by Dan Nielsen

Created on: June 16, 2009   Last Updated: June 17, 2009

I was diagnosed with bi-polar disease when I was thirty, but in hindsight it was very much there throughout my life. By thirty I was married with three children - all boys. They are good boys, even now, but the truth is my oldest son was eleven at the time I was institutionalized and he started being the house father. He had to because I wasn't there, even when I was there.

By the time I was forty - four I had been institutionalized twice and placed them in hell for a hard fourteen years. When I turned forty-four I lost two years, two years that I can't even remember. Luckily my boys now were older, but now my middle son took over and had to take care of me, leaving his friends and employment behind to be with me a very bi-polar man.

Listen people this is where I have to become real, the world of bi-polar is a hard... no it is "Hell" on earth. The ups are manic high where mental clarity is void. The lows are suicidal - nothing more needs to be said there. Then the in-betweens are few and far apart and don't help even when they show up. I was unable to take care of myself, let alone a young family. iI wasn't fair for them. All the medication changes brought with them and new personalities in me, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but the doctors just kept trying to find the right prescription cocktail to try to even me out. It wasn't until I was fifty-one that a prescription cocktail has come close to settling me down. Twenty one years - it taken twenty one years, and now my babies were men and two of them married getting ready to start their own families.

My boys and my wife have been taken on a ride that no one should have, but I may have been dead without them though. But for two of my boys the outward signs of the bi-polar disease are now rearing their ugly heads, so readers bi-polar begets bi -polar. I am so sorry readers, but it is a proven fact mental disorders do sometime gets passed on in genetics - oh and how the skeletons came out of the closet when I was finally diagnosed.

Any parent, woman or man, is going to travel a hard road to being a "Good Parent". Believe me I have first hand knowledge. Now my worries turn toward my boys who are showing the signs of the hellish life of a bi-polar. I apologize to my children for the things that I have said and done and for the genetics that I have passed. I apologize to you the people who might read this. The bi-polar life is hard, brutal and those who live with as a disease or as a family member, don't get to live.

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