Personally Speaking: Breaking a family tradition
By Lily Barnstone Wells
Like many families, mine has its traditions. Some families’ traditions include who cuts the turkey on Thanksgiving, lighting Chanukah candles or opening presents on Christmas Eve. My family’s tradition, sadly, is suicide.
My father called it the family curse. The Bible says that the sins of the fathers fall on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation. I don’t know how many generations the tradition of suicide goes back in my family, but it includes my grandfather, father and uncle.
The truth is that my family’s tradition of suicide is not any more a curse or a sin than any other family afflicted by cancer, heart disease or the host of other genetically inherited diseases. My family is genetically predisposed to bipolar disorder.
Bipolar disorder is known by many names: manic depression, the suicide disease, the death wish. Whatever you call, it is not to be underestimated. Individuals with bipolar disorder face the greatest risk of suicide of all psychiatric disorders. In fact, the suicide rate among bipolar disorder patients is approximately 10–30 times higher than that of the general population.
My paternal grandfather suffered from bipolar disorder. He was a jeweler and businessman, who repeatedly made and lost fortunes. Unfortunately, he lived in a time prior to treatment of the disorder. After losing yet again another fortune, he took his life.
Unlike his father, my father lived at the dawn of treatment. He was a renowned architect, but after experiencing a severe manic-depressive episode, was institutionalized. There he was treated with electro-shock therapy. It was the late 1960s when the procedure was more like a torture rack, conducted without anesthesia, and only a short-term remedy. In 1970, he was one of the first to be treated with lithium. The results were remarkable. He rebuilt his life as an architect, professor and author. He also drank to calm his nerves from the demands of his many great successes. Mixing alcohol and lithium is not recommended. When his drinking became out of control, his psychiatrist wanted to hospitalize him to safely wean him off. But he refused to go, terrified that he’d be subjected to electro-shock therapy again. He quit drinking on his own. Depression set in, and he took his life. I was nine months pregnant with his first grandchild and not yet diagnosed myself.
Symptoms of the disorder started for me at age 14. I called it “the merry-go-round” because I couldn’t get off. But the experience was more like a rollercoaster. Up, up, up I would go. Everything moved fast. My energy was high. Nearing the top, I’d recklessly let go of the handlebars and wave my arms in exhilaration. I was reckless with drugs and sex, feeling wildly alive. Until the plunge. The downside was always an abrupt stop, resulting in a depth of despair so intense I wanted to die. It kept happening over and over. I had it, the family disease. Yet no one wanted to admit it. It was a reality my parents choose to ignore, hoping it wasn’t true, or that it would go away on its own.
In college, I sought help through the university’s mental health clinic. There a psychiatrist recommended therapy three days a week, convincing me it was the only way I would get better. So I went, three days a week, for three long years. His method was Freudian psychoanalysis, commonly called talk therapy. It helped at first, but because medical conditions cannot be talked away, it was nearly fatal. Bipolar disorder is a medical condition, a chemical imbalance affecting the neurotransmitters in the brain.
Ten years and many more doctors later, I was finally properly diagnosed with bipolar 1 disorder and prescribed lithium and antidepressants. Despite the many side effects of lithium, it was a welcome stabilizer. I felt what I imagine ‘normal’ feels like. Life was livable. I could function consistently, raising a family and working professionally.
Twelve years later, my father’s brother, my favorite uncle, began showing all the classic symptoms of the family disease. He was a successful developer, lawyer and city councilman. Despite all the evidence of bipolar disorder in our family, he refused to consider that he had it too. The stigma of mental illness proved a barrier he could not overcome. He took his life in large part because of stigma.
Medical research into bipolar disorder continues to advance. For example, after 18 years on lithium, I now take lamotrigine. It’s an anti-epileptic, anticonvulsant drug that works for bipolar disorder without the terrible side-effects of lithium.
Today, I’m blessed that science, not tradition, is at work in my life. Medication, plus love and forgiveness, has given me a life worth living.
Lily Barnstone Wells is a professor of geography. Married 28 years, she is the mother of three grown children and a proud grandmother to three grandchildren.
