Bipolar Visions: The Ravages of Bipolar Disorder and Co-occurring Addiction By Peter J. Dorsen, M.D., LADC

Adapted from a talk given at the 40th Annual MARRCH Conference, St Paul River Centre: October 21, 2009


Everything is pretty calm in our kitchen this Monday night as I am pensively carving a roasted chicken just out of the oven long enough to have cooled and be ready for slicing. It’s been a week of hassles. It seems like minutes ago that I was sorting through a horrendous pile of bills looking for the few that I absolutely had to pay or “The Man” would be shutting off the phone, the electricity, or the paper delivery.

It seemed like only a week ago that the attic roof had almost burned off from an errant candle in my sixteen-year old Gabi’s recently renovated attic digs a bare few seconds away taking the rest of the house with it. Whew, I’m working on overload and am in imminent danger of imploding.

My wife at the time is into her share of problems. She’s got to deal with me and the kids. Meanwhile, her mother is back in southern Minnesota languishing at The Mayo with some unspecified form of metastatic cancer. Her usually likeable father continues to struggle from cryptic alcoholism either neglecting himself or just not always acting so nice. He’s usually blitzed by noon. We never know where or how he comes by his drug of choice. It just seems to happen between hardware or food runs. Miraculously, no DUI’s but we figure it’s because he he’s an expert at driving with one eye for all these years.

What happened next was painful for the whole family. I recall vividly turning to Gabi and telling her to “get off her phone and turn my laptop off, it was time for dinner.”
“No,” she answered without blinking an eye.
“What did you say,” I asked incredulously looking up from my chicken surgery.
“No,” she glibly repeated.

It was at this point that, while still holding the carving knife, I grabbed the phone from her simultaneously ripping the cord out of the wall. Then, of course, there was yelling and screaming from all sides: my wife at me, My wife at Gabi, Gabi at my wife, me at both of them.

That’s when my fuse blew and I said: “When I tell you to get off the phone and my laptop, I expect you will listen.”
Bria, Gabi’s elder and more theatrical sister, appeared at the top of the stairs at this point and chimed in:
“Wow, that’s pretty good stuff,” she added.
“That applies to you too, God dam it,” I shouted. You shut up and go to your room.” No one was listening to what anybody was saying especially what I was commanding ex cathedra.
“You can’t talk that way,” my wife chimed in.

By now, I had completely lost it. I couldn’t see myself gesticulating ridiculously. But it was as if I was trying to conduct an orchestra with a carving knife rather than a baton, waving it in the air like a madman. My daughters took the hint and retreated for safer territories upstairs. Here was an example of my tsunamic rage at its worst . My wife, with predictable stubbornness, stood her ground. I kept looking stupider by the moments.

As the dust began to clear and the silence became loud, we all just stood there stunned. I knew that I needed to get out and to remove myself from the craziness I had significantly created by losing control. I ran upstairs and gathered all the clothes I would need for work the next day at my outstate job. So, rather than leaving early the next morning, I took off.
When my wife talked to me the next day, the first thing she asked me the next day was, “How are you?”
“OK,” I lied having already told several of my friends how crazy and out of control I must have seemed swinging that knife around like a fiend.

One friend enlightened me that what I had done was certainly enough to have landed me in jail to protedct my family from what very well might have been perceived as their imminent danger. In hindsight, it was difficult for me to comprehend how I had lost control in the way I had.

I probably was only a 911 call away from sharing a commode, a sink, and a pull-down bunk with a roommate in jail for a DUI.
“Can I come home? I sadly asked my wife fully expecting her to say “No,” and that I would be setting up light housekeeping at some low-budget motel with plastic walls and a paper binder around the toilet certifying cleanliness.
“You can come home but only if you do something about your uncontrollable anger,” my wife warned.

Thank God, she was able to discern my pain and understand the insanity living with an illness known as bipolar II, a dangerous mixture of hypomania and disabling depression complicated by using drugs. The subsequent postings will serve to better help you understanding the mysteries of bipolar disorder and co-occurring addiction.