Resources

As detailed in Unglued, I got by with more than a little help from my friends and my family.

I’m also grateful for my NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) support groups. We begin each meeting with a quick review NAMI’s twelve principles of support. The principles are a reminder to family members to live our lives with more compassion for ourselves and our loved ones, with humor, with less guilt, and with a realistic sense of hope. The Depression and Bipolar Alliance (DBSA) offers similar face-to-face and online support groups. Mental Health Strong is a California-based nonprofit organization whose mission is to bring hope, resources, and support to marriages with mental health and addiction challenges. (I’ll be speaking at the May 2022 conference.)

The best pieces of advice I often revisit are Kathy Bayes’s “Sixteen Pointers to Help a Spouse Live with Mental Illness” and Al-Anon’s “3 C’s”: I didn’t cause Leah’s mental illness, I can’t control it, and I can’t cure it.

Bipolar Disorder for Beginners

DBSA has lots of mental illness educational information and mental health wellness information as well.

Michelle Clark, aka the Bipolar Bandit, has more than a decade of bipolar basics, stories, reviews, blogposts, and statistics in an easy-to-navigate website. Michelle’s own story as someone diagnosed with bipolar at age 13 is moving and hopeful. A one-time teacher of the year, she is also a strong advocate for those with a mental illness.

Solara Mental Health in San Diego has a bipolar self-test on their website, along with lots of information about mania and depression.

SoCal Sunrise Mental Health has created a resource page where people can take a PHQ-9 depression test for self-evaluation: https://socalsunrisemh.com/am-i-depressed-depression-self-test/

The Recovery Village has an easy-to-read guide with the basics of bipolar disorder and information on living with the illness, while Iris Healing’s website has useful information on the connections between substance use disorder and bipolar disorder.

Information is available in Spanish and in English about mental health disparities among Hispanic Americans is available from HelpAdvisors.com, along with links to governmental services for chronic health conditions.

AMONG THE BEST BOOKS I’VE READ

• Julie Fast and John Preston’s Loving Someone with Bipolar Disorder, which offers realistic advice for family members. (I’ve also heard good things about Loving Someone with Borderline Personality Disorder, but I haven’t read it.)

• The late Anne Sheffield’s How You Can Survive When They’re Depressed, along with the discussion board she created for partners and spouses experiencing “depression fallout” at Tapatalk.

• Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind, because she is not only a psychiatrist with manic-depression but an elegant memoirist.

• Ellen Forney’s graphic memoir Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me, because it’s funny and sad and real and it captured what mania and depression look like, literally, better than anything else I’ve read.

• Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, because he survived a slave labor concentration camp and knows a thing or two about the power of resilience, humor, hope, and love.

• Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s informative book about brain science and alternatives to drug therapy, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Given the topic, it’s pretty readable. The author shows how trauma and chronic mental illness are often related. Too often, though, doctors treat the symptom with meds rather than addressing the cause. It’s not an anti-prescription drug polemic. It’s solid science.

You’ll also find tons of resources at BpHope, including a free weekly newsletter with real-life stories and advice mostly from those with bipolar disorder. Just be sure to take all the Latuda ads with a grain of salt.