Welcome to Back from the Abyss. I'm Dr. Craig Hecock.

This is a place for stories of hope and healing, recovery, and redemption.

I want to take all of you who have decided to help support the out-of-pocket costs of the podcast.

I've been calling those of you who give $8 to $10 a month, and it's been such a joy to hear your

thoughts and feedback and also to answer your

questions. If you, too, would like to support Back from the Abyss, click on the support

the show link in the show notes. Today's story is one of genetic predisposition, environmental

triggers, and finally a psychiatric flamethrower. Whitney's uncle had a particularly severe form of bipolar disorder,

and she too began to develop mood instability and depression as an adolescent.

When we think of environmental triggers for mania,

we tend to think of sleep deprivation, substances, and the postpartum period.

And through her 20s and 30s, Whitney began to have more serious bouts of hypomania

during times of sleep deprivation or in her postpartum periods.

But it took an increasingly severe weed habit to bring her right into the horrors of mania with psychosis.

One quick note about Whitney's story. At one point, she described some misadventures with

the sleep med that she calls nexium. She really meant to say Ambien or Zolpidim. And listeners,

watch out for that stuff. Before high school, my uncle, who was bipolar, had a few kind of scary episodes, and he was a very

gregarious, like hilarious person. And so before kind of understanding his illness,

I really, like, thought he was just so great, but I was really heavily traumatized

by him. So there was just so much happening at once. And I remember he and my cousins and

moving away abruptly, and it was never spoken about. And so anything that I was experiencing

emotionally, I don't know that I even had words for

...