Prior to diagnosis, many bipolars frequently experience mild mania. Not enough to get one locked up, it's just an exuberant over-optimistic mood, which most people find pleasant to be around. One symptom of it is negative paranoia. That's where you think everyone likes you, even though, in reality, many people don't.

In a state of negative paranoia, you will tend to think that everyone is your friend.  You trust them when you really shouldn't.

This leads to pre-diagnosis bipolars often being people who don't keep secrets at all. They share everything with everybody.

Once they are diagnosed with a mental illness, suddenly they have a secret that must be kept.  They are totally unequipped with the social skills needed to keep secrets. Often they find the whole idea of keeping secrets morally objectionable, even dishonest.

So, typically, they waste years and years of their lives learning the hard way.

In bipolar support groups, lots of people say they want to tell everybody they know and be "accepted as they are".  That's the wrong idea, in my opinion.  It's not worth it, in fact, it's not achievable. If you have a serious bipolar condition, you've experienced a lot of things that are beyond the imagination, let alone the experience, of most of the human race. They aren't capable of understanding you in a short time. For them to learn enough to be able to understand you would take a huge investment of time on their part.  Almost no one has the time, let alone the stomach, to sit through it all. In practice, if they knew about your condition, most people's understanding of you would be less accurate than if you hadn't disclosed it.

If you had a friend, but not your best friend, who had cancer and chemotherapy, you might be interested in hearing that they had it.  However, you probably wouldn't be interested in hearing about it in gory detail. There's only so much time in the day. Also, the portrayal of mental illness in movies is so grossly inaccurate, that if you just tell them that you're bipolar and nothing more, they'll get a boat load of wrong ideas. For someone to put your condition in its proper context, they're going to have to listen to a lot of information.  Only a close friend is going to be willing to make that investment of time.

In 1968, the presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey was defeated by Richard Nixon. He stayed really famous for awhile after that, and I remember 10 years later he was on a news show and the reporter interviewing him ask "How are you?" And he went into detail about how he'd just gotten over stomach flu. And I though "Whoa, that's totally inappropriate!!!"

Because Humphrey was famous and important, and probably surrounded most of the day by people who worked for him, he was used to everyone around him wanting to know every detail about his life. However, the fact was, the whole country was not the least bit interested in his aches and pains.

And most of the people you know do not want to hear about your mental illness in enough detail to gain a realistic understanding of it.

Go meet other bipolars in support groups. You can totally spill your guts and "be understood" there. It's all under conditions of confidentiality, and there are people there who are ready, willing and able to "get" you.

In college, my best friend had a mental breakdown that was precipitated by substance abuse, and went to the mental hospital for several months. I exchanged letters with him the whole time.

Years later, before I had experienced serious mental illness symptoms myself, I met a girl and we were planning a date. We had a long conversation on the phone, and I told her about my experiences with that friend.

On our first date, she told me that she was schizophrenic and had attempted suicide. She was obviously thinking that, because of my experience with my best friend, I would be able to handle the news.

It was, too much, too soon. It was not constructive to burden me with that knowledge. And ultimately, I wasn't terribly attracted to her physically. But everything would have gone a lot smoother had I not known about that.

There are a lot of reasons for a couple to be incompatible. Mental illness isn't the first issue that needs to be dealt with right off the bat. It takes time to properly get to know someone.

If you've ever attempted suicide, or seriously considered it, that must not be widely disclosed. Most people have no idea how to handle it. They will be terrified of saying or doing the wrong thing and pushing you over the edge. They'll be afraid to be straight with you, so much so that you probably won't be able to have a healthy functioning relationship of any kind with them.

Some people have been violently abused in their lives by someone who flew into an unpredictable, irrational rage. Such people hate the mentally ill. If they find out that you have a mental illness, they will do anything they can to rid their lives of you as soon as possible, and they won't be the least bit concerned about being fair about it. And you won't find out who these people are until it's too late. This is especially a problem if you're a physically large person.

If you're single, one thing that you want to happen is for your friends to set you up with people for dating opportunities. If they know you're mentally ill, you're basically ineligible for that.

