It is a weird thing, to be a bisexual woman in the midst of a mental health crisis. I appear to be pulling myself out of the pit of my despair — the worst of the depression broke some time last week, and my natural mania began to return around Thursday — and I am looking forward to becoming more resilient through therapy*, but there is still a part of me that’s just… wow, a bi girl going crazy. What a stereotype.
I mean, really, look at the data from this January 2020 fact sheet put together by the American Psychiatric Association:
Things are not much better for bi men, though bi women are the definite champs of going crazy, it seems. (The fact sheet does not include data for non-binary people but I can’t imagine bi non-binary folks have it much better than their male and female peers.)
(Quick detour to just acknowledge that, yes, it is weird that the APA thinks that gays and lesbians and straights simply are their identities whereas bisexuals are “identified,” I could see the argument that plenty of people with multigender attractions call themselves straight or gay and thus to take on the mantle of bisexuality is to identify specifically as bi, but at the same time: if that’s what we’re going for here then aren’t all the multigender attracted folks calling themselves gay or lesbian or straight “-identified” as well? Okay that’s the end of this detour, I just needed to say that.)
What does it say about me that I am one of the nearly 60% of bisexual women who have reported having an anxiety disorder (hello OCD my old enemy) and, if this recent bout of depression “counts” (I’m not sure, it never feels like I have depression in the chronic, diagnosable sense so much as brief periodic stints) potentially one of the nearly 60% of bisexual women who have had a mood disorder as well? Did my bisexuality cause my mental health to collapse? Did the social isolation associated with bisexuality exacerbate a precarious situation? Is it all just, you know, minority stress?
Obviously, the top level answer is “it’s complicated, yo.” But it is nevertheless weird to see oneself and one’s distress represented as a statistic, a part of a larger pattern of unhappiness, one data point in a broad landscape that points to the existence of structural biphobia. When I learned that bi women are at the highest risk of sexual assault and IPV, it rationally made sense: though I’d never quite thought of it this way before, I could suddenly see the way that my bisexuality had made me a more desirable target for abusers, the way it was used to justify the negation of my boundaries. I could see the way that being bisexual had made me more vulnerable to abuse — as well as making it harder for me to seek assistance while going through my recovery (in part: so much of the abuse I experienced was invisible to me because of the way my bisexuality had been used to justify it, I did not know to even seek help for it because I thought it was just how things were if you were bi).
But mental health — well, here the connections feel a lot fuzzier. I mean, yes, all that violation and abuse that I experienced created some pretty horrific trauma that compromised my ability to cope, and I suppose that that is a fairly direct line between being a bi woman and being a bi woman in crisis. And while this is not the case for all bisexuals, my own bisexuality has made it harder for me to feel at ease in queer communities, while also not necessarily feeling at ease among the straights, and this I guess has probably contributed to my anxiety around connecting with other people when I need support, to my broader sense of isolation. Okay the more that I type this out the more the connections become clear because — while it is hard to see how, for instance, being bi has anything to do with the OCD I have experienced since I was a child — if I truly let it marinate, truly allow myself to accept how bisexuality has made me vulnerable, made me isolated, made me anxious and untrusting of other people, then, yeah, I can see how it might have exacerbated what I am going through, how a straight or lesbian version of me might not have fallen into the same pit.
(That said it is also worth acknowledging that, like so many things, mental illness relies on some degree of self-reporting so it’s possible that bi women are just so much more self aware that we’re seeking help and getting diagnosed at significantly higher rates than everyone else but… yeah I don’t know if that holds water. It just felt worth mentioning because when I look at the low rates for straight men I’m just… are they really less “crazy” or are they just less likely to self-report/seek help, you know?)
Anyway. I used to think of myself as just some crazy girl with a broken brain, bouncing around making bad decisions because of something fundamentally wrong with herself. But I am not unique. And while it doesn't seem fair to blame it entirely on biphobia — there are many complex factors at work, to be sure — it does feel worth reckoning with the fact that biphobia has not helped with my mental health. And it feels worth asking how I — or you, or any of us — might have fared better, cuckoo bananas wise, if we lived in a society that wasn’t so up its own ass about policing people’s sexual identities and desires.
* As I mentioned before, my therapy is super expensive and though it pains me to ask for help I would definitely appreciate financial support in the form of patr(e)onage, comic book purchases, or PayPal
I bought a comic and I'm looking forward to reading it while I'm traveling next week!
I love the way the quality of your writing persists through your troubles. Unlike your proper data, just for fun, I like to mess around with ‘studies show’ comments. There is apparently ‘studies show’ a correlation between intelligence and depression - which got me thinking, just to brighten things up, what if (and all scientific discoveries start with a hypothesis) bi-sexuality and intelligence were co-related, it fits my anecdotal evidence and bias nicely. Wouldn’t that put the cat amongst the biphobia pigeons 😂