bipolar disorder?

I don't know a lot about the clinical details of bi-polar.
I have witnessed it first hand as my sister was married to a man who had it or rather he still does.
He is a triplet( guys) all of them suffer with bi-polar as did thier father.
This illness has just about destroyed the whole family.

When it's bad it's oh so bad.

There is another illness called cyclothimia which I think is considered a milder form of bi-polar.
I think it would be more difficult to diagnose as the highs and lows may not be as dramatic.
As with bi-polar a person may go a long time without an episode,even years.
I have also witnessed this illness firsthand.

Mood swings from what I've seen are typical.
It appears that people with cyclothinia might be sailing along when a particular heavy stress such as a relationship break up causes an episode to begin.
The mania state naturally is individual,some people take a lot of drugs,act impulsively etc.
They might talk about how brilliant,clever,beautifull they are.
They might appear to be overly cocky and egocentric.
Might have a new plan or ingenoius idea every other hour.
Paranioa could be part of their thinking.They might believe that others are jealous of them or want to stand in their way or plot against them.
Some people might feel intense anger or rage mixed with depression.Thoughts of suicide or harming themselves.
They go from feeling like amazing wonder beings to absolute losers.
From feeling they are very special,inique,multi talented,charismatic individulas to having almost no self worth.
There seems to be a build up over days or weeks.Insomnia,racing thoughts and fast talking would be common.

I'm only describing what I have observed.

Call it what you will,there is a mental illness that causes some people to experience moods of extreme highs and lows.
It's a very very painful condition for the person who has it.

My favourite psychiatrist killed himself several years ago,he had bi-polar.

As for it being over diagnosed or under diagnosed.......what isn't?
A good diagnosticion is worth their weight in gold IMO.

cheers Shell

Yes, it is true that people do have problems with their own mind, with life and with other people. That is the nature of life and living. Some have it easier than others and some have it real bad. At times it may seem that shocking or drugging a person into an altered state, or oblivion, is better than the suicidal or destructive behavior they were experiencing previously. But make no mistake about it, psychiatric techniques are oppressive, very harmful and often irreversible. These approaches 1) fail to address the actual source of the problems they pretend to "cure" or "handle", and 2) the techniques confuse the mind further making any legitimate future attempts at correcting the problem(s) that much more difficult.

"With drugs and shock treatments, the psychiatrist instead attacks the subjective experience of the person and blunts or destroys the very capacity to be sensitive and aware"
-Peter Breggin, M.D., psychiatrist

Sensitivity and awareness are necessary for any person to address and deal with their own thoughts, ideas, fears, goals, intentions and imagination. Reducing or destroying these results in one's inability to take responsibility for their own life. This is the result of psychiatric "treatments". Modern psychology and psychiatry ignore the mind of Man and go so far as to consider it not to exist. The word psychology has been redefined over the past 50 years to exclude the concept of the mind.

Mind/Body Relationship

The brain, mind, body, emotions and thought are interrelated. Exactly how is not currently known or understood. The psychiatrist and materialist would have us believe all causes lie in genetics, chemical imbalances, electrochemical phenomena, physiology and environmental factors. But this is very far from the truth. You drink a cup of coffee and "feel up", improve mental clarity and are set to face the day. Obviously, there is a relationship between the physical and the mental and emotional aspects of man. Hallucinogenic drugs greatly alter perception and thought. But similarly, receiving good news can reversely suddenly shake a person out of despondency and give them an entirely new view on life. The successful use of a visualization technique can change a person's view on life, and even has been known to affect physical conditions. Prayer has been documented to alleviate and even cure diseases in some instances. It's a two-way street.

There is an obvious relation between the physical and the mental. Physical situations effect mental and emotional things, and visa versa, mental and emotional can things affect the physical. Meditation techniques and biofeedback have been proven to alter brain functioning. Certain Yogis can slow down their heartbeat rate and even enter physical comatose states by thought alone. Obviously, the picture is much larger than they would have us believe. The large error with psychiatry is assuming the physical (physiology, genetics, biochemistry, and environment) is the complete and sole cause of everything mental and emotional. This is a huge error. They refuse to accept the possibility that it's a two-way street. The mental realm can and does equally effect changes in the physical. Sadly, psychiatric methods act to inhibit and harm the functioning of a mind, thereby reducing its ability to do what it can and should do.

