Collection of links leading to more links about the evils of my least favourite class of drug in the world, antipsychotics aka neuroleptics aka chemical mind wipe. If you did not have a chemical imbalance before, this poison will give you one.

Collection of scientific articles at Mindfreedom

More archived stories about the truth concerning neurolpetics

Last week I discovered an online book called ‘Stripping the Gurus’ Sex, violence, abuse and enlightenment by Geoffrey D. Falk.

Mr Falk lifts the veil on corrupt spiritual teachers and organizations with an eye opening look the dark side of supposedly enlightened leaders. He takes the expected shots at the Roman Catholic church and the Scientologists but he also deconstructs some interesting names within the navel gazing and mantra slinging communities. Names like Maharishi, Dass, Rajneesh and Trungpa.

Other tantalizing chapters include:

Zen and the art of sex and violence

To a nunnery

Cockroach yoga

Deconstructing Ken Wilber

I have not read the book in it’s entirety but I am working on it. It is very interesting and it showcases some of the abuses that people may be setting themselves up for when giving themselves and their money over to a specific guru or path.

These are some prime examples of how an apparently wise and spiritually advanced teacher can misrepresent their own level of development. They preach one thing, yet do another. Vice and frailty is part of being human but some of these egomaniacs are deeply flawed individuals projecting themselves as holier than thou whilst sinning against the people they are supposedly trying to reach.

These exposures and critique pieces are good reminders of what happens when you over take on the mantel of teacher or leader. These serve as warnings as well.

Reading articles and pieces that denounce and expose the ideas or lifestyles of the spiritual teachers has had an effect on my own ideas and possible plans for teaching.

I can choose now, to some degree, how I want to present my own teachings. I don’t want to be drop kicked off a pedestal by disillusioned former students so I will wage my own campaign of making sure you have not been led to believe I have some kind of vaunted level of enlightenment or special powers. I don’t want to be a chapter in Mr Ward’s second edition printing, nor do I want to find myself being mocked at James Randi Educational Foundation for my untestable or unprovable claims to sidhis or powers.

I would not want to be considered one of the Unenlightened Pseudomasters that con and cheat genuine well meaning spiritual seekers.

Geoffrey’s comment at the bottom of the index page sums the attitude up nicely. Pay attention Micheal B.

“Being *God,* after all, means never having to say you’re sorry.”

When I first started vlogging on Youtube I made a video series called “Beating Bipolar Step 1-6″

The first video introduces the series and talks about distancing yourself from stressful or mentally ill people in order to therapy yourself without being brought down by other people. It is an older video and the it was made on the weaker of the two laptops we have so the frames and voice are not as smooth as the videos I have made of late. You can watch it here

Beating Bipolar Disorder, Step 1, Distance

I went on to describe in other videos, a number of factors one can micro manage in order to control and remit mental health symptoms.

Some of the critical components are:

Distance

Physical wellness

Lifestyle

Media and entertainment choices

Lighting and environment.

You can even use the *bipolar* aspect of your personality and mood swings to create a better mind-body space for yourself. That’s right you can use the bipolar mood swings to your advantage. I explain how this is done here in this video.

The Tao of Bipolar Disorder

I have repeated myself in several videos. I have gone on to pinpoint specifics such as taking up tai chi and yoga regularly .

I told people to quit smoking, take fish oil, supplements and eat organic food. I told people to drink enough water, get enough sleep, make a routine ritual of personal and private relaxation time. I told people to stay away from toxic and disturbed people because they will never heal you and only drag you down to their level. I told people to experiment with their diet, with sound, lighting and different movement therapies.

These days it seems that a lot of Bipolar people are hip to this stuff. I get correspondence and comments on my videos to the effect of.

“Hi Jane, I do all that stuff you say to do. I take (insert supplements x,y,z) I do yoga, drink water and I quit smoking. I stay away from toxic people, take melatonin and get enough sleep. I am still depressed! I am still manic! I still have anxiety! What I am doing wrong?”

