My new book: Up from the Ashes: One Doc’s Struggle with Drugs and Mental Illness

Up from the Ashes: One Doc’s Struggle with Drugs and Mental Illness

(ebook, Amazon, July 2017)

I write about the bad times in my life. But as my story confirms, there is hope for anyone struggling with bipolar disorder with chemical abuse thrown into the equation.

“Dr. Dorsen’s personal and poignant life story is a risky self-disclosure that mirrors hope to anyone, regardless of profession, who may suffer from co-occurring illnesses.” – Bill Manahan, M.D., author of Eat for Health: Fast and Simple Ways of Eliminating Disease Without Medical Assistance

I was a professional, I was over 50, had a mood disorder that my treating doctors had neglected for decades even back to my childhood. Certainly, my illness was impacted by intermittent pot smoking over all those years. Now, I had relapsed. I was not sure the Board would ever really see how my dual illnesses impacted on my deterioration as a physician, father, husband, and member of a greater community. As my 16-year-old's guardian, I was able to temporarily obtain a medical subsidized housing for me and a shared food card for her and me.
            My recovery was emerging from the shame of failure. Yet the sharp reality of my current destiny let me look clearly at the then and now. Was hard manual labor punishment for my errant ways, or was my sentence an opportunity, at 62, to take a break from my profession — the process Joseph Slater describes in Self Renewal? In every sense, I have had to think out of the box and rediscover who I really am, to find my soul. I remember that I felt a kinship with the physician in Milos Kandahar's wonderful book, The Incredible Lightness of Being. Our protagonist has been banished from medicine for political reasons but enjoys the perks of his new profession traveling from apartment to apartment washing windows. He also gets an opportunity to intimately know the women who live there.
            I now believe I have become closer to the Zen of my life. I feel once again. How did I do it? At first, I attended about three AA meetings a week. By day, as I toiled, my body became harder. I endured an existence that was a trial of hot and cold, wet and dry, clean or dirty unlike the sterility of an unexamined life. My mental health was due to my sobriety and the right medical treatment. I no longer chose to self-medicate with pot and then enter a painful world of anxiety, panic, and depression.
            I went from day-to-day appreciating a new freedom. My life had been self-imposed chaos. I no longer wore the mantle of the medical profession. Sometimes even, I felt good in a new life of honesty and acceptance. I worked trustfully with a sponsor who was a supporter and confidant. I stuck doggedly with a psychiatrist I had known since 1983 and trusted. I now worked to define myself from a different perspective. I was a worker in the earth in search of a stronger, renewed persona; as Plato spoke for Socrates, "The unexamined life is not worth living."

No matter where we are coming from, a doctor like myself, or artist, we fear we will lose creativity by taking the medications. This is my testimony how anyone with bipolar disorder can be creative and functional again. My story is about the relief from suffering from mercurial emotional fluctuations with the right meds.

Popalos and Popalos in the seminal Bipolar Child confirm that bipolar disorder may well have started in kindergarten when I was described as a “Very active little boy.” My life would continue as a seasonal depression. But no one figured it out. Society punishes behavior while paying lip service to a brain disorder like mine.

“Telling this story lays out my guts for the world to see. In so doing, I have surrendered resentments over what I had no control over. Finally, I see, through pain and denial, the devastation my own illness. I am writing about a private personal journey of pain.”