Psychiatry will cite various tests as "proof" that thought is biochemically based. Tests have been done where various sections of the brain are electrostimulated with resulting experiences of joy, sadness, and vivid memory recall. Again, there is an obvious relation. But to assume a direct, one-way only, causal relation is absurd and simply intellectual dull. That's not at all what the tests indicate. The mind and thought involve a unique realm that has its own properties and functions. It is ignored completely by psychiatry with disastrous results.

Psychiatry is one promotional and sales arm of major drug companies. Major drug companies fund all the research. It should surprise no one that their studies consistently explain everything as biochemical in origin requiring drugs as the solution. You are living in the Land of Oz if you think for a second that a major drug company would ever fund, much less publish results, encouraging any approach to solving problems with the "mind" other than their own drugs. There is no money in meditation, visualization, biofeedback or any other alternative approach to dealing with the mind. Worse, using the FDA, the drug companies wage an unrelenting war against any practices that have the slightest chance of competing with them. Don't think the current "scientific" and "psychiatric" views evolved out of total honest and sincere investigation into the cause of man's ailments. They evolved out of millions of dollars of funding by profit-motivated groups and individuals.

But Psychiatry Works! - Does It?

Some will argue "but it works!". "I was going to kill myself and after taking the drugs I stopped feeling this way".

This is true. But the above still applies completely. The true source of the problem was never addressed and the psychiatric "solution" directly acted to further submerge the true source of the problems making them that much more difficult to ever handle at a future time with a more legitimate approach involving personal responsibility for one's own mind, life and experiences. You could just as well tie the suicidal person up in a straight jacket or knock them unconscious with a baseball bat and they would not kill themselves. It would have "worked". Notice the "straight-jacket" is just another of psychiatry's methods. But it also never addresses any actual problem source. The method simply exerts force on the person thereby preventing them from acting out the suicidal thoughts. Drugs very much act in a similar way, as a mental straight jacket, altering awareness, perception, personality and sense of self. Psychiatric drugs are in effect "chemical force" exerted on the brain, emotions and mind, and not a "cure" that addresses some actual "disease" or "illness". Everything said about drugs here is even more true for ECT (electric shock), and in the case of ECT the method employs electrical force.

Actually Joe I do live in the land of "Oz" lol

Shades of grey,Joe,shades of grey.

Very few people would kid themselves that modern day psychiatry has it all figured out.
My psychiatrist keeps telling me that here is no evidence to support the serotonin theory?

What can a person do?Bi-polar is one hard to treat and hard to manage disorder.As I understand it a complete cure is not a possibility.

My father had bi-polar I wish to hell they'd given him some drugs.He might not have been the bastard that he was,terrorising his family.
We would have preferred that he was doped to the eyeballs,at least then we might have felt safe.

In no way do I feel all people with bi-polar are like this.That was just the way it was with my father.
I know how sweet and kind they can be too from personal experience.

Happy New Year Joe,I don't want to argue with you

cheers Shelly

My experience has shown me that my bi-polar depersonalisation disorder is self-induced, not doctor-induced.

Having said that my disorder is something that has also been never really doctor-understood! Twenty nine out of the thirty or so consultant psychiatrists I have seen simply did not understand it all. Their puzzlement and ignorance was deepened by the fact that I have proved, time and again to be very unresponsive to the usual mood stabilisers. (Although prozac I think does play a supplementary role in keeping me away from the exteme edges of the mood switches).

However, I am glad to say, my disorder is now finally becoming self-understood. And this has been due to a lot of intensive therapeutic work and identifying internal and external triggers, reactions and thought/feeling patterns which coalesce into severe depersonalised depressions and then bloom into over-active narrow-minded euphoria.

I think some people, largely in the Bi-Polar I category, definitely benefit from medications and that certain meds may have a critical role in the process of recovery for certain individuals. But even then, as Dakota Joe points out, there is still a lot of scope for practical emotional work to be done to manage their inner experience - past and present - and to minimise relapses.

