It’s a sunny weekday afternoon in November and Bernie Mitchell should be outside mowing the lawn.
His beloved girlfriend, Sam, is at work, but he’s stayed at home, unable to face getting out of bed this morning.
Behind closed curtains inside their home, Oprah Winfrey extolls the power of positivity to a rapturous audience until Bernie can bear it no longer and abruptly switches off the TV.
The innately ambitious and upbeat 24-year-old’s thoughts drift to Sam, whom he loves yet cannot feel anything for.
In frustration, he grabs a crystal vase full of pink lilies and hurls it against a wall.
Sinking to his knees and sobbing, he picks up a 25-centimetre kitchen knife and holds it to his wrist.
He is ready to end his life.
Fast-forward 15 years and life couldn’t be more different for Bernie, who has bipolar disorder.
Today, he’s a highly successful real estate entrepreneur, managing more than a quarter of a billion dollars’ worth of property.
He and his now wife Sam are happily living their dream with their four children in a spacious family home near the Georges River in southwest Sydney.
Not that it’s been easy: it took years of setbacks for him to learn to manage his condition.
“When I was diagnosed, I thought it was the worst thing that could have happened to me,” Bernie says.
“All of those dreams and everything that I had wanted just started slipping away. Right when my career should have been taking off, it was nosediving. I lost my way … I didn’t know if I would ever recover.”
Yet he did turn his life around – to the extent that, in retrospect, he’d choose to have bipolar rather than never have been afflicted.
“I didn’t have to wait for a mid-life crisis to learn that the only important thing is your health,” he says.
“Everything else is secondary.”
Now that he’s achieved many of his goals in his personal life and career, the ex-pizza delivery man is shifting his focus to helping others gain a better understanding of bipolar.
Already a popular keynote speaker, he’s written a new book, Bipolar: A Path To Acceptance (Quantum Publications, $24.95).
It was mid-1997 when Bernie first became ill.
Working 70-hour weeks in a pressurised job as a life insurance consultant, he was suddenly hit with overwhelming fatigue, a plummeting mood and an inability to concentrate.
As an otherwise healthy young man, he put it down to flu or a nasty bug and attempted to plough on.
Yet soon he was also suffering from paralysing anxiety and shortness of breath, as his productivity at work deteriorated.
An assortment of tests, misdiagnoses and a nightmarish period see-sawing through trials of various antidepressants, mood stabilisers and other medications ensued.
Finally, a year after his symptoms first emerged, a psychiatrist diagnosed Bernie with bipolar disorder.
Relief at having an answer was short-lived, replaced with panic attacks, mood fluctuations, social withdrawal and insatiable night time ice-cream binges.
It was during this period, with no effective medication, that Bernie took a knife and cut his wrist.
“It was not that I wanted to end my life, but more that I just wanted to stop the pain,” he says.
“It took all day to build up the courage, but I was fortunate that I had a little thought in the back of my mind that this is not right and so, eventually, I called the doctor instead of [killing myself].”
Bernie’s near suicide was at the beginning of his battle with uncontrolled bipolar, which took more than three years to fully contain.
Part of his desperation stemmed from his body’s resistance to medications and treatments, including electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).
“Going on and off new medications was just horrendous,” he says.
“On one of them, I would get all faint and black out. So I would be driving and feel it coming on so I would have to quickly pull the car up on the gutter or footpath and then just black out. Half an hour [later] I would come to, continue driving and it became normal.”
Yet with the support of his ever pragmatic “rock” Sam, he decided to accept his bipolar and maintain hope.
“Even when he was at his lowest and things were hard, there was always that glimmer of hope,” recalls Sam, who never believed he would take his own life.
“We always had [plans of] what we wanted and knew it wasn’t going to be impossible to get there – I just had to remind him every now and then.”
While some goals inevitably had to be put on hold, the teenage sweethearts fulfilled their vow to marry at 25.
In their early 30s, they started their family, which has steadily grown to comprise Hayley, seven, Cooper, five, Taylor, three, and Addison, one.
Among lessons Bernie shares about bipolar in his book are the importance of taking medication, finding the right doctor and taking personal responsibility for your health.
“If [other sufferers] follow my tips and advice, they can potentially save years off their recovery,” he says.
Maintaining the right level of medication can be a fine balance.
Bernie has a basket of moodstabilising, antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs from which he can alter his dosages according to his mood and symptoms.
