First – Happy New Year to you all. May your joys be many and your sorrows few this year.

In my last series, the Six Good Doctors, I talked about community. Community can be friendships, friendship groups and official organisations. Moodscope is a community. There are others out there, however, official groups, and these support hubs can play a part in improving and maintaining our mental health.

I received a call last week from an old friend. He told me that the Huntingdon Bipolar Support Group is about to reopen. This group is part of the official Bipolar UK network and is funded by them. It had closed four years ago because the funding had stopped when that organisation was restructured, but now we have funding again.

We meet every third Wednesday, in rooms in our local GP surgery complex, to support each other and to learn new techniques and skills in managing our bipolar condition. We often have visiting speakers covering such topics as diet, medication and meditation.

How many of us, who live with bipolar or depression, know others in the same boat, others who can understand completely? Probably not many of us. Until I joined this group, I knew nobody else with bipolar, although, when I spoke to people about it, they would say, “Oh, I had an uncle who had it,” or, “I had a friend once who suffered terribly in the bad times.” It’s helpful to know you’re not the only one, but it’s not the same as having someone to talk to who completely gets it.

This group was great for that, and I hope will be great again. There were only about ten of us in the group last time, as Wednesday afternoons don’t work for those in 9 – 5 jobs or with children to look after or who need collecting from school, but those ten were such a gift to me, and I hope I was a gift to them. I hope there will be more now that the group has started up again. We need the local GPs and psychiatrists to refer patients to the group so we can grow our numbers and increase our levels of support.

Every case of bipolar is different; every case of depression is different. I think it would be good to have similar groups in every locality to support people with bipolar and depression. Knowing you are not alone is the first and foremost benefit from such a group. A pooling of shared experiences is also useful. If somebody shares something they have found helpful, then more people can try it. Even if it something that one knows about already from reading, hearing first hand how it has helped someone else is far more motivating.

I’ll certainly be going along to my local Bipolar UK group now it has started up again. Why not see if you have something similar in your area? You might find it really useful.

Mary

A Moodscope member