Gavin has been talking incessantly all day.  To be more accurate, he’s been talking incessantly for weeks but he’s kicked it up a knotch today. 

This is all just an upward swing of the bipolar disorder.  An upward swing is one in the manic direction.  A downward swing would be one in the depressive direction. When his moods are balanced, they sorta equalize, somewhere in the middle.

What tends to happen with Gavin is that he becomes manic when he’s unstable. 

When he’s manic, he’s very hyper and scattered.  He will talk incessantly and his thoughts are a jumbled mess. If you can even understand what he’s physically saying, his words don’t make any sense.

Typically, his manic phase will bring it’s friend psychosis along with it. This just means that Gavin’s lost touch with what’s real and what isn’t. 

When he’s psychotic, he will see and hear things that only he can see and hear. 

This isn’t his imagination either. These are full blown audio and visual hallucinations, that typically revolve around Sonic the Hedgehog and Legos. 

If Gavin’s mood swings in the other direction and he’s in a depressive phase, he’s tends to become very violent and aggressive. The depressive phase brings it’s own, less friendly version of psychosis along for the ride.  This version tends to be much darker and revolves around voices that tell him to do bad things to his family.

We haven’t seen this in a few years but it was one of the scariest times of my life.

So…..I guess in retrospect, I shouldn’t complain about his incessant talking because at least he’s not trying to kill us. 

How’s that for a silver lining?

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