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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]NP here. Medication alone can never solve everything. It's important to recognize that mental illness is a lifelong battle and treatment is never a linear process; there will always be periods of highs and lows, both of which are temporary, so never lose hope and try to keep things in perspective.

I think the key is honesty. Being honest with yourself, your partner, your children, and your providers. One of my professor's in graduate school said: "Never suffer alone." That has always resonated with me for some reason, as mental illness seems to have a tendency to drive us inwards, when really we need to do the opposite.

My mother is bipolar and found a hormone specialist at Johns Hopkins that really helped her as she began struggling with it more during menopause. The point being, there are so many treatment options out there and everyone is different, so you just need to keep working towards finding the right treatment(s) for you.

This too shall pass![/quote]

Hmm! As a child of a bipolar mom I never thought of this. Her first break was when I was a baby (huge hormonal shifts and my family blames everything on the stress of me—an unplanned extra). Then her second break was five years later with-coincidentally?-a hysterectomy. I think she started HRT right away (assuming so, and she’s still on it in her 80s!).   I have two aunts and a cousin on my dads side with breast cancer so I didn’t even consider HRT.  But I felt a huge mental shift (not in a good way) with menopause. [/quote]

I have a friend who has been treated for depression for years. She had 8 kids before leaving her husband who refused to treat his BPD. I didn't meet her until she had all 8 and was a struggling single mom with no child support coming in, and I always wondered how the hell she had 8 kids before figuring out her husband was so off balance. But in her early 40s they started looking at hormonal things as well as the antidepressants she was on, and hormone treatment (I don't know what) made a huge different in her mood, and she said she figured out just why she'd had all those kids.

OP, I have dealt with major depression (technically they insist I'm bipolar all because of exactly one psychotic break in my late 20s which is 3 decades ago). I worried a lot about how that affected parenting, plus I'm very introverted. In a weird way I felt it was a good thing I had a hyper alert and fairly difficult child--not because of my illness (he came out of the womb that way, I guarantee ( unless because of prenatal environment), because his temperament gave me no opportunity to, well, ignore him as I might have done with another kind of child. I also wonder to what extent anxiety, which I also have/had, fostered an anxious temperament in him, for example I was empathetic to his anxiety and although I tried not to enable/coddle it I definitely did not dismiss it. I think I worked hard to consciously manage how I interacted with him. He had a decade or so (around 10 to 20 years of age) growing up that was pretty terrible, but he's done awesomely well as an adult. I also consciously encouraged him to look at other adults as additional resources, and a few really stepped up (within the appropriate context of their roles, e.g certain teachers and my sister).

It's also known through extensive research that parenting can really help an adult's mental status, in that even if you let the house go you HAVE to get up and get the child fed, off to school, etc. It forces certain responsibilities (the same research explicitly argues against assumptions that mental illness=unfitness in all situations where child professionals get involved, which historically has been a pretty strong bias). A parent who is aware of their mental health issues and seeking help is taking steps that extend into their knowledge of their children's mental health needs. [/quote]

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