“I nearly lost my marriage due to my erratic behaviour.”

The first sign my mental health was going downhill was getting hit like a tonne of bricks with anxiety, panic disorder and OCD the week I found out I was pregnant with my first child. I was treated and things were okay for a few years. Then I fell into a deep dark depression that nothing could lift.

At the same time I began binge drinking to chase a high that was never there. The depression was interspersed by short periods of time where I would become really focused on things like genealogy or solving true crime mysteries, spending tonnes of money, staying up all night on the internet, eating too much and drinking too much. A crisis led to my diagnosis of Bipolar Type 2.

I got my Bipolar 2 diagnosis after a massive suicidal crisis. I had been struggling with depression for about 5 years interspersed with (what I now know are) hypomanic episodes. I was receiving treatment for depression and anxiety, but it wasn’t stopping the waves that just kept coming, until one day I hit a breaking point and made a suicide plan. Thankfully I had a moment of clarity and told someone about my plan and they helped me to get some immediate crisis support.

When I saw my psychiatrist I asked her if she thought I might have bipolar because my grandfather had Bipolar 1, and treating my ‘depression’ wasn’t working. My psychiatrist agreed it was worth looking at and I was shortly thereafter diagnosed and put on mood stabilisers. I embraced the diagnosis because it just made sense. And the mood stabilisers worked. It was a crazy adjustment but I’ve always been thankful for it.

My ADHD diagnosis came after my 11 year old son was diagnosed. After doing his assessments with him, I found myself nodding along and ticking most of the boxes myself.

I saw my psychiatrist who did her own tests and looked at my old school reports before diagnosing me with ADHD – inattentive type. This diagnosis was a huge relief because it meant I wasn’t ‘lazy’ or ‘stupid’ or ‘scatterbrained’, there was a reason. It was much easier to be open about the ADHD diagnosis because there’s less stigma. I hope it gets that way for bipolar one day too.

My symptoms no longer affect me day to day now that I have found the right cocktail of medications. I can’t drink alcohol, I need to make sure I’m getting enough sleep, and if I do that, I manage to maintain stability.

When my Bipolar 2 and ADHD weren’t managed well before my diagnosis, I nearly lost my marriage due to my erratic behaviour. I said things in my extremely depressed states to my young children that they should have never had to hear. Trying to chase hypomanic episodes by binge drinking caused me to lose friendships and damage family relationships. I’d wake up the day after a binge with no memories of what happened and have to navigate all the chaos I’d caused carefully, trying to repair what I could.

Work and education has been difficult, but I was able to mask a lot of my symptoms and those in my personal life bore the brunt of it. Work was hard but not as disastrous as my personal life. In fact, it was a protective factor for the depressed times – something that forced me to get out of bed every day. My ADHD has made work and study difficult from childhood, and I’m always getting pulled up for lack of focus, and making silly mistakes due to inattention.

Bipolar 2 and ADHD overlap in a major way. The trick for me was to be diagnosed at different times. I got my bipolar diagnosis first and had a couple of years to settle and find the right treatment, and that’s when we realised that my inattention, forgetfulness, executive dysfunction and task paralysis were still a major issue. That’s when I had my ADHD diagnosis (retrospective from childhood) confirmed. Starting treating both was tricky because the treatment for ADHD can trigger the bipolar hypomania, so we had to take it slow and steady. Once we had it sorted though, my life got so much better!

The main overlapping symptoms are hyperfocus, impulsiveness, task paralysis and sleep disturbances. The way I tell the difference between them is if it is longer lasting (days to weeks) that indicates bipolar and if it’s shorter (hours) its ADHD. I’m still learning to tell the difference now. Poor sleep can trigger both.