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Self-Care: Living With Affective Disorders Drinking, Drugging. Won't do it Suicide, Finding Help Handling Recurrences Did You Know…? The Value of Support Groups Coming Out. Telling Others Good Health: It's Not a Cure But It Helps! Don't underestimate the importance of safeguarding your overall health. Factors that contribute to mood disorders include poor sleep habits, vitamin deficiencies, stress, other illnesses and their treatments, drug interactions, food sensitivities, improper metabolism, and social isolation. Every body is different. You may find it helpful to keep a journal to chart your activities, nutrition, and health to determine possible contributing factors to your mood disturbances. This gives women with depression and manic depression a special reason to chart their menstrual cycle. Drink, Drugs 'n' Rock 'n' Roll: Don't Do It People with mood disorders may develop unhealthy habits as quick fixes to their depressed mood, or in response to a manic mood. Abusing alcohol, over the counter or prescription medications, illegal substances, and even food, are often means to "self medicate. "
If someone is "winding up" his or her affairs, frequently discussing methods of follow-through, or is exhibiting increased feelings of despair, step in. Ask direct, thoughtful questions and point out specific patterns of behavior that concern you. This may help restore the person's perspective before professional help can be found. Keep communication going until you find help, but don't promise confidentiality! When a life is at stake, there should be no secrets between a patient's doctor and family or trusted friends. Encourage the person not to feel ashamed of the way he or she is feeling because suicidal thinking is symptomatic of a treatable medical illness. Stress that the person's life is important to you and to others. After the patient has been in treatment and the severe depression seems to be abating, beware that as mood lifts, a still-depressed person may be better able to plan and attempt suicide with the improvement of energy and functioning capabilities. Don't try to handle this crisis alone.
Such abuse can cause other health problems, increase or decrease the effects of carefully prescribed medication, cause severe or even lethal interactions, and lead to destructive activity. Exclusive of the presence of clinical depression, drugs and alcohol on their own can sufficiently alter the body's chemistry and bring about episodes of depression or mania. A depressive illness may be masked if another disorder, such as substance abuse, is present. For instance, a person may be seen as depressed because he drinks too much, rather than dependent on alcohol to alleviate a depressed mood. Comorbidity (the presence of two or more disorders) can be very difficult to treat. No matter how well a person is treated for the alcoholism, he or she may fail to get well if the affective disorder is not treated as well. Back to Top Suicide: Finding Help, Responding Effectively Although alarming, suicidal ideation is not unusual in cases of depression. These thoughts represent the distorted thinking that results from this treatable medical condition.
Under Title I of the ADA, employers with 15 or more employees must provide reasonable accommodations to eligible disabled employees — unless the accommodations will cause undue hardship for the employer or pose a direct threat to the safety of those in the workplace. This portion of the law also establishes guidelines for processing reasonable accommodations requests. First, the employee or a representative must submit a request for reasonable accommodations to the employer. Although the request does not have to be in writing, it's good practice to have documentation. Second, you'll need to initiate an "interactive process. " This is the information-gathering phase, which will help you determine whether reasonable accommodations should be granted. During this process, the employer, employee and employee's health care provider exchange information about the employee's disability and how it may hinder the employee's ability to perform essential job duties. Be sure to ask the employee or his or her health care provider for documentation that will enable you to assess the nature, severity, duration and limitations of the disability.
"In most jurisdictions, an employer is not required to tolerate workplace misconduct that it would not tolerate from a nondisabled worker even if that behavior is caused by the employee's disability, " Fentin says. "However, that is not always true. " She suggests consulting experienced labor and employment counsel to be sure that adverse employment actions against an employee because of disability-related behavior is legal under state law. "If it is permissible, then the employer can hold the disabled employee to the same behavioral standards as it would other employees. " Accommodations for bipolar disorder Employees with bipolar disorder can overcome many workplace problems through accommodations. The ADA requires employers to sit down with an employee with a disability to discuss if accommodations are necessary to enable the employee to perform the essential functions of the job. What are some accommodations many employers and employees find helpful? Fentin says flex time, regular time off for treatment, leave of absence of definite duration to allow an employee to stabilize medication, transfer to another vacant position that might more easily accommodate an employee's disabling conditions, work from home, regular breaks, maximum privacy and distraction-free workplace, windows, natural lighting, and service animals have been used effectively.
Helping Yourself, Helping Others: The Value of Support Groups Now... spending an evening with a group of depressed people may not sound like a barrel of laughs at first... but you'd be surprised! Support groups provide a forum for mutual acceptance, understanding, and self discovery. Your involvement with a group gives you something proactive to do while you may be waiting for a new medication to take effect or while you're ticking off the days until your next therapy session. Buoyed by the bond of depressive or manic-depressive illness, you may find yourself rediscovering strength and humor which you'd thought you'd lost. As with any chronic illness or serious injury, we can sometimes fall into the mistaken belief that we are inherently defective people. In a support group, where you have the opportunity to reach out to others and benefit from the experience of those who have "been there, " it becomes a little easier to remember that depression or manic depression does not define who you are.