Hi Alisa, I think you have been getting triggered and frustrated in that you were looking for a certain kind of answer to help you FIX this problem and no one is giving that to you.
Mental Illness is pretty complex and a person can go along fine for a while and then almost suddenly struggle with a mental illness that frightens and confuses them. The behaviors you have described may be THOUGHT to be bipolar disorder, but he may have something more than that going on. One of the things you shared that stands out to me is that he had been in a relationship with someone and was in love and he got dumped and it devastated him. This may have triggered him to experience something he experienced earlier in his life where he faced another major abandonment and some of his symptoms could be trauma related and that could be part of why he got worse with the treatment he was getting that brought that out even more.

He may not WANT to be in a relationship at this point and he may really need the space so he can figure out what he is dealing with, how to manage it better and that can take a long time. It sounds to me like he was trying to tell you that he just doesn't want the responsibility of a relationship and just wants you to back off and just be friends. You are not abandoning him for agreeing to give him what he is asking of you. You know, you can love a person and yet come to a realization that this person is not a good fit for you to have more of a relationship with than just "friendship".

You seem to want to recapture what you had at one point with this individual and you developed your own idea of what you had that may have not really been the reality you thought. This is something that happens to a lot of people who see only one side of a person and perhaps not the side of that person who can actually BE and BEHAVE like a different person altogether. Huh, I dated my husband and developed an idea of who he was and married him and he had a whole other side of him he never showed me until AFTER I married him. I fell in love with Dr. Jeckle and never knew there was a Mr. Hyde there too and all that was involved with that reality.

There is nothing YOU can do that will fix this individual either, not even your LOVE can fix him. He has to learn about his mental health challenge and go through getting help where hopefully he can learn to better manage it. It sounds like he has been trying to tell you that too and you can't seem to listen because what you really want is that part of him that you embraced in your mind as someone you thought was a soul mate.