New Passages Outpatient Services provides individual and group therapy, family counseling, medication management and family psycho-education services.  Eight clinicians run twelve therapy groups that meet weekly and focus on issues of self-esteem, boundaries, communication, trust etc.  Frank attends one of these meetings each week and has become very close to the other members of his group.  They offer advice and encouragement to each other, as well as provide peer support that can only come from someone in a similar situation.  These meetings have improved Frank’s social skills and also given him the chance to share his experiences with others.  The advice and insight he has offered to his fellow group members has helped change their lives, and vice versa.   

Before beginning group therapy, Frank received individual therapy once a week.  It was in these meetings that Frank’s illness was diagnosed for the first time as Bipolar Disorder.  At age forty-three he finally had a name to put to the feelings of mania, depression and anxiety he had been feeling all his life.

After being diagnosed Frank and his clinician at New Passages began working on identifying triggers to his episodes and building healthy personal relationships. Frank’s clinician made himself available in between meetings, and the two often talked over the phone.  He became someone Frank could count on and trust.  In Frank’s own words, he “came from the heart.”  The relationship between therapist and patient allowed Frank to form a healthy attachment to someone he could rely on and trust, a relationship he had lacked in the past.  He was then able to take that trust and respect to other relationships in his life.  He has improved his relationship with family members and has a better understanding of what he deserves from a significant other.  Frank is also working on understanding his illness.  He can better recognize his feelings of anxiety and depression and how to work through them.  He and his clinician also identified triggers to these feelings that Frank can avoid. 

Frank was inspired by the help he received from his first clinician and wants to do the same for others.  He is currently planning to attend Macomb Community College in Fall 2010 to become a clinician himself.  He also wants to learn more about his own disease.  Recovery is an ongoing process for Frank who continues to meet with his therapy group at New Passages once a week and deals with each day of his illness as it comes.