SPOKANE, Wash. — A local woman has turned her 40-year journey with bipolar disorder into a roadmap for teens facing mental health diagnoses.
Emalee Gillis, blog editor for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), first experienced bipolar disorder symptoms at age 26.
Since then, she’s been happily married for 35 years, raised two children, and built a career in community development.
“I’ve had this condition for 40 years and seven times I’ve had, about once every five years I have about five days that I’m incapacitated,” Gillis said. “There are worse illnesses than that.”
Now a published author and freelance writer, Gillis speaks with teens and young adults, often shortly after they receive mental health diagnoses.
In her writing, Gillis shares four effective strategies for managing her symptoms:
Recognizing and interrupting unhelpful thoughts before they escalate.Using meditation practices and, for some people, appropriate medications.Leveraging the brain’s elasticity through exercise and gratitude practices.Leaning on family members for crucial emotional support.
Gillis’s experience shows that mental health conditions don’t have to limit one’s potential. Her work with young people provides them with a living example that conditions like bipolar disorder can be successfully managed over decades.
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