I’m a doper.  Plain and simple.  I take performance enhancing drugs to edge out my daily opponent, bipolar depression.

I am resistant to conventional psychotropic medications which provide relief of mental illness symptoms from the inside out.  That is, they access your bloodstream after roughly six weeks, then their therapeutic effects begin to take-hold; and then (and only then), can your doctor begin the incremental step-by-step titration of your dosage eventually arriving at a suitable degree of efficacy.  So its fair to say that the management of your mood disorder is intrinsic or organic, as your body tolerated and is now escorting the daily ingestion of psychotropic drugs (prescription therapies) on the freshly paved path from mouth to stomach to bloodstream to brain.

I do not, unfortunately, enjoy the luxury of a pharmaceutical boardwalk.  My only relief is applied, like decoupages; like Zorro camouflaging his true identity with a mask, my mood is masqueraded by the uplifting properties of dextro-amphetamine salts which I ingest daily.  And while I experience my mood lifting like those Macy’s Parade balloon characters twenty minutes after ingestion, there’s a nasty bill to settle, a sheer cliff from which to fall, like the one from which Louise (Susan Sarandon) and Thelma (Geena Davis) launched their 1966 Thunderbird, and I drop like a lead balloon headlong into the Mariana Trench of despair and depression.  In order to avoid the cliff’s stifling fatigue I must remain dutifully conscious of my mood, and when it dips I must immediately swallow my next dose.

Each additional step of relief, each concomitant dose keeps me afloat like a life-jacket.  But it also hoists the height of my eventual crash higher still.  And predictably the rope snaps and my wakeful attention drops like a grand piano, crashing to the ground and splintering into a million irreconcilable pieces.

I’m in the company of fallen sports legends like Lance Armstrong, Barry Bonds, and Jose Canseco. We’re all guilty of willfully taking drugs designed to better our performance.

I am different in one respect: I’ve never beat my opponent to win the jersey or title or championship.  My opponent is bipolar depression and who has, unfortunately, all the bragging rights.

Related articles

• More About Bipolar and Depression (write4publish.com)
• The Six Stages Of Bipolar and Depression (psychologytoday.com)