An episode in honor of Mental Health Awareness Month and World Bipolar Day. Join me for a conversation with Natasha Tracy, author of Lost Marbles: Insights into My Life with Depression and Bipolar and the mind behind the celebrated blog Bipolar Burble. We begin by talking about her personal journey with mental illness, including when she started experiencing symptoms, her steps to diagnosis, the process of finding treatment, and her struggle to accept psychiatry in general along the way. She also speaks about how she worked through her feelings of suicidality, the power of hope, and the coping skills she still uses to this day. We then focus on the topic of bipolar disorder more broadly, discussing the differences between Type I and Type II and hypomania vs. mania. We briefly touch on her book before Natasha educates us about the importance of the brain/mind differentiation in mental illness. And then we wrap up by trying to answer the all important question: is mental illness a chronic illness?

Trigger Warning: mentions of suicide and self-harm