Help dealing with bipolar acquaintance, please

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I am distressed by my relationship with a bipolar acquaintance. Being around him is stressing me out, and now I am starting to carry the stress around with me. One of his greatest problems, as I see it, is his reluctance to have an honest relationship with his parents, he seems to prefer to manipulate them, is doing things they would be upset about if they were aware, and manipulates me from informing his parents by unpleasant threats: suicide, or taking enough drugs to induce a psychotic state and get sectioned. He had been making what seemed like excellent progress, having held a job for more than a year, and recently was deemed well enough to care for his son, who is normally with his parents.

The situation is making me feel sick. Does anybody have some advice?

Well I personally do not think his relationship with his parents should be your concern, unless there is a reason for it to effect you but I don't know the whole story with that so I would need more information to really give any advice.

Also Bi-polar depression is a mental illness with some pretty unpleasent symptoms so people with it are going to have some problems. People with this disorder do sometimes talk about hurting themselves because they are probably feeling really bad and might even be considering hurting themself.........though there are also people with and without this disorder that might make threats like that to get pity but that is actually pretty rare so I would probably assume he's having a difficult time and maybe needs help or support.

Another thing about Bi-Polar people is they have ups and downs.......during their ups they tend to function better unless its to the extent of mania, and during their lows their functioning can decrease. So that might explain why it might seem like he was making a lot of progress and is not continuing to do so right now.

Thank you Sweetleaf. He is going through a stressful time at the moment, but was a lot better when I saw him yesterday. I work with his father, who is greatly concerned for his son and grandson, which makes my friend uncomfortable.

Yeah sometimes parents can cause discomfort, thats the issue I have with my mom.....its not that she's being mean or anything she just makes me uncomfortable.

I think bipolar individuals can have synergistic friendships with Aspies.

Once an Aspie knows somebody is bipolar, they're fairly easy to decipher. They don't have subtle moods that change from minute to minute -- they're either hating life totally, or saving the world & loving every minute of it. When somebody who's bipolar is happy, it's next to impossible to make them sad -- no matter how badly the Aspie screws up, and no matter what he says. The unpleasant flip side, of course, is that when the bipolar individual is depressed, nothing the Aspie says is going to make matters much better.

Where problems can explode is when you factor Aspie obsessions into the mix. God help the bipolar individual whose aspie friend develops an obsession with painless euthanasia methods, then has a brain fart and decides to share his research with the depressed bipolar friend. On the other hand, pity the poor Aspie who's convinced to do something of epic stupidity by a manic bipolar friend.

IMHO, bipolar friends of Aspies are only hazardous to Aspies when they're manic AND the Aspie doesn't know it. Why? Because manic bipolar fantasies are fundamentally lies. The problem is, the bipolar individual genuinely *believes* his own BS. In the back of his mind, he might intellectually know it's fiction, but emotionally, he truly believes with all his heart that everything will somehow work out in the end anyway. That's why it's so easy for someone who's manic and unrecognized as such to suck others (both NT and Aspie) into their fantasy worlds. When somebody who's not bipolar & manic is lying, NT'ers can tend to pick up on it eventually (though we generally can't). When Aspies encounter a manic bioplar individual and don't recognize them as such, we end up convinced we've met somebody who can save the world (and maybe bring order out of the messy chaos of our own lives), and we swallow their fantasy hook, line, and sinker.

The good news is that once an Aspie has gotten burned by somebody's bipolar mania, we (unlike many NT'ers) can learn to spot the pattern, and recognize it in the future. An aspie who becomes friends with a bipolar individual AND KNOWS the individual is bipolar, is unlikely to get caught up in a hopeless manic fantasy.

Once we've been mentally "vaccinated", we go to the opposite extreme. We look at someone who's manic, see others getting swept up for the ride, sigh, think "Oh crap. He's manic again", and go into damage-control mode to try and keep our friend from screwing up both himself and others.

For bipolar individuals, an Aspie friend can be a valuable anchor to reality. By the same token, a manic bipolar individual can help break down a little tiny bit of an Aspie's shell, and broaden our social horizons a little bit (you know what I mean... that tiny zone of fun that you wouldn't have experienced without someone dragging you into it kicking and screaming because it forced you out of your comfortable safe zone and routine, but not *so* far that it became upsetting or disruptive).

At the flip side, Aspies can be valuable friends to depressed bipolar individuals. NT'ers get upset anew every time somebody who's bipolar swings to depression. Aspies see it, yawn, and think, "crap, he's depressed again. His depressive phases usually last N days," and go back to whatever we were doing. While NT friends are freaking out, we're the rock of (relative) sanity and stability. They'll tell us they're depressed, they'll tell us why, and we'll proceed to hand them an itemized list debunking the reasons. We'll yawn, and remind them that they're bipolar, they know it, and show them the logs we have of their past episodes to remind them that, yeah, their life is going to suck for the next 27 days, but then they'll be happy again... right in time for the weekend trip to Montreal that's going to be lots of fun.

As an Aspie, I wouldn't necessarily want to be the only thing standing between life and suicide for a depressed bipolar friend (if only because he might decide to send a single text message and interpret my lack of an immediate reply as affirmation that his life is worthless, instead of proof that most Android phones have terrible battery life), but I do think we do a good job of being their anchor-rocks and islands of objective sensibility, and they can be useful for occasionally dragging us into a good time and reminding us that our lives are nowhere near as bad as we might think they are when we get depressed about something for a few hours.

Last edited by dr01dguy on 03 Dec 2011, 3:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.

That is helpful, dr01dguy, thanks.