My answer is this. No one specific positive wellness choice is going to banish your mental health problems. I know some people think otherwise. I have seen videos, website and blogs where people say.” Oh I cured myself of bipolar and it turned out I just needed to get X,Y and Z out of my life and Poof! All my troubles went away. One woman on youtube experience was that her hidden gluten allergy caused all her depression and that getting off gluten permanently cured her. No more therapy and drugs. Wonderful! I think that is great.

Do you think if you folks stopped eating all gluten your bipolar would just go away? Maybe it will. She and others like were fortunate that making a dietary change was enough to remit their symptoms.

Most of us are not as lucky. The rubik’s cube of mind-body wellness is bigger than just diet. For some of us diet and nutrition is not enough. If dietary changes do not put your depression, anxiety, mania or other health problems into remission, then your search for a cure may need to shift elsewhere. Nutrition builds a healthy body and helps ward off physical problems which have negative mental health effects. She was lucky that gluten allergy was her issue. For the rest of us, diet and nutrition is but one facet of total wellness and mental health management.

My answer to people that tell me they are doing everything right in terms of mind-body wellness and who still remain symptomatic is, are you meditating?

Meditation was the key element, the Rosetta stone, the master switch. Meditation saved my life. Meditation totally reprogrammed my mind and personality and really made me into a newer and better person than I was.

Unlike some psychiatric medications which cause long term brain damage, meditation rebuilds the brain. It will grow a bigger, denser and stress resistant brain. It heals the delicate structures and cells of the brain, rather than killing them off like Agent Orange or chemotherapy. Meditation is scientifically proven to grow a smarter healthier more elastic brain. It clears the fog and creates stillness of thought and mood.

Here is a video I made about the latest research discoveries in brain science.

Meditation, mental health and brain science

With all things being equal, if you and I have bipolar, and we both do everything right. We have perfect stress management and holistic health. The reason I am cured and you are not is because I changed my brain structure and grew a healthier, more powerful, more focused and more relaxed mind through meditation.

Then I get some people who write to me to say, “Hey Jane, I practice meditation and it does not work. I am still symptomatic.”

I have already shown you folks, that meditation is scientifically proven to rebuild the brain and make a stronger more cognitively and emotionally stable mind.

If you have not received those effects in your meditation practice. Then in all likelihood, you are either:

A: Not meditating enough

B: Not actually meditating, or meditating improperly

I explain all this here in this video

Real meditation versus False meditation

You can hate for me saying so, but I have to be honest with you. I have had a woman roundly castigate me for daring to tell her she might be meditating wrong. She had told me in no uncertain terms, “Well I tried meditation and it did not work”

Meditation is my life’s work. I was able to cure myself of mental illness using a scientifically proven means of changing brain structure permanently. I have been studying this subject all my life.

It is unreasonable expect to sit for 10 minutes a day painting visualizations in your head and expect to permanently beat bipolar. It is not going to happen. By the time all my symptoms had gone into remission I had put over 10,000 hours into meditative practice. In order to get the same effects I did you have to:

A. Learn to meditate properly.

B. Meditate for prolonged periods of time.

In the final analysis, meditation is what healed my mental illness. My depression had gone into remission over a decade ago. In fact almost 12 years ago now.

Until 8 years ago, I still hated myself deep inside and I psychically self injured from time to time. I was still effected by psycho-emotional triggers, anxiety, compulsive behavior and the hurricane in my thoughts and mind remained for some time.

Meditation does not work over night. You have to be patient as you are leveling out and flexing mental muscles and you will experience your symptoms, sometimes intensely. I kept at it and won freedom from suffering. Then my mind was still, my anxiety was gone and I discovered self love. All this I explain in this video.

Eight years of peace.

There you have it. I wish Dr Kay Jamison, who loves looking at CT,MRI and PET brain scans of depressed,bipolar and schizophrenic people, would have a chat with Dr Sarah Lazar and take a look at Dr. Lazar’s PET, fMRI and CT scans of Tibetan Monks and connect the dots. There is this science division separation going on. Dr Kay Jamison never tried meditation to deal with her mental illness. I have read tons of her work. She never tried learning meditation. So she has not tried everything to deal with her manic depression.

After growing up with child abuse and trauma. After 20 years of the most severe and unmanaged Bipolar Disorder symptoms. My brain scan should be a denuded wasteland.

