When Mania Destroys Your Relationships
Depending on the severity of the mania and the person behind the illness, conversations can be quite pleasant or destructive with manic patients. When they’re pleasant, they revolve around interesting and grandiose delusions such as working with famous actors or become the next Stephen King. When conversations are destructive, you may be seen as an enemy and even be attacked during an interview.
Patients usually enjoy being manic because they feel elated, have a lot of energy, think and talk very fast and feel like they can accomplish anything; roadblocks are not often in their way. But with mania comes many consequences due to potentially destructive behavior, such as throwing things out of the house, sending unexpected large sums of wire transfers, destroying property, banging on doors, becoming verbally and physically aggressive, etc.
When someone becomes manic, the potential for destroying a relationship is extremely high; it can happen as quickly as in a few minutes. All it takes are some disgustingly evil words and perhaps even actions and the bridge is burned. But it’s not their fault because they are not being themselves when under the influence of mania; it’s part of their mental illness known as Bipolar I Disorder.
Bipolar I disorder is when a patient experiences mania; depression is not a requirement but they may also fluctuate into a depressed state of mind when they’re not manic. If a patient only has depression but has never had a manic episode, it’s not bipolar. You can think of bipolar as a disorder of great mood instability: rather than a flat baseline where most peoples’ mood lie, mania is above the baseline while depression is below.
More complicated pictures of mania is when drugs are involved. Some manic patients may be abusing methamphetamine which causes similar symptoms as mania: euphoria, a great amount of energy, days without sleep, no appetite, weight loss, a lot of strength, agitation, unpredictability, aggression, violence, paranoia and even psychosis. If a patient tests positive for meth but they have a history of bipolar disorder, it becomes a challenge to discern the correct diagnosis.
As you can see, drugs have no boundaries: they can create an addiction in any person, regardless of whether they have a mental illness or not. As I stated in one of my previous articles, mental illness and drugs go hand in hand as if they are a tag team: one infects a person first and brings in the other for the kill. Mental illness kills by relying on suicide, while drugs kill by relying on overdosing.
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DSM (Defeating Stigma Mindfully) 