Glutinous Bipolar – Gluten and Bipolar Symptoms
March 6, 2015 2 Comments
Glutinous Bipolar – Gluten and Bipolar Symptoms
It is 16 years since I was last detained on a psychiatric ward, 15 years since I learned how to self-manage and stay away from psychiatrists. It is now more than 4 years since I last took any psychiatric drug.
Today, it feels like I am ‘back to square one’ with words from a 1960’s song in my head.
“Lock me away and don’t allow the day, here inside, where I hide with my loneliness…”
Everything was going well, so why am I feeling this way?
It was cold and dark with a bitter wind. I was walking back to the train station when I got some bad news on my phone just as a welcoming fish ‘n’ chip shop came into view. I had promised a friend I would not eat chips. I went in and bought a sausage instead.
Somehow I convinced myself that any gluten in the sausage would not matter. This was not good food for me, but it was hot and seemed to be what I needed to deal with the cold and bad news. Was this self-harm? Were things going too well? Could it be my “inner saboteur” getting the better of me?
After more than a month with no gluten at all, with minimal pain, great positivity and plenty of sustained energy, just an hour after eating the gluten… my world was starting to fall apart.
Three days of misery followed with stupid coffee drinking and loads of dairy produce. Three days of binging, increasing gut pains and foggy and confused thinking.
Was it always gluten? It is 19 years since I was prescribed medications to calm my guts, but it was one of these that made my insomnia worse and led to the psychiatric drugs. These sedated me and in many ways made my life easier, but all the time they were allowing more gut damage to occur.
Each new doctor said it was all in my head and nothing to do with my gut, so I had to figure it out for myself. Now it seems I can only survive and thrive if I can learn from my mistakes and so avoid gluten regardless of what life throws at me.
About Roger Smith (in the UK)
Roger Smith (in the UK)
Rethinking Bipolar 
Reblogged this on Far be it from me –.
LikeLike
Congratulations on 15 years of being pseudo-science free and four of being drug free. Though my bi-troubles have not been as arduous as yours, I look forward to my drug free day, on the 26th next month. I was mandated to take psychiatric drugs for six months by a quasi health care tribunal. Three years of staying well makes me think it’s time to show my husband Robert Whitaker’s Anatomy of an Epidemic. How is it that my life mate could have insisted that I suddenly became bi-polar at age 51, I still wonder? Though I still have trouble with insomnia, as long as I stay sleepless in bed, my husband does not get freaked out by my lack of sleep. As long as I do not engage in emotional conflicts the day after, I am trouble-free. Someday I would like to be free of this ridiculous diagnosis, at least in the minds of my husband and my three offspring.
Kudos to you Roger for figuring out how to take care of yourself.
LikeLike