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Paul Butterfield Jr, known as the ‘bipolar poet’ spoke about his battle with manic depression as he prepares to take on a role with a mental health advocacy group based in County Londonderry.

Paul, a black-belt martial arts enthusiast whose poetry book ‘Little Boy’ was published this year by Chipmunka Publishing, has spent the past five years struggling with manic depression. In those five years, he has gone from a young man struggling with severe problems with anxiety and delusional thoughts to published author and soon-to-be mental health counsellor.

His story is an inspirational one of tremendous achievement despite crippling mental health issues.

He said: “The book was about five years in the making and got published this year. I am also part of an advocacy network in Coleraine and I am going to be trained up with them to work as a volunteer counsellor. I will be working with the Causeway Advocacy Network - it’s called C.A.N. because, well, because ‘we can’ is the idea. They’ve just opened up their doors to the public and I was there to meet and greet. We did some reading to finish the day off and there were around 30 to 35 people through the doors, which is really encouraging.

“I’m going to be starting a creative writing group to help people suffering with mental illness to express themselves.”

Speaking about his own struggle with mental illness, he said: “I think there is kind of a stigma to do with mental illness - people sometimes have this attitude about people with mental health issues and they say things like ‘they are just mad’.

“Hopefully with the book getting published and everything else it shows people that you can still achieve something and that will hopefully inspire others who are struggling with the same types of problems I have been dealing with.”

Paul explained his own struggle with mental health: “The first major depressive episode I had was, I was writing an article for a magazine - I was writing in my notepad - and this thought came into my head which said: ‘Why don’t you just kill yourself? Why don’t you just end it. You are worthless.’

“Now, coming from a guy who was so psychologically, spiritually, even physically strong and healthy and fit, I couldn’t understand why.

The thing that was so disturbing was the mania episode that I had. The manic episode was basically that I thought I was the Second Coming, I thought I was the reincarnated Jesus Christ. That is what I thought at that time. Basically, this took me through to the point that I was 19 and that it is the point that things got really bad.

“I had got my own place and I had a complete nervous breakdown. My mother and father took me to Gransha. I spent two days in there and it wasn’t the best two days of my life, to be perfectly honest. I had some psychiatric help. I came out of Gransha feeling completely ashamed and destroyed. It took quite a while to try and build myself back up again.

“Not knowing what was going on at the time, I met up with some friends. I was still doing a bit of training every once in a while, but I lived quite a self-destructive lifestyle. I was doing a lot of drinking, a lot of drugs, you know I just didn’t feel worthy at all. I lived this really self-destructive life for about a year-and-a-half. After about a year and a half of seeing counsellors and psychiatrists, I was told that I was bipolar.

“Now, I had done some research before that to try and figure out what was wrong with me and I realised that the bipolar diagnosis just fitted my description. When they told me, it completely shattered me. I remember telling my Mum and she just cried. I could control this illness to a certain extent with its manic highs, its depressive lows and with everything in between - like the anxiety experiences and the sleep disorders.

“I can only control it to a certain extent and I knew that I had a lot of work ahead of me. I was in complete denial and I didn’t know if I was ever going to come to terms with it - I was going to be on medication for the rest of my life, you know, and not feeling great in big groups of people.

“I did start to wise my act up by the time I was about 22. I stopped drinking, I stopped doing drugs.

“My mother and my sister got me a very beautiful dog, little Candy, and that sort of got me out of the house.

“I actually went through an anxiety experience now that completely debilitated me before I had Candy. I am on sedative medication in order to stop this experience from happening. Before I got this medication I used to hide in my room with the quilt pulled over my head until the experience passed. I could be sitting there for an hour or I could be sitting for three or four hours. Once I got the medication, I sort of got a bit of relief. It sort of helped me get on with my life, and having the dog, things were not so bad with the family and good with the friends. Things were starting to look up for me as well.

“I was very grateful and I know things are not perfect but I hope they get there.

“I started writing. It was something that I accidentally got myself into. The first part of my writing was very stiff and rigid. It was to do with the martial arts.”

He continued: “I started to look into some of the more creative stuff. I started to get involved with a local creative writing group, in Limavady - the Jane Ross writing group. I started to learn about poetry, I started to learn about short-stories, novels and loads of different things. I started to create some poetry and some short stories.

Lucky enough, the BBC published one of my short stories. The local library actually displayed some of my short stories and some of my short poetry.

“Geoff (Thompson, a martial arts expert) had said to me that I needed to find my own voice but I didn’t realise that my voice was going to be this - mainly the poetry.

“I actually sent my work off to 15 different publishers and I got turned down 15 times. That destroyed me and for quite a few months I never put pen to paper. I realised, I thought I had something and I got back on the bandwagon.

“I ended up getting a publishing deal with Chipmunka Publishing and that is where the book ‘little boy’ came from. That was five long years of pain and love through very painful experiences in my life to do with a lot of different things, turned into poetry. They had seen my example, my creativity and my love in my work and they gave me the publishing deal - and that is where the book came from.

The best thing with having the book published, it has helped me regain a lot of confidence and it has helped me to realise that I do have a gift at the writing. I’ve really enjoyed my time writing and I’m actually working on a new poetry book and I’m working on a short story. That’s where I am at in my life right now. Yes, my life is still very dark, full of fear depression, anxiety and insecurity but I’m trying to build myself up from a broken man to be a better man.”