The Bipolar Soulmate

– Patrick, March 2026

The Bipolar Soulmate

I have bipolar and schizoaffective disorder.

As of this writing, I am 46 years old. In the last year, due to this disease, I lost my money, my job, my wife and precious time with my children.  I was not diagnosed until age 45.  The symptoms, however, were always present.  There were signs of bipolar as young as 7.  There were poor grades, night terrors, rapid shifts in mood, and of course the inability to truly sit and listen to someone. As I am sure any adult who has recently been diagnosed with mental illness can attest, researching what your body and mind have gone through over the years, and continue to go through as you begin treatment, can be all consuming. I spend a lot of time using AI to help me get through the grief of losing my quality of life due to manic and schizoaffective episodes. Mental disease does nothing but take. 

The point of this  website isn’t to unload all my trauma and loss. It’s to pull up the hem and raise the slip on this disease. There will be cautionary pieces of information, particularly from when I was very young.  I am not a doctor, but I am someone who fell through the cracks of our medical system. The warnings were there. It is my hope that a parent reads some of these entries and takes a close look at their child. If someone had done that for me, my story would not be as tragic.

The most important part of this website is to create a fellowship.  I read about people with bipolar (and any other mental disorder) and I truly feel I am not alone. That is the hardest part of having a mental disorder.  When those intrusive thoughts come, you feel as though you are hopelessly alone. Having a voice that says, “I know right where you are; it gets better”, is needed during those times.

I will write extensively about loss in the hope that people understand there are more than just “bad feelings” to overcome. We can lose everything if we are not cared for medically.

So, we will embark on this together and try and find hope in the darkest of places.  Maybe we will find they aren’t quite as dark as we thought