“A few weeks after I graduated, I tried to jump in front of a train”: My bipolar disorder nightmare

www.salon.com|Mary Lu Unterburger

When I was 17, I decided that I wasn’t going to get out of bed anymore. It was a grey morning in March, and I woke up feeling lifeless and sad. There was nothing particularly wrong with my life; I had a great group of friends, I was involved in several clubs, and I was set to graduate in three months with straight A’s. I knew my misery was completely unjustified, but I couldn’t move.

My dad dragged me to a psychiatrist and I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder. This wasn’t a shocking revelation for me. It was pretty obvious I was a sad kid. I had figured out that I was probably depressed years ago, but until the diagnosis, my family had dismissed my lifeless demeanor as typical teenage angst. I was almost proud to hear a doctor say that I actually had a mood disorder; it made all my mood swings seem legitimate and, more importantly, fixable. I was going to be prescribed a happy pill, feel better, and go back to my life like nothing had happened.

“I didn’t feel fit to be a mother:” I was holding it together, pushing through, getting by, and then one night, I wasn’t

www.salon.com|Mary T. McCarthy

At 25, I gave birth to my first daughter, Sarah, at 29, my second, Molly. I didn’t experience any feelings of depression whatsoever surrounding their births. I began a successful part-time writing career while I raised my girls. After about two years, I had a miscarriage about 12 weeks into my pregnancy. It was a devastating loss — I’d seen the baby’s heartbeat, everything had progressed normally and suddenly the heartbeat was gone and I had to have surgery to remove the lost baby. Heartbroken, I sought out other women who had experienced miscarriages; they seemed to be the only ones who knew what to say. Others said the wrong things, awful things. Too soon after, another pregnancy came and another miscarriage at around nine weeks. I couldn’t understand why, after two full-term lovely girls, my body seemed to have forgotten how to be pregnant. It was only after this second miscarriage that I learned I had a condition called bicornuate uterus, which meant I’d only ever had a 50/50 chance of carrying a baby to term due to the shape of my uterus.