At one point, I took a job working for some old friends. Both my boss and his boss knew that I was bipolar. In fact, both of them had visited me in mental hospitals many years before. I did a software project for them, and the end result had some problems with it. It wasn't clear they were going to use it. They told me that a decision had been made to adopt it. So I thought "Great, a feather in my cap."

But what had really happened was they threw it out.  Then, they had a couple of guys do another project to solve the same problem, with a different approach. I was in a meeting with those guys every week, where everybody said what they were doing. For a month or two, those guys lied to conceal the truth from me. The whole team conspired to keep me from finding out what was really going on.

I was a hired on a contract basis, and my contract eventually finished. I was waiting for the next contract to be approved, so I could start working again, and it kept not happening. They kept telling me "Oh, the senior VP isn't fond of contracts but we'll get him to sign." which this dragged on for months. What was really going on was that people were arguing "He didn't cut it. Don't hire him again." The VP had nothing to do with it.

Then the signatures went through and I had a few weeks to wait until I could start working again.  I got a chance to interview with another job that wasn't quite as interesting work, in a programming language that wasn't as good. I turned down the chance to interview, thinking that I had a good job waiting for me.

Then, once I was re-hired, I had a really unimportant, inconsequential bug in something, and my boss massively freaked out. He was saying "Zero bugs is the standard around here!" which was stark, raving mad. After that I was deemed unfit to touch the code base without extreme supervision.

Plus, people on the team were treating me with contempt, and I had no idea why.

Eventually, my boss told me about them throwing out my code a year before. He said the reason they didn't tell me at the time was "because they didn't think I could handle it."

So here I was thinking I was in a much better position than I really was, turning down other job opportunities. In reality I was one minor bug away from catastrophe.

Once I realized where I stood, I took a 30% pay cut to a much less desirable job, the first I could find, just to get out of there, be deemed fit to touch the code base, and not be treated with contempt any more.

One thing that made it really hard to get another job, was that my boss insisted that if he give anyone a reference for me, any future boss had a "right to know" that something was wrong with me. He said that he would tell them that I "had to be shielded from stress" without going into any detail. There is no such thing as a job "safe from stress". Even though my illness had never been a problem while I was working for him. Any employee you hire might not work out, you might have to fire them, and that's super-stressful. "Can't handle stress" equals "medically unfit for the workplace".

I eventually worked out a deal where his boss would give me a reference as my "manager". He felt that it wasn't appropriate to talk about my health. I'm not confident that he had a high opinion of my talent.  However, I'd much rather have someone say that I'm an unexceptional programmer than that I'm medically unfit for the workplace.

If anyone who knows about your condition gives you a work reference to a hiring manager who is a personal friend of theirs, they will mention it to them. That information might totally foul up your relationships at the new job, and your new supervisor may feel ethically compelled to tell all your future bosses that you "can't handle stress".

At New Year's Eve 1995 I went to a party. I met a girl there, and we wound up in her hotel room together. In the morning the phone rang, and it was her friend warning her that she was in bed with a "psycho".

She didn't say anything right away when she got the call. However, a couple of days later she completely freaked out. She left a long, rambling, hysterical message on my voicemail, telling me never to call her again. It turned out she'd been date-raped by a guy who suddenly flew into an unpredictable rage. After that she just couldn't handle being around people with any sort of mental issue. Especially ones larger than she was.

The person who told her was not a close friend of mine. It was not someone I had disclosed anything to, she had learned about it second hand. Which meant she didn't feel that she had much of an obligation of confidentiality to me. The girl I was in bed with was close friend of hers, so she felt a much stronger obligation to "warn" her.

Every person you tell about your illness will tell other people. Each step further the information travels, the person who learns about it will feel less obligation to keep the secret.

For awhile, I was going out to a bar once a week, with my scuba buddies and dancing. We were a group of people who would hang out. I told some of them about my condition. Eventually I lost touch with them.

Years later, I wound up out dancing with the same group of people. I asked Karen, one of the girls I'd known before, to dance. I'd danced with her a dozen times before, I was sure she'd say yes.

She immediately turned and ran out of the room. Right in front of everybody. She must've heard from someone that I was a "psycho". I can't see any other reason for her to do that.

I felt so shot down and humiliated in front of all the other girls present, there was no way that I was going to get up the confidence to ask anybody else to dance. I wanted to just leave and go home, and not see them any more.

