The Weather is Not Bipolar
You wake up and know that today will be a bad day. Your eyes feel heavier than a bag of stones. Your body feels heavy and drained like you ran all night instead of sleeping. You try to think about the book you are currently reading and use it as motivation to at least roll to your side to reach it, but you have no urge even to read the first line. How will you make it to work today? Why is it that just a week ago you were up until five am watching TikTok and woke up the following day full of energy as if you were on a sugar rush, but today, you are the sugar, slowly dissolving into your bed? The answer is simple: you are bipolar.
Now imagine you finally drag yourself out of bed, get to work, and the first thing you hear is your co-workers chatting and one of them says “The weather has been so bipolar lately! Just yesterday it was raining and now it’s sunny!” You are taken aback. How could someone reduce the debilitating disorder that affects you and approximately seven million adults in the US2 to an adjective describing the weather? Anyone you know, even your best friend, might be dealing with bipolar disorder.
People with bipolar experience symptoms, that can happen simultaneously or be separated into “manic” and “depressive” phases. Some of the symptoms are abnormally elevated moods, increased energy levels, poor judgment, negative moods, feelings of hopelessness, decreased energy levels, sleeping too much or too little, and thoughts of suicide.1 Imagining such a lack of control over your body and emotions is hard, and makes anyone feel powerless. Using the word “bipolar” so flippantly diminishes the value of a bipolar person's difficulties and that powerless feeling in their chest.
If it is bad to call the weather bipolar, it is even worse when it is used to insult someone. For example, your boss might have changed his mind about your deadline three times this week, and now your coworkers are calling him bipolar. Such actions stigmatize mental health struggles. The same applies to when someone organizes their desk every day and says “I am just so OCD about my desk.” It is light-headed comments like these that contribute to the misunderstanding and marginalization of people with mental health issues. Imagine saying when someone gets a sweet tooth and “needs sugar” for someone to say “You’re so diabetic”, or calling someone paraplegic when someone says “I don't want to stand up”.
People who use these words as adjectives probably have no harm at heart. But if you are one of those people, you are causing harm to others. Look for another way of making your speech vivid. How about you say “The weather is as decisive as a rotating door”? “You're as organized as an ant”? Get creative with it!
One might think that using the words “bipolar” and “OCD” more often would be a way of making them more normalized, and simply make a speech more “colorful”. But normalizing words in the wrong context with the wrong meaning causes harm. When we meet people who indeed have bipolar or obsessive compulsive disorder we will use the previous knowledge we have of those words in this new, more important context. It will minimize their lived experiences and make people think that bipolar is “flip-flopping” in opinions, moods, and everything. But the truth is some people with bipolar don't even experience the extremes, just a mixture of symptoms, and one with OCD does not always have impulsive behaviors related to cleaning and organizing. People with OCD have all types of obsessions from the fear of losing or misplacing something to unwanted thoughts of harm. 3
In a world where disorders are reduced to symptoms, it is easy to summarize someone’s pain to statistics. But pain is much more than statistics, and a person is much more than their pain. So, to understand someone’s pain, you must understand the language that hurts them.
Bibliography
1Bipolar Disorder Amen Clinics. https://www.amenclinics.com/brain-health/bipolar-disorder-4-investment/. Accessed 12 Sept. 2024.
2Bipolar Disorder Statistics | BetterHelp. https://www.betterhelp.com. Accessed 12 Sept. 2024.
Bipolar Disorder - National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/bipolar-disorder. Accessed 12 Sept. 2024.
3Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: When Unwanted Thoughts or Repetitive Behaviors Take Over - National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/obsessive-compulsive-disorder-when-unwanted-thoughts-or-repetitive-behaviors-take-over. Accessed 8 Oct. 2024.