I know that is my brain is not a wasteland. Year by year my brain gets healthier and stronger. I reprogrammed my mind with meditation successfully. It took time a long time to grow a meditation circuit in my brain. It did not however, take a lifetime. In fact, it took five years to get there and another five years just to be sure. Just to be safe.

Considering the fact that when I started this, I did it reluctantly. As I did not want to be here anymore. When you have nothing else to deal with but you. You come face to face with your inner world and you experience your mind and all that it is in it. You either construct a newer better personality matrix out of the primal chaos, or you lose your mind. Having faced the decision to euthanize myself at age 20. I had resolve and will. From having looked down at my own body. I know that that nothing, absolutely nothing I can experience while in this body is the real me. It can not touch your real core. It can obscure your being. Like permanently dark, foggy, rainy night. But deep inside it all. You are still there. You take none of that *stuff* with you when you cross over. If you plan on staying here. You either suffer it or you have to transcend it. Failing that, you have to become one with it.

I will tell you what folks. In all humility ( and confidence ) I would gladly submit myself to PET or fMRI scan to prove this. I would love for Dr Lazar to explain to Dr. Jamison what she is looking at in my brain images. I am guessing there is no evidence of brain damage at all. My brain scan will scan like a Tibetan Monk while I am meditating. I know it.

How many suicidal, depressed or manic Zen, Taoist, Buddhist, or Tibetan nuns or monks have you met?

One of the things I learned in the process of meditating for over ten thousand hours is this.

It does not need to take ten thousand hours, once you learn how to meditate properly and the tricks to stabilizing your mind and emotions.

Do you folks know, that before I was a vlogger on Youtube, I was a blogger. That’s right. In October of 2006 I began the baby steps of writing my manuscript by an exercise of reflection and notation. Meaning, I was writing down the story of my life as I could remember it, year by year, subject by subject.

Hidden in the private section of my blog are about 20,000 words of my first attempt to stitch together some kind of chronology of the events in my life focusing on the mental health history.

As I was recollecting my time spent in psychiatric hospitalizations I recalled the incidents surrounding my diagnoses. I was initially admitted because of a suicide attempt. After a few weeks of living in the surreal world and restrictions of the Special Treatment Unit I was stressed, scared and anxious. After being antagnosised and threatened by a psych nurse, I catastrophically lost my temper and in the process I was restrained and isolated by the staff. This was interpreted as a full blown psychotic mania. After all, how delusional and grandiose and invincible does a kid have to be to challenge, threaten and then fight against 20 adults who are in the process of challenging, threatening and assaulting the kid? A 14 year old juvenile demanding the respect of an adult? This kid must be psychotic!

Thus began my experience of involuntary medication.

When I was diagnosed I was summoned into my psychiatrists office. She explained to me that I had a chemical imbalance in my brain. Without a shred of real empathy she tried to let me down easy. It was not my fault she solemnly told me. It was not because I had a bad childhood. I didn’t do anything wrong. I was not being punished. I was mentally ill. She explained the nature of my impending lithium treatment like this.

“Your brain does not make enough lithium to naturally balance itself.”

Thanks to my bunk genes I needed lithium to rebalance my brain chemistry, which would then balance my moods. Elsewhere I have talked about what a nightmare 6 months of 1500 mg of lithium was. Punish the body to manage the mind. As a minor with no one looking out for me or asking critical questions of this psychiatrist I had no choice but to take lithium and a brain damaging neuroleptic voluntarily, or face the ignominy of being restrained and injected 3 times a day. I was raised to be staunchly anti drug by my parents. Year after year I grew up with the idea that only losers and mentally weak people took drugs. ( I was a teenager, go easy)

Can you imagine going inpatient and then told you are being prescribed a cocktail of drugs that would destroy your personality, your health and your body? You are told that because of the severity of your mental illness everyone needed to be protected from you. They violated me with their drugs against my wishes. I had spent years being assaulted and violated at home and at school, I survived it all, and placed my trust in the professionals. Then they chemically raped me.

