Where this goes — both halves

There is a long study of borderline personality disorder that followed people for sixteen years. The symptoms — the ones a diagnosis is made on — go away in almost everyone: between 78 and 99 percent. That is the first half, and it is rarely said out loud.

The second half is this: recovery, meaning no symptoms AND work, study, relationships, happens for forty to sixty percent. After a year of good therapy two thirds of people no longer have the diagnosis, but three years on, half of those are still neither working nor studying.

Bipolar disorder has the same shape. Two years after an episode, 97 people in 100 no longer have symptoms. But only 38 are back to ordinary life — work, money, relationships. So for two in three people whose state settled, life has not settled yet.

Both halves are true at once. Anyone who tells you only the first is soothing you. Anyone who tells you only the second is burying you. The hardest and the most honest thing is to hold both.