Spouse with Mood Disorder Sending Mixed signals...can Anyone Relate?

I am sending you strength. I wish i could give you a big hug.

The only thing I can share, is for you to figure out what impact this is having on your children?

If it is negative, you need to either take the kids and leave/ have your husband leave, or go to family counseling so you all can have professional guidance.

I lost a very good friend to mental illness, bipolar, depression. Heartbreaking to realize how bad their home life had been. At her funeral, I swear, every person that spoke of her started off by saying, "she was my best friend...."

But we had no idea that she had been so unstable and how her children adored her, but their home was so unbalanced and stressful, the older the children became the more withdrawn they became. they began to rebel. The eldest son, killed himself a year later at 16. Shocking, heartbreaking and devastating.

You must care for your family and seek professional help for all of you. You all deserve to be happy, but loving someone with all of your heart, may not be enough. Your husband is ill and not always able to express his needs in a positive way, or even be able to face his true needs and fears.

My ex-husband has been diagnosed as Bipolar Disorder II. Your description of your husband is very familiar to me. He was like two different people, but mostly angry and depressed. That is the definition of Bipolar II, cyclical depression with angry/irritable periods.

I moved out when our daughter was 4 1/2 because I could not continue to let her think this was an OK way to live in a marriage. (And I was just exhausted from the years of providing emotional and financial support to him and the children. We had been together over 20 years by then and raised two older children. His periods of depression got worse and more frequent, then he got the new diagnosis.

Since then, he has seen more and better doctors, gotten medication that stabilize his moods the majority of the time, and become an involved father. We have a healthier relationship as co-parents living separately than we had when married.

I have had professional counselors say to me that he has NO excuse for acting like a shithead. There is NO "that's the depression talking" allowed. If his illness is not being treated effectively, then he goes to see his doctors and gets a medication review and counseling.

If the mood stabilizer your husband was on wasn't working, there are several more to try. I am not always a medication advocate, but in my ex's case, finding the right combination of drugs has been a life saver. He was showing suicidal tendencies. Testosterone can create angry moods, so I would not think this is a helpful course of treatment for your husband.

You can't make your husband do anything, but seeing qualified doctors and mental health professionals for additional treatment is in order here.

My poor cousin goes through something like this every few months.
This time they were on the way somewhere when he got out at a gas station and she almost couldn't get him back in the car. His anger is always focused on her. But that lasts about a week or two, then he's so sorry, he's depressed. Then he's ok for a while then slt manic. Which one is him?
The whole package.
No, I don't think the mean, openly hostile one is his authentic self. I don't think he thinks that all the time and is just letting you know when he is shockingly filter less. I think it's running through a depression laden quagmire, not something filtering his self control. I have seen things through that quagmire and said some hurtful things but never threatened to leave. That's a special kind of wrong.
I agree with keeping that email as a type of diary. He needs to write another email to you now on the same subject. It's going to be revealing to read what he says. A diary can be revealing to him.

We just recently started a bipolar med for our 9 year old daughter. More than one psychologist has mentioned bp.
It has been night and day for our daughter.

Without the her on the med our whole family and life is flipped upside down and we are all on edge all the time with her anger, violence, rages and tantrums.
Things aren't perfect now, but way better than they were without the med.

We were having to do trial and error with ADHD meds which made her worse in some ways, then we tried the bp med and I'm thanking God regularly for this wonderful change.
Only neg effect right now is weight gain.

My MIL and a couple friends are bipolar. When they are unstable, they can say and do terrible things. When they are getting the proper care and are stabilized, things proceed along normally as they do for anyone else.

You mention he takes supplements and sees a naturopath. Is that the only thing he is doing? He needs to be under the care of a psychiatrist, see medical doctors, and be on proper medication. That is non-negotiable if this marriage is going to work.

I suffered from depression for many years. I said a lot of terrible things, and yes, I thought I meant them at the time, but that was the chemical imbalance talking, the depression talking. However, I agree with the responses that said he has to take responsibility for his illness.

I'm concerned that he's trying so many things. You say he's working with a naturopath on the low testosterone and "other health issues". He's taking a lot of supplements - but how did he decide on which ones, and how do you know they are balanced, safe and not working against each other? As a nutritional consultant, I have to tell you that having a consumer play amateur chemist, mixing and matching supplements, is usually very expensive, quite ineffective, and often a good way to make things worse. Reading an article about how Vitamin X helps with Health Issue Y, or Herb Z helps with depression, does not make someone a food scientist.

I did a combination of medication and therapy, both alone and with my husband, and it made a huge difference. Over time, and working with food science and my doctor, I was able to wean off the antidepressants and am now healthy and medication free. But I did it the smart way and based on really solid education, not just grabbing some things off the health food store shelves. Those items are not well regulated and you have to be careful.

Your husband is at the start of this process, and it sounds like he is working at cross purposes. I think it may be okay for him to avoid medication (which I think is what he's doing by stopping the mood stabilizer and working with supplements and a naturopath), but it doesn't sound like those efforts are at all coordinated. It also doesn't sound like they are working.

This is absolutely having an effect on you, and it's having an effect on the children whether you can pinpoint that or not. I think it's past the point of you being able to talk to him about it - he either needs a fully comprehensive line of patented supplements (patents indicate they are proven safe, effective and unique), with no piecemeal approach. He might benefit from medical intervention if he will try it, and I think you would both benefit from counseling both individually and together. I think you have to get past the feeling of hurt, but not try to get past the feeling of doing nothing. You really need to take action for yourself and your kids, whether your husband goes along with it or not.