You have a choice they told me. Take the poison voluntarily or involuntary, but refusal is not an option. I had to make that decision 3 times a day for 6 months. At 15 refusal became an option and I exercised it.

Flash forward 17 years.

I had been depression free for decade. I had been suicide attempt free for 12 years. I had been manic episode/psychosis free and self injury free for almost as long.

I began to wonder. what are my chemical imbalances like now? Were they rebalanced? As I delved deeper into memories half a lifetime ago, I thought back to the tests used to determine I had a hereditary biological illness that caused my manic depression.

I could remember the MMPI, the Rorschach, the endless therapy sessions and interviews. The blood test to screen out neurological or genetic diseases.

Ah! there it is, I thought There is a blood test for bipolar. That is what it was, that is how they knew I had a chemical imbalance.

Emboldened, I popped open a browser and began Googling bipolar blood tests. I was willing to spring the lab test fees out of pocket just to know. I just wanted to see the paperwork and the chemicals that were tested for bipolar. I could not find a single lab test I could take to would ascertain my chemical balances. I even called my GP and asked her if she could draw up an order to test for bipolar. There is no test for bipolar. In fact the only tests were these behavioral inventories which inquired after my moods and general personality traits. I was baffled. How did they know I was bipolar?

This began a search into how my diagnoses of bipolar was rendered in the first place. I looked high and low and searched Bipolar support forums to find out how anyone got their Dx.

The people on the boards, talking about being diagnosed Bipolar wrote gems like this.

“Hey gang I am new here, just looking for info and support. After talking to my Pdoc about my symptoms and mood swings she told me I was probably Bipolar. As we discussed it I realized, Bipolar described my personality more accurately than any personality inventory ever did, better than astrology even. I know I have this disease. I have been like this my entire life.”

This is not a specific comment by a specific user at a specific forum. This is construction, an amalgam of the average post of a person newly Dxd with Bipolar.

Invariably the replies and offers of support from the other forum members would be something like, “Welcome to the club! what meds are you on?”

My click search for the chemical imbalance test led me to Psychetruth channel on Youtube. There I learned the truth. There is no test for bipolar, this is no blood test for bipolar, no urine screen or oral swab. This supposed biological disease is not diagnosed by clinical testing. The diagnosis is rendered by consensus. You talk about your symptoms, the doc goes through the DSM and picks the insurance code that matched the symptoms you present the most accurately.

Philip Dawdy at Furious Seasons is an amazing blogger and reporter. I have always loved his work but I think he outdid himself in a post titled ‘Once Diagnosed Never Undiagnosed’ on December 11th about the nature of bipolar, personality and recovery.

I snagged this bit from close to the bottom of the post.

“I know I am going out on a limb here that someone will likely chop off for me, but I believe that much of what we call bipolar disorder is in fact a personality disorder or constellation of behavioral issues. That’s why I am so opposed to diagnosing kids with bipolar disorder and why I am so against the long-term use of anti-psychotics in treating bipolar disorder. In the latter case, it’s like using a nuclear bomb to clear a field of stumps.

I do think–as the questioner asked–that these personality issues are used by society and the medical industry to marginalize humans and to engage them in a treatment paradigm that can serious consequences. I’m not opposed to the short-term medical treatment of bipolar disorder (provided it’s done without the use of anti-psychotics except for brief periods) and am certainly not opposed to free individuals making their own choice about what kind of care they want, but at a certain point people have still got to come to grips with themselves and who they are and what their lives are about. There isn’t a medication or drug in the world that can do that for you. You have to do that for yourself.”

This is what I have been saying on youtube for 9 months. Ever since my first bipolar recovery video back in Feb/March.

Folks, I have not been disabled by depression, mania, suicide, psychosis, compulsions, anxiety or obessesions for ten years. Thanks mostly to alternative therapy, nutrition, stress management and meditation. I have been free of bipolar without therapy or drugs,

There is no test that I can take the Undiagnoses me Bipolar! That is one of the reasons my 2006 blog stopped, and I took my talks to Youtube.

20 years ago I was told I had a genetic chemical imbalance.

Are my chemicals still imbalanced? Inquiring minds want to know.

