I have been feeling good lately- stable, calm, and at peace. I really felt like I have turned a corner off the roller coaster of ups and downs that come with Bipolar disorder toward a period of more stability and evenness.
However, yesterday through me for a loop though. I was tired and once I reached my bed mid-evening I could not get back up and this scared me a lot. I called my mom to help with my daughter and proceeded to get really upset that I was starting to sink once again into a depression episode.
I have suffered with Bipolar 1 since 2002 (24 years!), and I have had my fair share of ups and downs. I especially hate when I am feeling good and the other shoe drops from a hypo-manic episode straight into a long, low depressive one. And that is what was weird I didn’t feel like lately I have been too elevated with my mood so it seemed weird to crash so hard and so fast.
Complicating my diagnosis is that I found out earlier this year that I have Celiac disease and if I don’t eat a very clean, gluten-free diet I have these attacks which cause a lot of fatigue and mimic my depression symptoms but are purely physical not mental.
This morning I feel good, refreshed unlike last night, and I don’t feel like a depression cloud is hanging over me anymore- so what happened?!
Well I ate gluten and didn’t realize it until it was too late. I had ordered some fund raiser caramel and cheese popcorn from my cousin’s daughter’s cheer team and after downing most of the bag (it was so yummy!) I read the ingredients and whey/wheat was a main ingredient which has gluten.
Yesterday was rough- I was tired all day, I was agitated and irritated easily, I just didn’t feel like myself, but almost 24 hours since eating gluten and I feel fine again! It is such a weird phenomenon for celiac symptoms to mask depression symptoms, especially since I have had symptoms of depression on and off for so long. Because I am so familiar with depression and how it feels I automatically think that a depression episode is what is happening when I feel bad, when sometimes especially lately it is just a gluten attack- phew!
I am very thankful I am feeling good today and it was just a gluten attack. Gluten attacks take about 24-48 hours to leave my system and I bounce right back to normal. Now a depression episode on the other hand can last weeks to months and is a very hard struggle to live through.
This really shows how mental health issues have so many physical side effects too, since the fatigue of depression and celiac disease feel so similar, but the recovery is very different. For the purely physical celiac disease symptoms everything clears up right away once the gluten has been processed and left my body, but depression related to Bipolar disorder is a whole different story. The human mind is magnificent but also infuriating thing and for people suffering from mental illnesses it can seem like your own mind is attacking you when you are suffering from either a depressive or manic episode.
I wish my mind wouldn’t attack me and my life wouldn’t be so much harder managing this awful disease (Bipolar), but I actually am thankful to finally know about my gluten allergy. While it makes eating, and cooking, and socializing with food involved a lot harder it has really given me a fresh perspective of the physical side effects that I have experienced with depression.
Leave a Reply