I have been a practising psychologist for 27 years. In that time, I have worked with hundreds of individuals living with bipolar disorder — and sometimes with the partners, parents, children and siblings who love them. What I have learned in those sessions is this: what most people think they know about the condition is almost entirely wrong.
The myth of the 'high and low'
When people hear the words bipolar disorder, they imagine dramatic swings — wild euphoria followed by crushing depression. And yes, those extremes exist. But what nobody tells you is that for most people living with the condition, the most difficult terrain is not the peaks and the troughs. It is everything in between.
The periods of what clinicians call 'mixed states' — where energy is high but mood is black, where everything feels urgent and impossible at the same time. The long flat stretches that look like functioning but feel like numbness. The hypervigilance of the person's family, constantly watching for signs, never quite relaxed.
What it does to a family
One of the things that drove me to write my novel In the Name of the Mother was the gap in public understanding of how bipolar disorder ripples outward. When someone in a family has the diagnosis, the whole family lives inside it.
Roles shift. Relationships reshape themselves around the diagnosis. Children learn to read a parent's mood before they learn to read the room. Spouses develop a sixth sense for warning signs. The family becomes, in some ways, a secondary patient — and one that almost never gets formal support.
What fiction can do that a textbook cannot
Clinical literature describes bipolar disorder with precision and care. But it does not tell you what it feels like to sit across a kitchen table from someone you love and not know which version of them you are talking to. It doesn’t tell you which version will come home to you at the end of the day.
That is what fiction is for. In the Name of the Mother does not aim to educate its readers about bipolar disorder in a clinical sense. It aims to help them feel it — in the characters, in the silences, in the choices that the diagnosis makes almost inevitable.
If you know someone with bipolar disorder, this novel is written for you as much as it is written for them.
CTA: Order In the Name of the Mother at https://janehudsonbooks.com/