Abstract
This paper is about making sense of bipolar disorder. We open with lines from a poem titled “Oasis of Life” by the poet /coauthor of this article which are part of his endeavor to know and tell some of his embodied experience living with bipolar disorder. We then use this poetry as a framework for interpreting stories of others living with/ supporting someone living with bipolar disorder as described by three members – two sisters and their mother – from a family where both sisters and their father have bipolar disorder. These family members stories are treated here as an instrumental casestudy and were collected through in-depth private interviews as part of a qualitative study conducted by the first author to better understand needs of adults who have disability and/or mental health issues and who support close family members with disability and/or mental health issues. Our purpose is to bring together poetry and research data in an exploratory way with the poet, or to use Hornstein’s term, “expert by experience”, sharing in data analysis with the researcher or “expert by training”. From our analysis, we provide an early stage illustration of how poetry may be an effective and unifying mechanism for interpretation and communication of complex embodied experience of bipolar disorder.
Highlights
Individuals with bipolar disorder live with intermittent and often unpredictable episodes of depression and mania [6]
We demonstrate how the process of creating poetry can be a means of achieving goals identified under a managing well framework and further, how the resulting poetry can be used to make sense of efforts by others to manage well with bipolar disorder
Our case is defined as experiences of living with bipolar disorder and supporting close family members who have bipolar disorder presented from the perspectives of three members – two sisters and their mother – from a family where both sisters and their father have bipolar disorder
Summary
Individuals with bipolar disorder live with intermittent and often unpredictable episodes of depression and mania [6]. The intensity and variability of accompanying moods and feelings make bipolar difficult to understand and explain to others [2,4]. These difficulties are exacerbated by what Hirschfeld discusses as a diagnostic lag wherein the symptoms of bipolar manifest relatively early in life, obtaining an accurate diagnosis often takes several years [2,7,8]. Since the 1990’s, advocates have called attention to the dehumanizing aspects of these approaches and argue instead for recovery models of mental illness which entail a focus on individual empowerment and strength in developing a distinct and positive identify with or without illness symptoms [18,19,20,21,22]. Recovery is conceptualized as a process through which an individual manages illness and achieves success according to his or her definitions of illness and success [15,23]
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