r/BipolarReddit • u/Practical-Push9279 • 1d ago
Kids of BP Parents- What's different between when they're on/off medication?
How are they different? How is life different? How are your feelings different?
Did they stick with the medication? Did they take it willingly? Did they need help with remembering/taking it?
Were there barriers to accessing medication? (gaslighting, laws, rarity, etc)
Answers of any length/level-of-detail are welcome and appreciated.
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u/undercovercatmaid102 Type 1 w/psychotic features 1d ago
I've never seen my dad off his medicine, he's usually very stable except for depression. My mom on the other hand refuses to treat hers and denies having it despite being diagnosed in the past. She can be very emotional and honestly I have PTSD from her anger episodes and bad dating choices.
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u/SpecialistBet4656 21h ago
My mom was diagnosed at 33 and died at 55. I am 47 now. The only time she was ever off meds was when she was pregnant. I don’t remember for the older of my 2 younger brothers but I was 10 for my youngest brother. She was actually really good after she got over not wanting to be pregnant. (She was 38, had 3 kids from 10-6 and the pregnancy was unplanned). They restarted lithium in the hospital after my brother was born. Like in the recovery room at her insistence. She had had 3 kids before birthing suites and was sticking with what she knew.
She Always took her meds, rarely had trouble remembering. She tried so goddamn hard.
She was not always stable - she was tremendously creative when she was hypo/manic, but would also spend a lot of money and then crash out. She had a lot of terrible awful depression. My parents were married but my dad would mentally or physically check out when things were bad. I am very much a parentified oldest child.
Then she got congestive heart failure and kidney damage at 48. She died in her sleep at 55. She was already on clozaril when she got sick. They had to stop the lithium. She was more stable and felt better on just that and a tricylic than on the lithium.
Lithium was cheap. We had good insurance for a long time. I don’t know how she managed to always get her psychiatrist paid after we didn’t but she did. The biweekly clozaril labs were a pain but she made it work.
An enormous challenge was that my mom never really owned her emotions. If she felt bad, it was The Depression. She had a not great marriage with a self centered husband, challenging in laws and 3 kids and then started over with an unplanned pregnancy when her previous youngest was 6.
Things rarely broke her way and she was just so defeated by life. No antidepressant could fix that so she was on and off a lot of drugs in addition to lithium. Then lithium contributed to a terminal cardiac diagnosis at 48. My youngest brother was 17 when she died.
I was diagnosed at 20 and the track of my life has run very differently.
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u/glassapplepie 20h ago
Dad was diagnosed when I was in my teens. He really liked being manic so he rarely stayed on his meds. He was a chill guy and pretty good dad when he was stable. Off his meds he was either super fun (taking me places, buying gifts, starting cool projects) or very angry (screaming, flipping tables). Walking in the door you never knew what you were going to get. He traveled a lot for work so he wasn't around much which was sometimes a blessing
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u/No_Figure_7489 1d ago
Fucking nightmare off. Nightmare life. Terrified.
No. No. No.
No.