When Mom and Daughter Both Have Bipolar Disorder

Personal Perspective: Mental illness doesn't run in my family, it sprints.

Reviewed by Lybi Ma

When I was a teenager I blamed my parents for a lot of things: my big ears, my geeky high school reputation, and my lack of fashion sense to name a few. But my mental illness wasn’t one of them.

Over five years, beginning when I was 26, I had four psychotic episodes, three landing me in the psych ward, and all alternating with depression and mania. The eventual verdict: rapid cycling, mixed state, bipolar disorder with psychotic features, mild temporal lobe epilepsy, and disordered eating. After the final psychosis (where police found me running gleefully naked in West Point Grey), I finally accepted I had a mental illness.

My parents were familiar with bipolar disorder. In the mid-1970s, my mother was diagnosed with what was then called manic depression.

When I landed in the hospital, things started to make sense for my parents. The puzzle of my distraught adolescence and university years fell into place and they realized what I’d been fighting. For me? I thought my hyper excitement (a euphemism at best) and spirals into despair were none other than dramatic charm and talent. I was an actress at the time.

“I felt tremendously guilty,” explains my mother, when asked how she felt when I was first diagnosed. “Mental illness is partly genetic.” Mental illness runs on both sides of my family. But I never thought to blame my parents.

“I felt so helpless. Nothing I did seemed to help,” my mother says, “and you were an adult. We couldn’t force you to do anything.”

My family, like most others, was far from perfect. But my parents offered me something I know was essential to my mental health and sadly missing for many others who struggle with psychiatric disorders: compassion, empathy, and support.

I know people whose families deny there's a problem or worse, reject them once they’re diagnosed with a mental disorder. The motto: Not in this family. Abandonment can be lethal. Literally. I also know families who, like mine, unconditionally accept and support their loved ones.

Growing up before my mother’s diagnosis was no easy road. But I was fortunate, my parents worked together, finding the right treatment for her by the time I was 9. I admire them for accepting her illness so readily. Denial of my mom’s disorder would have been damaging to all of us.

My mom’s illness ironically played a healing role in my life. She knew intimately what I meant when I said not only did I not want to get up in the morning, but could not get up. My mother listened, nodded, and would say two of the most curative words: "I understand." And she did.

“Having bipolar disorder myself,” my mom explains, “helped me accept and understand your experience.” But psychosis, neither my mother nor father had ever seen that. Until me. "It was so scary. We thought we’d lost you forever. You were rambling, making no sense at all."

My mother sighs, “But when I think about what I must have put you through with my condition, it must have been awful,” she pauses, then with a laugh, “but you got us back good, didn’t you?”

“Yep,” I pipe back, “But thank goodness I didn’t run around naked when I lived with you and Dad, huh?”

”Am I ever glad!” My father and mother’s signature humour is also hereditary.

© Victoria Maxwell