Over and out! WR x

I'm infuriated by the fact that this debate implies that essentially mental illness, or more correctly brain disorders don't exist.

It is already known that schizophrenia and bipolar are clearly medical/neurological disorders. I also tend to be of the neurological camp re: most other mental illness.

This isn't to say that one's environemnt/life experiences/unique personality don't play a part.

However, all this does is stigmatize what we here suffer from already. And all mental disorders come in varying degrees of severity. So it is impossible for one person to generalize from his/her experience how any one else here is feeling or what choice that individual makes in seeking treatment.

****I hope this discussion does not deter anyone from seeking treatment, or cause them to hold back information from a doctor.****

Mental illness has existed as far back as history recorded it. It was treated in many different ways. Barbaric and otherwise. Medicine itself is in its infancy, and the mind is "the final frontier."

Again, if you have a loved one with a mental illness, then you will understand it exists. The strangest thing is, here WE are, with various problems -- and none of them are "weakness of character" which is the stigma perpetuated by the public at large, by the media.

We are afraid to talk about OUR DP/DR, obsessive thinking, all manner of "odd sensations and strange thoughts" as we will be found out to be "crazy." And yet we say, there is no such thing as being crazy? (I HATE that word). It was created, when? Since pharmaceuticals were invented?

OK.

It is extremely frustrating, as someone who is a mental health advocate, to work on destigmatizing mental illness, to find fellow DPers, and those with other illnesses such as OCD, panic disorder, social anxiety, depression, etc., etc., etc. not acknowledging that these illnesses are as real and as disabling as heart disease, or AIDS, or emphysema.

I ask any of you to volunteer for a short time at a mental health day care facility, at a NAMI office (National Alliance for the Mentally Ill), spend time with a mentally ill relative or friend -- many have one mentally ill relative or more. And don't be "afraid" of someone who is mentally ill. They are as human as any of us here.

I'm just flabbergasted that here we are, on a forum, seeking help for something very much out of the ordinary, that was not created by doctors!!!!!!!, denying that these illnesses exist.

I have no words.

And again. A psychiatrist cannot CREATE bipolar, OCD, depression, DP/DR. A psychiatrist can MISDIAGNOSE, yes.

This is like saying that a Family Doctor can create diabetes. A Family Doctor could fail to notice the signs and symptoms, or misinterpret lab tests, or lab tests could be bungled, but the patient would ultimately show up in an E.R.

(Again, the one dicey area of psychiatry as I see it, is the area of MPD, multiple personality disorder. The diagnosis does not exist anymore. Psychiatrists, in trying to help patients that are indeed ill with something that is not fully understood, have made situations worse. The diagnosis is DID now. Dissociative Identity Disorder. And is still one illness, like DP/DR that is not well understood.)

AIDS, some 20? years ago, used to be called Gay Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome. GRID. I always pull this out of moth balls as an example of the revolution of understanding that must happen when a constellation of symptoms are identified, and the causes need to be understood.

We have a name for the illness AIDS now. People the world over have been diagnosed with it, or with HIV ... they are infected with a tiny virus we still have no clue how to immunize people against. And some still don't use condoms, still use dirty needles. "That can't ever happen to me."

Medicine is ever evolving.

The understanding of the brain will continue to evolve and we will never understand it completely.

My final word. A very close friend of mine whom I knew for 25 years, since college committed suicide about 3 weeks ago. I knew she had problems, but she kept them to herself. It was always difficult for her to discuss "problems." She became overwhelmed. She felt she had no one to turn to. And she would have been ashamed to see a psychiatrist -- maybe someone would have thought she was stupid to go to one, or that she was "crazy"...

.... she might be alive today if she had gotten help. I know I couldn't have stopped what happened. But once you have experienced this --the death of someone who felt there was no good reason to go on living -- maybe you'll understand. Maybe you will have compassion.

Maybe you won't.
Your loss.
She was a good person. As are most people on this board. And as are many mentally ill people who have nothing to be ashamed of.

Shame on you who say otherwise, or imply, or infer or whatever the word is.

To P. and sadly to M. (the story is too horrific)
Rest in Peace
L,
Dreamer

Again, take a visit.... http://www.nami.org
The National Alliance For The Mentally Ill
and READ.