‘ Don ’ t Quit Your Day Job ’ : On Working Through a Health Crisis

I had mental health issues in 1991 that caused me to be hospitalized for two weeks, after which I received a diagnosis of bipolar illness. My psychiatrist at the time encouraged me to go back to my full-time teaching job immediately after getting out of the psychiatric ward. This was hard, but I think it was the best thing I could have done in the long run. I remember I was hospitalized in the summer right before the fall semester began. I didn’t have my textbooks to create a syllabus. My brother drove 150 miles over to Pennsylvania to get them. (I was hospitalized in my home state of Ohio.) I remember sitting in the psych ward lounge, writing my syllabus and course calendar. People asked me what I was doing. I guess I looked strange, pouring over a writing text, scribbling notes on yellow legal pads. I guess, I might have looked like I had it all together. Of course, I didn’t, but the drugs I was given had stabilized me enough to concentrate on paperwork.   After this experience, I stayed two years at the university in Pennsylvania. There, I grew lonelier and lonelier until I decided to move back to Ohio, where a year later, I met my future husband and things got better. If I hadn’t jumped back into my life as it was at the time, I may never have returned to an existence of relative normalcy, a life of functioning in a job on my own, in my own home. This same sort of situation happened again when I had breast cancer years later in 2011. I had to have three cancer tre...
Source: World of Psychology - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Bipolar Personal Bipolar Disorder Cancer Hospitalization Source Type: blogs