Once, I was in a group where the main activity was that everyone would talk about politics. And there was this one guy, Kurt, who I interacted with a lot. The problem is, he didn't really read that much, didn't even think that much, and we came at politics from very different angles and I tended to mop the floor with him.

Eventually, he would bring up the fact that I was bipolar and he wasn't whenever we disagreed about anything. To ridiculous extremes. It was a lot easier for him to say that than to become better-informed. Eventually, I just quit hanging out with the whole group.

Later, I started viewing anyone who knew that I was bipolar as "contaminated" and life was a battle to try to keep the "contamination" from spreading.

I was active in the Sierra Singles, where nobody knew about my condition.  I was on a group hike, and saw a former co-worker on the hike, who possibly knew about my condition. He wasn't a close friend, I didn't trust him.  I just walked away from him as fast as I could so that he couldn't find out who knew me.  My thinking was that if he didn't know who knew me, that would prevent there being an opportunity for a conversation about me to occur between him and anyone else there.

The same thing happened when I went to a party at a singles club. I walked in the door and saw a guy at the party who I'd been close friends with.  We had drifted apart on uncertain terms ten years before. He knew I was bipolar. As soon as I saw him, I left the party before anyone I knew talked to me.  My thinking was that if he learned who there knew me, that would open up a situation where he would know they knew me and there would be a potential for a conversation about me between him and them.

A lot of your whole social life is based on friends recommending you to friends. If the recommender is close friends with the person you're being recommended to, they'll feel obligated to tell them that you're mentally ill. It just keeps spreading.

Disclosing your condition to someone is an irreversible act, and almost never in your best interest.

In 2005, after living in California for about 27 years, I decided to move to the East Coast. There were several reasons for the move.  However, one of the main attractions was to start over where nobody would know about my condition. In the 14 years since I moved, I have told two friends other than doctors, pharmacists, and girlfriends about my condition. In both cases I'd known them for over twelve years, before telling them. One of them was one of the ushers at my wedding. I've been working in the same company all this time, and nobody there knows.

Some argue that people's stigma against the mentally ill is all based on ignorance. Not entirely true.

Statistically, the mentally ill are much less violent than the public thinks they are. The image Hollywood paints of mental illness is often just horrible, and not realistic at all.

So the argument goes that if the public knew about everyone around them who was mentally ill, they'd understand how normal it is, and the stigma would go away. Well, maybe, maybe not:

We commit suicide a lot, and no one wants to be the last person to say a careless word to someone who went off and killed themselves afterward.

We get depressed and become unable to do our jobs, and let down the whole team. I've done that. The actress Vivian Leigh, the star of "Gone With the Wind" and "A Streetcar Named Desire" was bipolar. and she was going to be the star of a big movie shot in India, and she got depressed on the set and couldn't work. They had to cancel the whole movie after shipping the whole crew and equipment halfway around the world, at great cost.

Bipolar people often have a lot of trouble being sexually faithful in a relationship. It's pretty hard to find a spouse who's going to be understanding about that one.

Bipolars often go on manic sprees of binge-spending, leading to financial ruin.

Is it reasonable to expect society to just say that none of that matters? Especially the committing suicide?

Mental health organizations and Bipolar Magazine are all adamant that everyone who's mentally ill should come out of the closet immediately so that everyone would see how many mentally ill people are around them, to "fight stigma".

Screw that! I've dealt with tons of people who knew about my condition. I've paid my dues. I want a decent life. Maybe I might go public after I retire. We'll see.

I was talking recently with the CEO of the Depression and Bipolar Support Association (DBSA) at a fundraising event.  The possibility of my going public came up. He said a lot of people had said to him that they were considering coming forward, but they were worried about the "risks". I said "risks" is the wrong word. "Consequences" is more like it.

A lot of artists are public about their mental illnesses. In the art world, having a mental illness is a positive status symbol. Like, would Vincent Van Gogh have really been considered such an awesome painter if he hadn't cut his ear off? But I'm an engineer, not an artist -- no one wants a mentally ill engineer designing the bridge they're driving across.

Don't keep your meds in the medicine cabinet, or anywhere in the bathroom. Guests will see them there. Keep them in a bedroom drawer.