Electroboy: was I ever really down and blue?

In retrospect, it was easy. And boy, did it mess me up from age eighteen until I turned thirty years old. "I'd like to thank each and every one of my doctors for screwing up," I told an audience of mental health care professionals a while back - jokingly, of course. After all, that was fair. But I also played a huge part in my diagnosis and in my treatment. So I was responsible for the misdiagnosis, too. I wasn't really giving any of these doctors the 'complete picture'. I mis-reported my symptoms, my activities and my general behaviour when I wasn't depressed. I left out a complete part of my mental illness.

I couldn't sleep for nights on end, as my brain felt like there were thoughts colliding within it; I obsessed over small details, from saving pennies and polishing each one of them to washing my clothing over and over in the washing machine. And then there were days when I was so exhausted that I slept for fifteen or sixteen hours and just felt like I had a case of the 'blahs'. But mostly I told my doctor about sleeping long hours and the fatigue associated with it. So they came up with depression. It seemed right, I suppose.

"Depression, you're suffering from depression, Andy," my doctor told me the year before I went away to college, when I was eighteen years old. "It's common among many adolescents," he assured me. "Thanks so much. Now I feel completely better," I wanted to say. "I'll just live with the depression, and just see if it kills me or I kill myself first," I thought to myself.

That was twenty-four years ago. I didn't really know what the diagnosis of depression meant, but I certainly knew how it felt - and it wasn't very good to feel the way that I was feeling, day in and day out. This was in 1980, and the doctor's method of treatment was 'talk therapy' - sitting down once or twice a week and telling him about how the past seven days had gone. "We'll get you better before you go off to college," the good doctor told me.

So I visited him twice a week. My mother drove me forty-five minutes each way, and it was our secret that I was seeing a therapist. I remember being hopeful that the 'dark feelings' would go away, but they only got worse and worse. I felt like I was the only person on the planet with this 'thing called depression', and I remember being frightened. I was knocked out and dopey, and I cried all of the time. Don't get me wrong - I had some good moments, too. I felt on top of the world at times and that I was invincible. But I never told my therapist about these feelings. I didn't think they had anything to do with my condition, or his diagnosis of adolescent depression.

Therapy with the 'good doctor', as I liked to call him, was interrupted when it was time for me to leave the depression-inducing suburbs of New Jersey and go away to college in the scenic countryside of Connecticut. I packed up for my freshman year and thought I would leave eighteen years of my feelings behind. But when I arrived on campus, I realized that they had followed me. Was the countryside making me feel worse or better? Worse. So it wasn't the suburbs after all!

I immediately sought out help from the mental health program on my university campus, and the next week I had an appointment at the mental health centre. I was assigned to a very young therapist, an attractive woman in her early thirties. She performed an extremely thorough intake on me during the first session, but remained particularly quiet while I answered her questions and provided me with almost no information for a few sessions as far as a diagnosis was concerned.

Soon, she announced some shocking news: I was suffering from adolescent depression.

I couldn't believe that this diagnosis had taken four or five sessions! We went on to talk about my depression twice a week during my four years at college - and that's quite a bit of talk therapy. We mostly discussed my childhood, my fears and frustrations, and I remember that we also talked quite a bit about my colourful dreams, which I wrote down in a notebook.

Every other night I had vivid memories of drowning in the middle of the ocean, while on the nights inbetween I was being chased through the subway in Manhattan. But apart from this, there wasn't much more to my sessions. They were quiet. Since it was the early eighties, what else was there to do for my 'depression'? Nobody talked about medication. I suppose talking was the best thing that could be done for me at the time.

I remember my frustration at making no headway. I also remember slipping into a darker world - one of staying up all night (or sometimes a few nights in a row), sleeping for days and being unable to get out of bed, experimenting with drugs and alcohol, sexual promiscuity and over-spending. I didn't speak about any of these symptoms to my therapist, and thus my diagnosis remained: depression. I remember seeing it printed on the invoices that I had to give to my parents every month, so that the doctor could be paid her forty-five dollars per session.

After graduation in June of 1984, I moved to Manhattan. My first stop was a psychiatrist, who in less than our first fifty-minute session again diagnosed me with depression. I remember thinking, "This is great, this diagnosis and label, but can anybody do anything for me and am I ever going to get better?" I continued to see doctors throughout the decade, continued to be misdiagnosed, experimented with medications, got into lots of legal and financial trouble and had electroshock therapy and was placed in hospital until I finally stabilised in 1999.

Just a note: that's twenty years of therapists, misdiagnoses, medication experimentation and hopelessness.

In total, I was diagnosed with depression by eight psychotherapists and psychiatrists over a period of thirteen years. Diagnosed wrong. Absolutely wrong. My accurate diagnosis was manic depression, or what we call bipolar disorder today.

I suffered from rapid cycling manic depression - it was a rollercoaster of euphoric highs and desperate lows. Each morning I would wake up and be surprised by my mood. Some days, I would jump out of bed with a bang (if I had even gone to sleep the night before!), get dressed, drink a few beers, hail a taxi to the airport and choose a destination once I got there - Acapulco, London, the Caribbean, or maybe somewhere just kind of bland like Los Angeles. Those were the highs. But during the lows, I'd sleep for days on end, barely eat and just stay inside my apartment in Manhattan in total darkness. This was the depressive part of my manic depression, and it was horrible. Those were the days that I prayed for my manic episodes to return. But they didn't. So I would wait it out until I'd either come to an even keel or once again slip into an episode.

Almost a decade later, after so much experimentation with medication and finally finding the right combination of drugs, my condition has been stabilised for almost five years. Not that my medication hasn't been tweaked in the last five years - we've played with it quite a few times, just to get it perfect. But now the manic episodes have stopped and there's no depression. I'm leading an even-keeled life and I don't experience the tremendous ups and downs of my illness.

In retrospect, there are so many things that I would have done differently. I would have spoken more openly and honestly to my doctors about my symptoms. After all, I only sought out mental health care when I was depressed. My thoughts were: why go see a doctor when you're high and feeling good?. But I still feel comfortable saying that I wish my doctors had asked more questions and moved past the diagnosis of depression when they realised that the treatment wasn't working, because it wasn't working for a reason: misdiagnosis.

I would have read more information about mental illness, too. I didn't. I knew very little about my own condition and could have benefited from other people's accounts of their battles, which is what motivated me to write Electroboy: A Memoir of Mania.

I don't wish depression or manic depression on anyone. However, at times I feel somewhat fortunate to have been through some of my experiences, as they gave my life tremendous perspective that I probably would otherwise never have seen. But those out of control highs and raging lows ... I never want to go back there again. And I'm hopeful that I won't.