Because he has a rapid-cycle form of bipolar, he can experience both highs and lows in a single day, which made it quicker to diagnose.
“Would you believe the average length of time to diagnose someone is 10 years?” he asks.
“Other people have years between episodes. In a lifetime, if it’s a year or two in between, you are not necessarily going to join the dots, let alone whether you are going to pass on that information to the doctor.”
Unlike with other illnesses, says Bernie, bipolar patients can’t simply hand over management to a doctor.
“The only way you can get better is to help yourself,” he says.
That’s not to diminish the importance of support – both he and Sam relied on a close-knit circle of friends and family when times were tough.
It was especially difficult for Bernie’s parents, who moved to Queensland for a sea-change just as their son flayed around in the early stages of his illness.
“I remember my mother would ring me and be crying on the phone because she felt so helpless and couldn’t do anything and blamed herself – I don’t know why,” says Bernie, his eyes filling with tears.
For Sam, it was important not to slip into the role of Bernie’s carer, which she felt would negatively alter the dynamic of their relationship.
“I’ve never been his nurse,” she says.
“I thought, ‘No, that isn’t going to work for us.’ [Bipolar is] just part of life, it’s like someone having something else that they can regulate and lead a normal life with.”
In retrospect, Bernie says staying engaged with other people and working were vital in giving him a sense of purpose and helping his recovery.
He credits his wife’s level-headedness and no-nonsense approach with keeping him on track.
She, in turn, says her belief in him comes from knowing she can rely on him to fix any situation.
There have been positive effects.
Bernie recognises that bipolar has made him more adaptable and spontaneous.
When he was unable to hold down a full-time job, he took on various roles, including delivering pizzas.
In 2005, when he felt others wouldn’t give him a go, he set up his now award-winning specialist firm, Focus Property Management.
He’s had to get used to being outside of his comfort zone.
And he has a heightened appreciation of the little things in life – the sound of his kids playing, his morning phone call to check in with the family when he’s at work and unplanned weekend adventures.
Until he decided to write his book in 2010, bipolar had receded into the background of Bernie’s life.
Indeed, so effective is he at managing the condition, he can alter his medication to compensate for warning mood swings that would be virtually undetectable to others.
While going public inevitably brought bipolar back to the forefront of his life, Bernie says it’s a price worth paying to reduce stigma and improve awareness.
“I remember when I was about to send out the email invite to my business clients for my book launch, I paused and thought, ‘No, I don’t know if I’ll do it’.
Then I took a deep breath and went, ‘Stuff it! Send.’
Then the emails started to come back saying, ‘That’s great’, ‘Congratulations’ and others passing on their own experiences. They started talk about it. That’s what I wanted to come out of my book.”
Indeed, with mental illness a taboo in the past, Bernie didn’t learn until adulthood that his paternal uncle was suspected to have had schizophrenia and committed suicide as a teenager.
Although the odds are against it, Bernie is aware his children could inherit his bipolar.
“I don’t worry about it, probably because if anyone is going to be able to help them, it’s me.”
And it has little impact on their lives.
“They just see me as Dad,” he says.
“I’m not this volatile person throwing things around the house.”
And if he ever does feel warning signs, such as a sudden change in sleep, social withdrawal or abnormal hyper-efficiency, Bernie moves swiftly to put it in check before it develops into a full-blown episode.
After all, he says, “I’ve got my kids, Sam, my business, everything riding on it.”
BIPOLAR: THE FACTS
*458,200 Australians suffer from bipolar disorder.
0*Sufferers experience extreme mood swings that interfere with everyday life.
*Symptoms range from debilitating depression or “lows” to elevated, energetic mania or “highs”.
*Genetic factors account for about 80 per cent of the cause. If one parent has it, a child has a 10 per cent chance of developing it.
Onset is usually in late teens or early 20s and may be triggered by stress, drug use or pregnancy.
There’s no known cure, but it can be managed long-term with treatment, which is considered essential as there’s a 10-20 per cent risk of suicide.
Medications include mood stabilisers, antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs.
Psychological therapies, avoiding stress and a healthy lifestyle, including diet, fitness and sleep, may also help.
Celebrities with bipolar include Catherine Zeta-Jones, Stephen Fry and Andrew Johns.
For more information on bipolar disorder, visit blackdoginstitute.org.au.
For urgent help, phone Lifeline on 13 11 14.
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