J B, he's mentally ill. Half of what comes out of his mouth sounds totally different to him, he probably didn't think it sounded like that at all.

To maintain this disorder he needs to be seeing someone and he needs to be on some sort of med to stabilize him more. Obviously what he's doing isn't working.

It's really hard to tell if it's 'him' or his condition doing the talking.
I think he needs some professional help - the naturopath is doing less for him than the medication he gave up on.
Also, messing with testosterone levels is tricky and I think it might be complicating his mood disorder.
A doctor or team of doctors and counselors who treat the whole man and all his conditions would be better than a piecemeal approach.
If one medication didn't do much for him there are others he can try.
I've heard the best success with these sort of things is medication plus ongoing counseling.

You need to decide how much you can live with.
You're raising kids and it's got to be tough living with someone who's depressed for 8 weeks out of 10.
How much do the kids really pick up on (they are smarter than you think) and how much does their Dad's depression affect them?
You might want to consider some counseling for yourself to help you figure out what you want.

As someone who has this disorder, there are a few things I want to tell you. First, a naturopath will not cure him. He need pharmaceutical meds, not supplements. The supplements might make his "normal" times feel more normal, and they may spread out his cycles so he spends more time being normal but they aren't going to take the disease away. Personally, and again this is in MY CASE, I find that the longer I go without a depressive episode, the longer and stronger it is when it finally rears it's ugly head. A little private cry at the end of a stressful day does wonders for me, I also require a lot of time alone, my family repects this and it doesn't affect my duties to my business nor as a mother or wife. Second, he needs to be in counseling regularly, he needs coping skills desperately to get rid of the guilt of having this disease and to learn how to avoid and deal with triggers that can bring on the manic episodes.

The thing about bipolar type 2 is that we do NOT handle stress well, it's much harder for us to process lots of activity in our lives in spite of the fact that things like being very busy the week before school and getting ready for guests may not seem to be affecting us. But if we do not have time to process all of that crazy activity properly, our brains go into overload mode and we either curl up in an angry spitting ball of depression or act out in a hypomanic phase. One more thing before I answer your questions directly, our manic phases often include a lot of sexual activity, whether it's with our current partner or not, it's very common for us to look to sex to feel better, as it floods our brains with all kinds of feel good hormones. Keep this in mind when dealing with your husband.

If you have depression...have you ever said something as hurtful as what he has said to your spouse?
Yes, but it was usually in an "I feel this way and don't want to, help me!" way.

Did you mean it?
At the time it was as if I could find no other way out of the indescribable pain I was feeling and releasing my husband from my craziness seemed like a good idea.

Is that how you really feel or felt at the time?
No, most of the time I was feeling ok, but after I had kids my cycles were shorter and my moods more volatile. The more stressed I felt, the worse it became. I wasn't diagnosed until 5 years ago, so this is all 20/20 hindsight. I'm 43 now. I've been this way since I was 8yo.

How could your spouse separate what is you talking and what is your mood disorder?
He couldn't. He had an affair partly because he thought I didn't love him. In reality, he was spending more and more time away at work and I was feeling neglected and tossed aside and was so sad for my kids that they barely saw him. I was cycling through depression and mania so much due to financial stress, the stress of our marriage and having four kids, with no outlet for the stress, that I often said things just to get a reaction out of him.

Or are those voices really just one and the same?
Voices? Imagine getting a song stuck in your head and you can't get rid of it. That's what it's like, only worse. I found writing things down really helps me put those intense feelings/voices aside so I can live my life.

...how do I know it's not really what he thinks and wants but just normally does have the courage to say it and follow through with any action?
You don't. You need to call his bluff, enough is enough. Real therapy and medication or you're done. He's holding you hostage with this, and that's not fair to you, especially since you have done so much to help him. My husband waited until I had a complete breakdown before he helped me find help.

Can he really know what thoughts and feelings are even really his authentic self talking?
They are all really him. Just like your fantasies about movie stars, or you imagining strangling that annoying person you have to deal with at work. Just imagine what it would be like magnified 100x and seemingly screaming at you to DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!!! That's kind of what it's like.

At the end of the day do you think it matters or should I just start to take these things at face value and act accordingly?
I think you need to drive him to a psychiatrist and get him on real meds, possibly suggesting some inpatient time until they can get his meds right.

I try very hard now not to let my mood swings affect people, I can now avoid most triggers, and if not, know how to properly deal with them. I take a mood stabilizer and an anxiety med every day. If I forget them? I'm a mess at the end of the day, even if I've had a pretty good day.

I hope that helps. This is as real as diabetes, treat it as such. Would you blame a diabetic for having low insulin, or get them the insulin?

I agree that it could be "the illness talking" when he says those things to you.

But, he needs to address it head-on. My guess is that he should be taking more medication.

I suggest that you print out the email he sent to you and put it somewhere where you *both* see it - taped inside the closet door, for example. Let him know that you remember he wrote that. Don't sweep that under the rug...illness or not, he needs to take responsibility for writing you those harsh words.

ETA: I agree with some above posts like Reverend Ruby. When I say "he needs to take responsibility", I mean - it's not fair to make you live this way. He either needs to "apologize" for being so mean to you, shape up and act right, or, he needs to take medication. Those things he said to you - either it's the illness talking, or, he is a jerk! He needs to figure out which is true.