This week is Scottish Bi-Polar Awareness Week.

Ask most people what they understand by bi-polar disorder (BPD) and you’ll get a veritable rattlebag of images and words thrown back at you: split personality, happy one minute/sad the next, creative genius, hallucinations, out of control, Jekyll and Hyde. The half-truth hashtags around bi-polar are as abundant as the idiosyncrasies of the illness itself. Although there is a distinct and recognisable pattern of "ups and downs", each individual will experience and express themselves differently during episodes.

It’s a complex condition whose cause is not really known. There are genetic elements (if you have a family member who has been diagnosed with BPD, there’s an increased chance that you may also be affected), but traumatic childhood experiences can also play a significant part in its development. Approximately 3 per cent of the population are thought to suffer from BPD. The incidence of the illness among the creative community is considerably higher (think Plath, Plato, Woolf, Beethoven, Churchill, Sinatra, Van Gogh ... the list goes on and on).

Although media campaigns led by celebrities like Stephen Fry (who was diagnosed with BPD aged 37) have done much to raise awareness and inform the general public about the symptoms of bi-polar disorder and its impact on sufferers, myths and misconceptions about the condition are rife. It is not the same as schizophrenia (which can be more debilitating and isolating). Essentially, BPD is classified as a mental illness whose primary symptoms include radical fluctuations in mood, characterised by potentially extreme manic highs and depressive lows.

There are different grades of bi-polar, ranging from type 1 (full-blown manic episodes lasting for at least one week), to type 2 (where the manic and depressive episodes are less extreme and classified as hypomanic). Generally, when sufferers are in a floridly manic episode, they will be very energetic, hugely confident and optimistic, initiate lots of activities and projects and be extremely talkative. Their thoughts will race and render sleep impossible and, as far as the manic individual is concerned, totally unnecessary. Behaviour during these episodes can involve bouts of extravagance – often expressed in shopping-sprees, buying rounds of drinks for the other 50 folk down in the local pub, or overindulging in risky behaviours such as gambling, drug-use or indiscriminate sexual encounters.

The ascent to the manic episode can also be hugely creative and is often associated with genius insights and the kind of fluid, unconventional ways of thinking that engender great art and literature. But in full swing, manic phases are disruptive and detrimental to relationships with family and friends and lack of focus and concentration can make it difficult to work. The aftermath and "day-of-reckoning" nature of the come-down from the heights of mania can be excruciatingly painful and humiliating and, more often than not, heralds the descent of the heavy veil of depression that is the flip side of this dark coin.

Depression – the polar opposite of the manic state – can be devastating. Lasting considerably longer than the high phase, it is a dark, empty space where no light gets in. Vincent Van Gogh, writing to his brother, Theo, described it as “feeling that one were lying bound hand and feet at the bottom of a deep, dark well, utterly helpless”.

For those who have never sunk deep into that well, it can be perplexing and difficult to understand the utter bleak horror of clinical depression. Sufferers struggle to articulate the stifling nothingness that consumes them as the illness eats away at the meaning of everything, even the words and language that could provide a lifeline to the non-depressed world of family, friends, lovers, carers.

Those closest to sufferers can do nothing but hover with love and compassion, and try not to make things worse. At the same time, carers need to find ways of not falling into the well of despair by finding support for themselves, so they can think lucidly about their own needs and wellbeing. Without this, they, too are at risk of becoming emotionally stressed or physically unwell.

Above all, it is important to keep hoping. Depression can be managed and it’s possible to come through it and see not just the light at the end of the tunnel but the joy and grace of being alive.