My husband and i met in college - we were totally in love. We finally got engaged after 4 1/2 yrs of dating, and married 2 yrs after that. We've been together for 8 1/2 years now and he was recently diagnosed. Looking back I can see the signs now. He comes from a broken family - all who have mental illnesses. But he's always been successful and for the most part loving, so i thought it skipped him. I got him a therapist 2 1/2 yrs ago thinking he could solve some of his past childhood issues - but it didn't seem to help much.
Things started going down hill once he started grad school and 2 different certification tests (which had 4 parts each). He studied TOO much, after work, on weekends...We moved into a home, started renovating it, and all the while he just didn't do well with stress. We thought it was just a stress/anxiety issue, but it got worse and worse. If I ever got stressed out or upset he could never comfort me becuase HE was the one always stressed and NOBODY understood HIS pressures. He grabbed me a few times when he got really upset - nothing too bad but it did frighten me. His studying got more excessive, and i think it was a coping mechanism now. I felt alone all the time.
Then this past Feb 2008, it went downhill. He was always tired (couldn't sleep) and had pounding chest pains. He started to complain non-stop, picking apart his job, me, our marriage and life in general. He also had memory loss and couldn't keep instructions straight and couldn't concentrate at work. He was seeing every Dr imaginable to find out what was wrong - he went to the cardiologist, nuerologist, you name it! This was around the 1st time he took off work, and found out (or thought) he had depression. He stayed in bed for a week and started to verbally abuse me. Nothing i did was right. If i pointed at him or tilted my head the wrong way i was evil. If i picked him up a gift i was a liar. It was insane and after a month of this I started getting out of the house to get away from it all. Then he would blame me all the time for leaving him and not being there for him. Yet he wouldn't let me go to his Dr's appts with him (he later said he didn't want me to tell the Dr's how he was really behaving - he always wanted to look successful to everyone).
I finally found a marriage counsiler because i began thinking maybe he was just unhappy with me! We went once and he seemed upbeat about it, but then it got bad again. I went to my parents for a week and wrote him a letter, basically outlining how he's been acting, what i've done to try to help, and that i was leaving him for a while. He called me and begged not to leave him - told me he loved me and was nothing without me. So i came back and saw a different Dr with him - who diagnosed him with bipolar.
