In two, through the labyrinth of the mind. At 37, Andrei began to complain that he “burns his head.” Then he found his most important ally in the fight with the disease with which he was diagnosed with

Andrei is the husband of Bianca, the father of Teodora and Alex, an activist who helps people with mental illnesses and, at the same time, a man who lives with his own psychiatric diagnosis. In 2013, he made two decisions that changed his life: to accept that the disease will always be part of his daily and not let this define it. He succeeds with the help of his wife, who never treated him other than the man he loves, writes Snoop today.

• “A system in therapy ”, is a series of depth journalism, published on snoop.ro, which radiographs the problems in the mental health system, says the stories of those for whom it should work and propose solutions.
• In the first episodes, we showed how much the untreated mental disorders cost us, how we got to keep the psychic patients under the key and how the Romanian state takes patients to auction with the tens. The most recent episode is the story of a woman who has been fighting for 20 years with bipolar affective disorder.
• Through Andrei's story, diagnosed in 2013 with bipolar disorder, we discover what a huge difference make relationships with those close in life with a mental illness.
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The text contains references to suicide.

Scrabble

Andrei and Bianca are 49 years old and, 42, are part of each other's life. There were school colleagues from class I until the 12th. “At certain subjects we were even banking colleagues and we were doing all kinds of farces together,” she says, in the living room on two levels that the family rents in a residential ensemble in the city of Voluntari.

They had a childhood in Hunedoara, a small town, where all the children of the same age spent their holidays together. After high school, their roads broke up. She went to college in Timișoara, where she studied construction in English, he – at aircraft, in Bucharest. Their friendship survived the distance. After a few years, Bianca also moved to the Capital. He had a job, but he hadn't found a home yet. So for a while he stayed in Andrei.

In 2013, Bianca opened a cafe with society games. The day went to work, to the corporation, but the evenings and the weekend worked there. For a few months, their group of friends were gathering at the cafe every night after work.

Here it started for Andrei and Bianca first an intense scrabble competition, then the relationship.

“I think I played hundreds of scrabble games. I didn't have the sheet on the sheet I was holding, although I was writing very, very small,” Andrei recalls. “The score at Scrabble was in my favor, she was trying to recover the land, she brought us closer.”

On the counter

In the same summer, as their relationship advanced, with Andrei something else was happening. He was in Hypomania and climbed to anger – the state of disposition unusually increased from bipolar disorder, the pole opposite depression.

He had begun to sleep less and less, but he had a lot of energy. His thoughts were running, he spoke over measure, he spent excessively, he lived more intensely. He was exaggerated by impulsive.

He and Bianca went to the sea, and there Bianca began to realize that there was something wrong with him. “He thought very quickly (..) found a jellyfish on the beach and put it in the water, after which he had remorse, if he changed his destiny,” she remembers.

Andrei was still complaining that he “burns his head.” At that time, Andrei did not have the diagnosis of affective bipolar disorder, although he had gone through depressive episodes and an episode of anger with psychosis. He was 37 years old.

In another impulse, during the same vacation, he resigned by fax from the workplace. On the way back from the sea, he refused to feed the car from the gas stations that had the names written in capital letters. It seemed to him that those who use uppercase are not honest “they want to steal us.”

Concerned about what she had noticed about her lover, Bianca discussed with a psychological friend. At her recommendation, after returning from the sea, she tried to take Andrei to the “Dr. Constantin Gorgos” Hospital in Titan. But, because Andrei had no document to him, he was refused the hospitalization. While she was trying to convince the guard doctor to find a solution, he left. Bianca found him and took him home to him, where he believed it safely.

That night, from 2013, Bianca woke up a phone received at 4 in the morning. “A gentleman who told me: they arrested Andrei.”

Read the continuation in snoop.ro.