The Chronic, Part One....

No, not that "Chronic." With all due respect to Dr. Dre, what I've been thinking about affects more of us than those who enjoyed his classic 1992 album. Depending on which numbers you go by, as many as 25 million of us in the U.S. live with the chronic conditions of depression or bipolar disorder. If you add up the number of people who live with any chronic condition-arthritis, diabetes, lung disease, chronic pain, heart disease, asthma, irritable bowel syndrome, cancer-the numbers get truly staggering. We all have some things in common, and I actually never thought about that before.

 

In her book, Living a Healthy Life with Chronic Conditions, Kate Lorig, RN, DrPH, outlines what 19 illnesses have in common and identifies the successful tools all of us are using to cope with them.

 

Let's look at what a "chronic condition" means. Lorig makes the case that illnesses are either "acute" or "chronic." Acute means the illness has a fast onset, an easily diagnosed cause, is treatable and people can be "cured"-that is, the person returns to health after a specific treatment. Heart disease, for example, is not acute because once we're diagnosed with it, we have to really watch our health and behave in different ways-we don't return fully to health after the onset of heart disease. A broken leg is usually acute because, once healed, we can return to normal, "pre-illness" functioning.

 

"Chronic" illnesses, on the other hand, usually have a gradual onset, may have many causes, are harder to diagnose and take lifelong treatment. You don't stop treating diabetes, for example; it's always present. However, you wouldn't need to keep treating the measles your entire life. Measles are acute. Diabetes is a chronic condition. While Lorig doesn't talk about mental illnesses in her book, many types of depression and all forms of bipolar disorder are considered chronic conditions.

 

It's interesting to me that we can learn so much from others living with all kinds of chronic conditions. For example, Lorig makes the case that most chronic conditions benefit from some combination of pain management, fatigue management, breathing techniques, relaxation, as well as managing nutrition, exercise and medications. Most of these are techniques many of us are using to move toward recovery. Whether it's heart disease, diabetes, cancer or bipolar disorder, these basic tools make sense. For years, I've been looking at the importance of wellness tools in my own recovery. These new insights put me in good company-the company of millions of others who rely on many of the same techniques I do to get through the day.

 

See if any of this sounds familiar to you: Lorig writes about self-management skills, saying "What you do about something is largely determined by how you think about it; for example, if you think that having a chronic illness is like falling into a deep pit, you may have a hard time motivating yourself to crawl out, or you may even think the task is impossible. The thoughts you have can greatly determine what happens to you and how you handle your health problems." Remember, Lorig is talking here about things like cancer and heart disease and diabetes-not depression or bipolar disorder.