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	TX: 19.11.09 - Living with bipolar disorder PRESENTER: WINIFRED ROBINSON

	Downloaded from www.bbc.co.uk/radio4 THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE 麻豆约拍 CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. ROBINSON Bipolar disorder, once known as manic depression, affects around four million people in the UK, it causes mood swings from extreme highs - the mania - to lows of sadness and hopelessness - the depression. You may remember last month we spoke to one bipolar sufferer who's agreed to keep an audio diary of those highs and lows. He wants to increase knowledge of what he believes is a poorly understood condition and we've just received the first of his entries. DANES Hello it's Chris Danes here. Wanted to talk this morning I suppose a little bit about what's been happening to me over the past couple of weeks. I have to say that I've had quite a bit of a difficult time. I was very up when the first interview was broadcast but after a few days I went into a crashing depression where the usual kind of suicidal thoughts and I could hardly look anybody in the eye and I didn't have the motivation to get up properly, so that I spent - oh - a load of time in my dressing gown flopping around the house, feeling that everybody thought dreadfully of me. And that being informed by memories of how I behaved in the past before I was properly medicated. And the terrible thing about it of course is that those memories are true. I think we all suffer from those memories that very occasionally [indistinct words] wake up in the night perhaps and put a pillow over our face and scream - we all have those. But if you can imagine living a life for days on end when that's all you get one after another, it's really, really difficult. Anyway I've sort of begun to come up, which is nice and I've actually got the motivation I suppose to actually do this recording, which is one of the things that's been hanging over me and making me feel guilty - that I cannot bring my mellifluous voice to the masses. And that's another thing - when you're up you take on tasks and you think I can absolutely perform these, these are terribly easy, you know, you take on these huge tasks and then of course you get down and then you can't fulfil them and you upset people because you can't meet deadlines and then you feel guilty and all of those things. But one mustn't sound too self pitying, one needs to go on, you know. Yeah, anyway. Well it's Monday today and I'm feeling absolutely terrific. The blues went away again like a switch and since then I've been working terribly hard. I've done some work with an anthology that I'm writing for a local charity, in fact for MIND, you know, the mental health charity. Well I'm not actually writing it I'm editing it. What else have I been doing? I've been doing a website for my brother. I've been ripping CDs like a maniac. And I've - I've just been generally very up in the air, very excited, very little need for sleep, not really wanting to eat. And yeah it's been - I've been feeling terrific. The trouble is, of course, one is frightened of the blues coming back again but I mean I do feel very, very well at the moment. So what I do is when I feel like this I try to do as much as possible because I know the blues will come back again. You can probably tell that my speech is very fast today and I think that's a reflection of my elevated state. So anyway that's what's going on with me at the moment and see you all soon. I want to talk about something that's quite difficult for me and that's my past. And I've talked before about this business of these terrible memories that come back to me about how I behaved before I was treated with drugs and talking cures. I went to teach in public school. Unfortunately I have continued to be ill and I made a right idiot of myself there and you know messed up what could have been a quite good career I suppose. Having said that I was very, very sad to have alienated through that and through my illness very many - very good friends and colleagues and I still look back on that and I regret that very, very much and of hurting the people I know and I suppose that is a repeated pattern of my life. I started teaching in the state sector after that. Various deputies came and went and there were large gaps between them and so on. Every time that there was a gap I was asked to be acting deputy and they'd never give me the actual post. And I think that was because there were a large number of people on the staff who actually saw that I was pretty round the bend. And when I was manic I think I was very nasty to a lot of the staff, not a good handler of people, I demanded far too much of them, demanding that people work at the same rate as you do yourself when you're manic. I was far too rude to people because that's what happened and I left - well I had to leave. I went to the doctor and so on and bust my marriage up as well and became really, really crashing down. And I think that that was the time in my life that I've most been in danger. It was really my present wife, Ruth, who - who picked me off the floor and took me to mental hospital and said look you have got to do something about this. And since then I can cope. It's still difficult at times, obviously it is but it's nothing like as what it used to be, nothing like what it used to be. ROBINSON Chris Danes, who will be continuing to keep a regular audio diary of his experiences of bipolar disorder for us. And we'd be really interested to hear your reactions to it. Back to the Transcripts homepage Back to the You and Yours homepage The 麻豆约拍 is not responsible for external websites

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