PHP and Me, Part 2

PHP is like day camp for bipolar adults. as such, activities take place throughout the day. no, we don’t make lanyards, but sometimes we make collages or draw as part of art therapy. personally, i like making collages because i can’t draw.

the problem with these projects is that bipolars can be competitive, especially when manicky. you have to have the best collage out of everybody in the room. nothing less will do. so you end up hogging all the magazines to get the best pictures first, and everyone else ends up hating you.

speaking of competitive, my favorite was recreational therapy. in the program i went to, the Rec Therapy Therapist was totally cool. her version of rec therapy consists of board games in which patients work as teams. these weren’t therapy type games, either. they were real games like Cranium, Outburst, Scattergories, stuff like that. luckily, i was usually able to talk Rec Therapy Therapist out of having us play Pictionary. timed drawing games like that can induce an anxiety attack if my current anxiety level is high. i’m not sure what the point of rec therapy is, but it was fun. who wouldn’t want to play $200-300/day to play board games?

mornings usually begin with a check-in period. each patient gives a brief update on their current mood, to which they can assign a number between 1-10. it isn’t sufficient to just say you’re “fine” or “OK.” the therapists and other patients ask you what’s currently going on in your life to help you get to the root of what it means to be “fine.” in other words, to be able to attach an emotion, like anger, sadness, or whatever.

this has never been easy for me because i tend to parse these words. like, do emotions have to be adjectives? for example, which is an emotion: “frustrated” or “frustration”? does it matter? for that matter, is either one a mood? are emotions and moods synonyms? or is there just the slightest bit of difference so that one includes/excludes nuances of the other? maybe this isn’t so much bipolar thinking as it is obsessive thinking, but it’s what goes through my mind. as a result, i have trouble naming my emotions, so the check-in period was helpful.

for 15 minutes 2 or 3 times a week, the psychiatrist assigned to you would pull you out of session to discuss your meds. my doctor’s first name means pubic hair in Tagalog. so every time this poor doctor stuck her head in the doorway to summon a patient, i and the patients i had befriend would start laughing. it was hard for me to take her seriously.

there’s an educational portion, which consists of videos about bipolar disorder or depression. for newly diagnosed people, this is extremely helpful. it’s a good idea to know exactly what you’re dealing with, right? also, when you see how people behave during episodes, you’ll realize that the same actions you may have taken in the past weren’t results of a character flaw. but i’d been dealing with this for 10 years, so i found this part borrrrrinnngggg.

the day wraps up with a goal session. we go around the room and everyone states a goal they want to accomplish tonight–they don’t have to be anything major. it could be something as simple as taking out the trash (which honestly, if you’re really depressed, it isn’t that simple). everyone writes their goal on a dry erase board and off you go.