Vitamin B12, B6, B2, folic acid, calcium, Vitamin C, D, and A, zinc – I’m sure there are others my doctor mentioned as she read the test results, but the list was so long, I was in such disbelief, and at the time, I barely had the capacity to remember what happened a few minutes earlier. Like the urine sample…I have no recollection.

All these nutrients…I’m deficient in. Of course, I’m anemic. And I have a urinary tract infection, gastritis, and a nagging cough. My hair is coming out in handfuls, my gums bleed, my bones ache, and my breast milk supply is falling despite how much I’m eating, drinking, or pumping to keep the supply up.

The baby still looks good, but his weight gain has slowed the last couple weeks. The only good point has been my weight loss – I dropped four pounds in the past week alone, which appears deceptively great for someone only a few months postpartum. But as my husband likes to point out: Sickly is not sexy.

I’ve been dead tired, but with each passing day of treatment, my energy is climbing – last night, I cleaned the kitchen after supper for the first time in a looooong time, while directing bedtime routines for my children and asking my husband semi-intelligent questions on the football game he was watching, to show my interest in his interests – and my mood, concentration, memory, and just pure and plain sanity is back. The few days before I started treatment, while still awaiting results from a blood lab, I was – as my husband who has bipolar disorder, and a bit of experience with this, will tell you – psychotic. Amazing what a few handfuls of vitamins and minerals will do for a starved brain, and I mean that literally.

You may be wondering how someone can be walking around, going about their daily business, and be this sick and not know it. Well, I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t imagine this. Then, I thought about how there are people everyday doing the same thing right before their doctor tells them they have Stage IV cancer or diabetes or schizophrenia.

The immediate treatment is taking mega doses of various nutrients to correct the deficiencies and an antibiotic to eliminate the infections, along with probiotics to ward off fungal infections, which are common in people with immune suppression. But of course, we’ll have to figure out what the underlying problem is – likely a malabsorption syndrome. Some of those vitamins I’m deficient in, like B12, take years to deplete from the body, so whatever the problem is, it’s been going on for a while. My husband thinks it was probably the cause of the placental abruption with my first pregnancy, five years ago.

I’ve been reading up on celiac disease, but my husband warns that I shouldn’t cut gluten out of my diet yet – that I need to treat the infections first, before we go to the next phase. I’m impatient, but, as I understand it, the tests for celiac would be inaccurate if I altered my diet beforehand. And as I’m not a doctor, perhaps I shouldn’t be diagnosing myself.

It’s disturbing that malnutrition can cause psychiatric conditions. Now that I’m feeling better, I can look back and see how depressed I was. Even the times I thought I was stable, I was depressed. Things made me happy on those days, yes, but my overall mood was tired, slow, lethargic. I was totally overwhelmed by life.

Toward the end there, I couldn’t remember anything, my cognitive processing speed was extremely slow, I felt either irritable or nothing much of the time. My brief moments of happiness were encapsulated by a pervading feeling of confusion. I believe my body had run on adrenaline for a long time, until finally even there was no longer the nutrient base to keep this function going. I now wonder how close to coma I was.

I have always “used” my kids as a mood thermometer, in that if I feel irritable toward them, I know something mood-wise is off. I should’ve been using my husband, too, rather than blaming his bipolar moods for mine. Now that my brain is getting food again, and I can think more clearly, I can tolerate his mood fluctuations much better.

I understand my previous anger toward his depressive moods: I couldn’t handle his support needs at the time, since I was unknowingly depressed, too. I no longer see every tired evening as the start of a mood swing, or every idea for a project as a manic symptom. I was living in fear of my husband’s illness because I was indeed depressed, and very ill, myself.

My husband mentioned the other day that he is a bit jealous that I’m finding out the reason behind my mood disorder. It goes to show that he still stigmatizes bipolar disorder himself; he doesn’t accept a chemical imbalance in the brain to be a valid illness. As if my body starving itself is any better? An illness is an illness. At least bipolar disorder doesn’t cause your hair to fall out…

Rita Brhel has been married to her college sweetheart, who has Rapid-Cycling Bipolar Disorder and Attention Deficit Disorder, for 10 years. They are happily married, have three kids, and live in the Midwest, USA.

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    Last reviewed: 8 Jan 2012 APA ReferenceBrhel, R. (2012). Life is Clearer When You’re Thinking Clearly. Psych Central. Retrieved on January 23, 2012, from blogs.psychcentral.com/moody-marriage/2012/01/life-is-clearer-when-you%e2%80%99re-thinking-clearly/