I have a learning disability called bipolar disorder. My thought process is severely distorted at times, making me believe that the plastic spider in front of me is real, and if I don’t exert all my energy into swatting it, the thing will leave me with a bite bigger than my knee.

That sounds absurd, doesn’t it? But it’s not all that far off from the truth.

Ten years ago psychiatrist Dean MacKinnon set out to find a biomarker for bipolar disorder because biomarkers signal a disease cleanly, without the “nurture” part contributing to it (like an abusive past, stress, or a traumatic experience.) He did find evidence which could grow into a biomarker for bipolar disorder: a problem with adaption. In other words, a learning disability.

Per the Winter of 2008 of Johns Hopkins Bulletin:

The brain is primarily a learning machine, MacKinnon says. “It takes in sensory information, then puts two and two together to organize and motivate behavior that avoids danger and satisfies appetites.” 

It is that so-called appetite behavior that is the focus here. Classic bipolar disorder, of course, brings recurring highs and bouts of depression. But manic and depressed patients also find themselves hypersensitive or numbed to appetite’s influence on behavior.

“Depressed patients have little motivation,” says MacKinnon. “They have little zest for activities that normally bring reward–sleep, nutrition, and socializing, for example.” Conversely, someone in manic state seems driven by intense and varied urges, to the point of being unable to manage them. This may stem from failure or inefficiency in conditioning, the most basic sort of learning, according to MacKinnon.

Perhaps the chemistry within the brain’s synaptic classrooms is altered–it may be no coincidence that some candidate genes for bipolar disorder retool synapses (the junctions between nerve cells). Whatever the biochemical flaw, the changes in patients are what you would expect with an inability to link need, behavior, and reward. “My hypothesis,” says MacKinnon, “is that at times of stress or change, people with bipolar can’t maintain that sort of learning.”

This is all fascinating to me because I have been battling my brain in a big way the last two days. I’m stuck on an obsession that history tells me can only hurt me and bring me deeper into depression and anxiety. Still I obsess. And obsess. And obsess. And with each cycle of obsession, my breathing grows shallower, and I getting closer to that panic point, where I start shaking and look like I did on the way to Johns Hopkins hospital.

STOP IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I tell my brain. YOU KNOW BETTER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But none of that matters. I yell at my brain another ten times, and manage my breaths, until I collapse into tears, frustrated at my futile efforts. The tears help, actually, because as I’m crying, I realize that I, in fact, do have a learning disability. The need to reward connection is defective. The message “this won’t work” doesn’t register. It’s like sending an SOS out to the Indian Sea when I’m kayaking in the Atlantic. The memo isn’t going to get there. Not even when I scream it aloud 17 times, so that my kids wonder what mom ate for cereal this morning.

I realized what my brain might look like when it’s doing circles in this faulty thought trap as I watched a mentally disabled teenager swim yesterday. She insisted on plunging into the pool back and forth, back and forth, right in front of the steps, where all the kiddies swim who are trying out the “big pool” without inner tubes or wings–in case they forget how to hold their breath under water and have to grab for the rail.

Katherine was among the fledgling young swimmers, who wanted to test her swimming ability from the lower step. She would swim from there to me, about three feet away. Katherine kept colliding into the girl, who would look up at me irritated every time Katherine jumped off the step.

This is not the best place for you, I wanted to tell her. It is just as shallow at that end. Can you go over there? I can guarantee you will be less frustrated and will have more fun whatever the heck you are doing.

But there was a fierce look of determination on her face. She wasn’t going anywhere. This was HER place. And even though she was interrupted every three seconds, she was staying here, dang it.

I was a tad irritated, but I knew that she was most likely mentally disabled, and so my annoyance quickly turned to compassion. And I prayed for her, right there in the pool.

Her disability was pretty obvious. It would be hard to get upset with her.

Mine isn’t. It’s easy to get upset with me. Or at least, I don’t seem to put my mood disorder into the same family of “challenges” as I placed the teenager swimmer’s disability.

I don’t give myself the same break as I gave her.

But I should.

Because when it comes down to it, my bipolar disorder is, in fact, a kind of learning disability. And I need to go gentle with myself, and forgive myself for those hours or days that the messages sent from my fear center (the amygdala) never make it to the smarter, more sophisticated part of my brain. They stay in the Indian Sea, going back and forth in the shallow end like the teenage swimmer. As Beyond Blue reader Larry Parker likes to say … I need to remember Christopher Plummer’s comment to Russell Crowe in a “A Beautiful Mind”: “You can’t fix this problem with your mind – the problem IS your mind.”

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