Hi doctor,
I am a college student studying to become a psychiatrist, and I think that my estranged fiance is suffering from manic depression or a form of bipolar disorder. We have a 1-year-old son. I love my fiance with every inch of my being, but when he gets into these moods he tends to push me away. He says and does things to hurt me, for example, that he does not love me, he regrets getting me pregnant, I ruined his life, etc. But he is very overdramatic about things like this, he'll say that he is still in love with a girl that he was dating two years ago, apparently, he had gotten her pregnant before me then she went away for college and sometime after ended up having a miscarriage, months before I had given birth to our son. Now, I am not 100 percent sure that this is true, I feel that he is just saying this to hurt me because he blames me for his life being. He is only 21 years old, therefore has plenty of time to get his life back on track. This time around, it was like we couldn't resist each other. We immediately started trying to have a baby, then we moved out of his mom's. Things didn't go too well because I had become too sick to work while I was pregnant and I was not in school at the time. He was but couldn't focus and his classes and just stopped going; mind you he has a habit of doing this. There have been three jobs in the past two years that he'd just stopped going to. His reasoning is always that he feels that, he should be so much more than what he is, and I have always tried to be as understanding as I could about it but at the same time I was either pregnant or we had a son to support. So this has always been hard for me, I myself have suffered from depression both recently and in the past. Mine was at its worst during and the immediate time following my pregnancy, but I sought help. I went to therapy and was prescribed medication which did help me a lot. I now know how to manage my moods. So this just makes it even harder for me to watch this guy suffer all because he refuses to get help. He was adopted at the age of 6, when his mother adopted him he was on medication that she'd taken him off of and was seeing a psychiatrist but he'd stopped going and now believes that no one can help him. Kindly help.