stabilized myself thanks to a drug treatment partly called a mood stabilizer. This treatment certainly helped me to have fewer seizures, but it didn’t cure or solve anything.
To get really better, I went knocking on all the doors. I did therapy. For me, it was psychoanalysis. Therapy helps you understand yourself. I became interested in philosophy, religion, spirituality in the broad sense. All this to try to understand what is happening to me. But I had forgotten half the work.
Half of the work is to stop trying to understand, to agree to live with it, to let go.
And for that, we have plenty of disciplines that can help us. Moreover, they are all about breathing. I swim once a week, I meditate every morning…
What message is close to your heart?
I want to give hope. Today I’m fine. And this, for several years. There is an after. So I’m not saying I’m not sick anymore, I’m saying I’m well. I’m not saying that I will never relapse. In any case, I believe in it. But it is true that today, I no longer take treatments.
However, I want to say it and it is very important for all other patients: the goal is not to stop treatment. The goal is to get well. I can tell you that if in a few years, I feel more and more fragile and that I have to take a mood stabilizer, I will take a mood stabilizer. I’m not going to put these 4 years of happiness after 25 years of chaos in the trash, under the pretext that I don’t want chemistry in my body.
There are activists to think about things like that. Me, I am not an activist, I am an activist for my well-being. It’s that simple. Hope is something very important. And this hope, it is possible only with a lot of perseverance.
Are you still bipolar?
My book is called “Taming yourself. Confessions of an ex bipolar in consultations”, it is also so that mentalities evolve.
Even today, medical students learn that it is a chronic disease, that bipolar disorder is a lifelong disease. I’m sorry, but I, for four years, haven’t suffered from it at all. Deep down inside, I’m still on my guard, even though I no longer have the Sword of Damocles. But deep down inside, I also have this big hope: that people will be able to say that I’m cured the day I die, because I won’t have relapsed.
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