I am single. I have been single for a long time, actually. It’s OK; I don’t mind it that way. I have my dalliances, I have my friends and I have my cats. It’s a touch stereotypical, but it’s my life. I have, however, fallen victim to an irrational line of thought from time to time – I really want to couple. Some of this desire is completely rational. It’s normal to want to spend Sundays in bed with someone and have someone to share orange juice with in the mornings. What isn’t rational, though, is the idea that a relationship will make me “happy,” will make me “better.” In times when bipolar feels it’s darkest, more than anything I just want someone to hold onto even if holding onto someone doesn’t work. Holding onto someone, however special, will not cure bipolar disorder.

Mental health is something that matters whether you’re seven, seventeen and seventy, and any of those ages can fall victim to a mental illness. Depression, for example, is quite prevalent and undertreated in the elderly. But if you’re underage, it may be more difficult than just going to your doctor to start the process of getting help for your mental health. It likely means explaining your mental health concerns to your parents; which, quite reasonably, is scary to a young person. (It’s scary to an old person too, but I digress.) So how do you tell your parents you think you need mental health help?

I’m sitting on my red, plush couch in my living room and I have started crying. Tears well in my eyes at first while I try to convince them not to roll down my face and splash the back of my glasses. As usual, the tears don’t listen and soon my cheeks and lips and chin are wet with saline. I take off my glasses and put them on the wenge coffee table and my head falls into my hands. Loud crying now, choking sobs wrack my body as I feel the pain of illness that I had been pushing away for so long beat me once again. And I wonder – will it get better?

I have said it again and again, what goes up, must come down and it usually does so with a resounding thud. A crater. An impact that puts you lower in the ground than before you started. In other words, a depression. And that’s the problem with hypomania. For many people the hypomania itself really isn’t a huge deal (although for some hypomania in and of itself is damaging) but the period afterwards is devastating. It’s the hypomania hangover.

Self-talk is something we all do. In psychology they call it intrapersonal communication – or communication with oneself. It could be the voice of your mother in your head tell you to “take a jacket” or the voice of an old lover telling you that “you’re fat” or simply a recitation of the lyrics to YMCA for an hour at a time. However you do it, we all have an inner voice no matter how unconscious it may be.

Bipolar disorder is associated with extremely high (mania/hypomania) and low (depressed) moods. This is typically seen with emotional changes, behavioral changes, energy changes and so on. Psychosis, on the other hand is the presence of delusions and hallucinations. Delusions – false beliefs that persist in spite of the existence of contrary evidence – and hallucinations are most closely associated with schizophrenia. However, symptoms of psychosis can occur in bipolar disorder and depression as well.

Bipolar disorder is an affective disorder, in other words it affects your emotions (among other things). Bipolar disorder symptoms are often about feelings. Well, they're about FEELINGS. I feel HAPPY. I feel SAD. I feel IRRITATED. I feel ENERGETIC. But one thing that's rarely recognized is that sometimes bipolar disorder is about feeling nothing at all.

I've been studying mental illness for a long time and while I knew the answer to this question, I couldn't really have told you why. This is mostly because I haven't done a lot of work on personality disorders, but I have had occasion to learn more about them recently. No, bipolar disorder is not a personality disorder, and here's why.

Last night I was feeding my cats and thinking suicidal thoughts - I like to call that a Wednesday night. And I was thinking to myself that no one (save others in my position) understands what that is like - to go from some sort of normal person in the daytime to a sobbing, suicidal headcase at night. I thought about the fact that I have spent eight years talking about this very disease, this very state, this very problem, and yet still, people don't get it. No matter how many words I use, no matter how I phrase it, people simply do not understand. So what do we do with the lack of understanding by others?

Happy new year to everyone. Thanks to all for joining me for a wonderful year of information, interaction and debate. I have learned a lot and I hope you have too. But in case you missed it, here are the top ten articles people were reading from Breaking Bipolar last year: