3 First Person: Living with Bipolar Disorder
BY JAYSON BLAIR, INTERNATIONAL BIPOLAR FOUNDATION BOARD MEMBER
It was a May day in 2003 in my Prospect Heights, Brooklyn apartment. I do not remember the day, but it had to be after the May 13 article—known as the Mother’s Day Massacre among my friends—where David Barstow, Johnathan Glater, Adam Liptak and Jacques Steinberg, four reporters who were my colleagues’ weeks before, wrote an unprecedented article about my deception. The article was called “Correcting the Record; Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves a Long Trail of Deception.” The article was splashed on the front page of the paper of record and filled two full pages on the inside. It was not my finest moment.
After a brief stay in Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, Connecticut, where among it’s other even-more famous alum were Billy Joel, Mariah Carey, Michael Jackson and Diana Ross—I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. That tracked. But I still wanted to understand more how top psychiatrists in Connecticut and New York had come to that conclusion. Trust, but verify, as they say in my old profession.
For a data-driven, evidence-based kind of guy, the moment came that night in Brooklyn. I was reading a section of a book called Unquiet Mind, written by Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry and mood disorder expert who herself had masked bipolar that was hidden under the surface until she, so to speak, went off the rails. I saw the parallels, but the intellectual coda for me was a decidedly more emotional note.
“How could one, should one, recapture the intensity or reexperience the glorious moods of dancing all night and into the morning, gliding through the star fields and dancing along the rings of Saturn, the zany manic enthusiasms,”
she wrote in a section about whether she would have wanted to have been born without bipolar disorder.
“How could anyone bring back the long summer days of passion, the remembrance of lilacs, ecstasy, and gin fizzes that spilled down over the garden wall, and the peels of riotous laughter that lasted until the sun came up or the police arrived?”
My mind, I did not realize, my most prized asset, was trying to kill me.
Check. Check. And check. And another check or two. I had danced all night in the rain, laughed like it would never end. I spent nights where my cup overflowed onto tables, walls and all sorts of other places. I only slept for a few hours most nights. I self-medicated. I experienced undiagnosed periods of mania and depression that had no correlation to the normal and success and failure measures faced by others. I lived life, and life was a as beautiful a mess as it was an experience. I laughed a lot for no reason. I cried a lot for no discernible reason. My mind, I did not realize, my most prized asset, was trying to kill me.
I was out there—entertaining enough that, before I was diagnosed, a colleague, friend and writer for The Times once wrote a column, and later a book chapter, about me hanging out at my favorite bar, the now defunct Robert Emmett’s in Times Square, with Gary Coleman. Some excerpts:
Jayson Blair, an enthusiastic, eccentric reporter for The New York Times and fixture at Robert Emmet’s pub in midtown Manhattan …
Mr. Blair, currently traveling on the wagon of sobriety, ordered coffee …
Neither dreams regularly …
Mr. Blair, a gossip, is known for the line, “Hey what are you guys talking about?”
Both are excitable black men given to wild hand gestures and possess loud cackling laughs
… both are trying to extricate their working lives from their private livesMr. Blair, who recently took a few weeks away from his job to tend his inner being …
Both are insomniacs, prisoners to manic periods of highs and lows …
The lack of sleep. The uncontrollable laugh. The wild hand gestures. The lack of boundaries between work and persona life. The eccentricity. The need to take time off from the job to tend to my “inner being.” And, of course, the arm chair diagnosis—pre-diagnosis—of insomnia and being a prisoner to manic periods of highs and lows. My colleague, Charlie LeDuff, nailed it. I wish I had noticed it.
He left out the cocaine-fueled, non-stop parties before this period where me and my colleagues tried to drink Irish immigrants under the table (it was never successful). The only difference between my colleagues and me was that I had the manic stamina to be there all night. All of my colleagues rushed toward the burning Twin Towers on that horrible day in September 2001, but I reacted in an emotional manner that felt right then, but in retrospect, was ten times greater than those around me. I made up a story to my colleagues to help explain my emotions. We are a sensitive bunch, those of us with bipolar.
