About the author: Eleanor Worsley

Eleanor Worsley has Bipolar Type Two (diagnosed aged 24, in October 2014, after years diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder). She lives in Devon, UK and loves “her” part of the world, commenting often that she is “very lucky to live in such a beautiful place”.

Eleanor has always loved learning and is a qualified History Teacher (secondary school, 11-18 year olds) with a Post Graduate Diploma in Education (Secondary History) and a Post Graduate Certificate in Character Education. While Eleanor adores teaching and enjoyed working with teenagers, the work-life balance challenges of being a full-time secondary teacher became too much to bear. Unfortunately she had to leave formal teaching due to her BPII, as the stress of the large workload caused her to become severely unwell too many times. Eleanor’s first major mixed episode in spring 2016 was the end of her career as a history teacher.

Eleanor Worsley spent the first year or so after leaving school-teaching focused solely on getting well in terms of managing her BPII; getting stable. She attended Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), had regular contact with Mental Health Services especially the Community Psychiatric Nurse who made home visits whilst Eleanor was still “high risk”. Eleanor tried a raft of different medications and complementary therapies over the following months and years; like many people with bipolar disorders, the first options/attempts in each case were rarely suitable for her, but eventually she found a medication regimen which helped significantly and built up her “toolbox” of coping mechanisms, management techniques, and self-care strategies. Much of the research Eleanor did in this time, would later feed into the reference material for her book, Life With Bipolar Type Two: a guide to stability.

Why Eleanor wrote Life With Bipolar Type Two

In 2016, when Eleanor was undergoing Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, her psychotherapist (knowing she was an avid journal keeper) suggested that one way she could better understand her bipolar disorder, how it affects her life, the fluctuations of her episodes, and how to manage symptoms etc., might be to write about it. So, she did.

When Eleanor started writing she focused on her own BPII. She wrote about her different symptoms, her medication journey, her various life experiences (especially focusing on those which were almost certainly impacted/influenced by bipolar). She wrote about her depressions, self-harming behavious, and suicide attempts. She wrote about her hypomanic episodes and the risks she took with her health and well-being during those episodes, as well as the funny anecdotes she has from those times. She wrote how her bipolar affected her feelings, and how she felt about her bipolar. As she was writing she was researching, talking to others with bipolar disorders (Type I, Type II, Cyclothymia, and those who weren’t sure which type they had), reading everything about bipolar she could afford to get her hands on; filling in gaps in her knowledge, learning about others people’s journeys and experiences. Soon she realised that while there were lots of medical books about bipolar disorder and lots of anecdotal stories or autobiographies from people with bipolar, she could find little that crossed over between them, and nothing like that for BPII in particular. She also realised that none of the medical, educational, or even self-help books really talked about some of the more problematic symptoms of bipolar: like self-harm, suicide, overspending, and hypersexuality. These symptoms are always mentioned, but rarely get discussed in any helpful detail or properly addressed in sections about symptom management. So, Eleanor decided that what she had been writing was going to change, she was going to write a book which was based in her experience of having Bipolar Type Two and heavily informed by medical research, written in a way that was accessible to as many people as possible and would hopefully be helpful to people with BPII, their loved ones, and to mental health clinicians and professionals. And thus, Life With Bipolar Type Two: a guide to stability was born.