This article has been published in partnership with India Mental Health Alliance.

Aparna Piramal Raje is a writer, columnist, bestselling author, and mother of two. She has also lived with bipolar disorder for over two decades. Here, she shares the seven 'therapies' — from her family's love to a sleep routine she calls 'religion' — that help her live a full, happy life.

It is March 2013, and I am at a yoga ashram in Bihar for a weeklong retreat. And I am coming apart.

I haven't slept more than three hours a night in several days. I'm talking to myself. There are voices in my head, and my thoughts are so scattered and disorganised that I can't hold on to any of them. I am having a psychotic breakdown.

When the retreat ends, I can't manage the journey back to Mumbai on my own. My husband has to come and get me, and escort me home.

Seeing the state I'm in, I'm taken to a psychiatrist and put on medication. And for the first time, what I have been living with gets a name: bipolar disorder, a serious mental health condition.

Thirteen years without a name

The diagnosis was new. The condition was not.

It had first surfaced in the year 2000, when I was in my mid-20s, and remained undiagnosed for more than a decade. I had been raised in Mumbai and London and studied at Harvard Business School and Oxford University. I had worked in my family's office furniture business and as a journalist. Through all of it, I had been riding highs and lows I didn't understand.

Looking back, I can see the pattern. Too many projects and deadlines pushed me into mania more than once, in both jobs. Work, for me, had become a trigger.

After the ashram, I recovered from the psychosis, only to be plunged into depression for several months. Eventually, I came out of that too.

“ I don't consider myself unwell, even though it is an illness”

“ I don't consider myself unwell, even though it is an illness”

It may sound strange, but the diagnosis came as a relief. For the first time, my family and I had a roadmap for how to treat and manage what was happening to me.

It also taught me what bipolar disorder actually is. As I understand it, it is a mood disorder brought on by psychological triggers and chemical imbalances in the brain. It causes extreme shifts in mood.

At one end is mania: energetic phases where I barely sleep, have delusions of grandeur, and sometimes tip into psychosis. At the other end is depression, when I am low on energy and in low spirits. In between, there are long stretches of stability and normalcy, though every patient's cycles are different.

Everyone has mood swings, so please don't assume you are bipolar because you have some. Bipolar disorder means extreme swings, and very specific changes in behaviour.

Most importantly,........

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