There were others who would later come to my coffee table for reading, like Andrew Solomon, whose book, The Noonday Demon, crystalizes the darkness of the other side of mania, depression. And there were those who captured what would come later in life, as it does for most of us with bipolar once we reach our thirties, and that was the irritability and agitation of mixed states, where one is both manic and depressed.
I was 27—and like Amy Winehouse, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain actually did—I felt that I had died.
I was 27—and like Amy Winehouse, Jimi Hendrix, and Kurt Cobain actually did—I felt that I had died. All that I was, all that I had ever wanted to be had passed away with the poor choices I had made and the contributing mania and depression of the past 18 months.
Thank God for the medicine. As is not uncommon, it took four years, another hospitalization at Silver Hill, moving home to Virginia and more than 70 different combination of medicines it right, but I had stabilized by the summer of 2007. I was not back to myself, in any stretch of the imagination. I was some new guy who had a look of things to make up for and a lot of damage to recover from. I might have been a new person, but it felt like it fit me as I was truly meant to be, like a nice pair of silk slippers.
Like many people who have a traumatic experience—including loved ones—with bipolar disorder, I gravitated toward helping others with the illness by founding a non-profit in a town where I grew up. It expanded across the region, became involved in outreach and education activities and I eventually transitioned to life coaching. It is not to say that I did not have bumps with mania and depression during these periods—I did, often to only internally nightmares, but sometimes to embarrassing external consequences. I did, however, get to the point where I was stable enough to deal with my character flaws, deal with some post-traumatic stress from my day-job watching bodies drop on the streets of New York, including some hurtling themselves out of windows when the more than 2,000 died on September 11, and give back to the noble profession I had damaged.
At the end of the article with Gary Coleman, the washed-up child actor who played Arnold Jackson in Different Strokes, known for “What you talkin’ about Willis,” noted that my height of five-foot-two was such a blessing. “What do you have to complain about,” Coleman, coming in four-foot-eight, asked. “What are you? Five-foot-two? You’ve got nothing to complain about. If I had your height, I’d be on NYPD Blue.”
Well, I do have nothing to complain about now. I have learned that with support from family, psychiatrists, therapists, medicine and friends you can live a charmed life, the one that I now find myself in. I have not lost all the vestiges of bipolar—the humor, the two-minute hurry up offense that does not end after two meetings and those grandiose moments where I complete me. But it is manageable, and my unquiet mind as become a beautiful mind. Loving every minute of it—for all the tears, the anguish, the suicidal thoughts, the pain, the broken hearts, the hard lessons learned and the disappointed colleagues—I would not have wanted to do it—all the without bipolar.
About the Author
Jayson Blair is a certified life coach and the managing partner of Goose Creek Consulting. Jayson is a nationally known mental health writer and consultant. He is the founder and the former executive director of the Depression Bipolar Support Alliance of Northern Virginia.
Jayson, who has bipolar disorder, wrote about his illness in a 2004 autobiography. He has years of experience working with individuals with mental illnesses, their loved ones, support groups and others in outpatient and inpatient care settings. He has also worked as a career coach, helping high school students, college students and adults formulate and achieve their career goals. His specialties include helping others with career problems, bipolar disorder, depression, schizoaffective disorder, attention deficit disorder, Asperger’s syndrome, substance abuse problems and anxiety. He also has experience working with individuals with mental disabilities, eating disorders, sexual abuse, post traumatic stress disorder and other conditions. Some of his other interests include career testing and transition, executive functioning, management of triggers in mood disorders and substance abuse, psychopharmacology, crisis intervention and peer support. Jayson also advocates for clients in school services eligibility meetings, in IEP meetings with disability services programs and other services. Jayson also has contracts with corporations to provide employee assistance services.