Oh wait, there is no test that confirms this theory one way or the other. There was not then and there is not one now! I was an overnight activist in one sense. I was lied to 20 years ago and people are being told this lie today.

It just has a strong appeal to it like those bunk alternative medicine detox kits.

Detox now! Cleanse those toxins out of your system with product flushX!

People readily believe they are toxic despite the fact these products never claim to remove any specific toxins.

What kind of toxins do they get rid of? “Toxins, you know, toxins.”

Then they buy bogus detox scams.

People easily come to the conclusion that The Chemical Imbalance is REAL. It sounds plausible. It is even probable some chemical changes are at play when someone is depressed versus euphoric.

Without a test, it remains a guess. Not a fact. These days it is more of a marketing pitch.

The newly diagnosed preach it! They know it is a chemical imbalance Why? Their doctor told them it was so. Doctors are always right. They are never wrong. Do you have an M.D? then how can you say there is no chemical imbalances. Lord help me come to accept my chemical imbalance that you gave me.

I get comments like this in my email and on my videos regularly.

One of the first people to contact me after my first series of bipolar recovery videos was a man in the U.K. in his late 30s.

” I love being Bipolar ” he told me. It described him perfectly. He would not want a cure he told me. He did not want the bad parts of Bipolar to be gone because he said, Bipolar is part of who I am, the good and the bad.

Once I read this several times. I knew I had to start talking. That man completely identified his personality as an illness.

At any rate. I have been complaining for the last year that there should be some test, some debriefing session. One Final Therapist Appointment for closure. There had to be way I could get any psychologist or psychiatrist in the profession that labeled me and treated me, to see and acknowledge the complete remission of manic depression and schizophrenia. To affirm and validate this. I felt it was important to share my methods with the profession and explain to them how I did it in the interest of science.

There are no receptive ears for this in psychiatry.

Here is some more from that WunderPost by Mr Dawdy.

“Speaking of psychiatrists, I saw mine yesterday as I do every two months or so. Despite being off-meds at his urging, I continue to see him just to be on the safe side. But I’m beginning to wonder how safe that side is. You see, I’ve had almost two years of not just being subsyndromal, but of being virtually non-syndromal and the last five months of that has been without the aid of medications of any kind and so I had to ask him if I even passed muster as someone with bipolar disorder anymore. His answer discouraged me.

“Once diagnosed, never undiagnosed. But once diagnosed, not always symptomatic.”

We talked about this and my original diagnosis in 1989–that was eight psychiatrists ago–and how I think I never was anything more serious than perhaps a bipolar 2, but I was diagnosed in the days before bipolar 2 existed. We talked about bipolar disorder as a personality disorder and how that may be far more applicable to someone like me than the big old ugly diagnosis of bipolar disorder 1, manic-depressive and mentally ill. It became clear to me after a few minutes that there was no budging my doctor on his view of once-diagnosed, always-diagnosed. So I told him something.

“What’s the point of treatment and going through years of agony and finally getting vastly better only to be told that there is no goal line I can possibly cross that will lead to me being undiagnosed?”

He didn’t have an answer for me. Our appointment was over. But my concerns are not. How is it that I can go along with the rules of the mental illness paradigm for almost 20 years and actually meet almost every conceivable endpoint of recovery and still be told I have the disorder? That doesn’t strike me as fair, logical or particularly humane. In fact, I am feeling rather screwed over by this whole process that has consumed my entire adult life. What if we, as a culture, told that to cancer patients? Would there be a movement of cancer survivors? Or would their be hoards of former cancer patients huddled in the corner, well but still diagnosed? You know the answer: we’d never stand for that.

I think it’s high time we started examining what personality issues psychiatrists might have–and if you know anything about the history of the DSM, you know they have loads of issues of their own–and began a push to stop this nonsense of labeling people for life. Oh wait, there’s already a movement like that. Is it any wonder it’s had little success given that even fairly humane docs such as mine buy into the Dx’d for life nonsense and that there’s a $250 billion industry very interested in keeping people like me sick for life even when I am more well than most normal people I can think of?”

Again, this is the message I have been trying to communicate via Youtube videos for almost a year. