2.01 Loren Eley, living with Bipolar 1, managing higher episodes with very few lows.

Loren Eley is a mental health advocate and change agent, who uses her lived experience of Bipolar Affective Disorder Type 1 for good, to raise awareness, educate and inspire. Loren was a founding member of Belonging at Bauer, Bauer Media’s Diversity and Inclusion forum, and works on Team Enable, the disability and mental health pillar, as well as Thrive, creating wellbeing content for staff. She represents the company in industry panels and webinars on the topics of disability and mental health, including for the Radio Academy and the All Party Parliamentary Groups for Media and Disability. Loren delivers talks on Bipolar Disorder, mental health awareness and self-care strategies for organisations. Loren has worked with Bipolar UK as an employment ambassador, assisting in workplace training, as well as having blogs and feature articles published in her role as media ambassador. On the side, Loren is a Talk for Health graduate and leads a peer support group, and she records community radio shows about self-care techniques, as well as a bespoke show for World Bipolar Day, interviewing people with lived experience and carers. Loren was diagnosed in 2012 at the age of 29 years old with Bipolar 1 after going through a phase of acute mania. With a build up lasting weeks and perhaps months that wasn't recognised at the time, working in a new job, going from working on 1 brand to over a 100 that resulted in being run down with the flu and returned to work too soon, burning the candle at both ends of the day, not sleeping properly, which culminated in writing in an entire full A4 page work book of plans for an epiphany she had had for work plans. Rapid speech , allocating herself to all tasks and transcribing a meeting at work. On return from work this escalated in to taking her clothes off to being nude at her home whilst living with her partner and also a housemate who could have walked in all night, staying up all night and believing a film crew were coming to collect her for filming with Dizzee rascall. Loren talks about the differences between hypomania and manic behaviour. A&E became her gateway to getting the help she needed, although she believed that they were going to Heathrow to meet her mum for a visit and not going to attend the hospital... We also talk about the memory gaps that can happen when we a manic and/or medicated to bring us down from a high and how this can feel when looking back, hearing from others and/or reading notes that have been taken during these periods of being unwell. Loren lives her life mostly stable, managing occasional hypomanic/manic episodes with fewer depressive episodes Please find support and resources on our website www.bipolaruk.org Insta: @bipolar_uk Twitter: bipolaruk Facebook: bipolaruk Find Loren at: Linked In Instagram Hosted by Emma Belle Insta: @emmakbelle Facebook: bellekemma www.emmakbelle.com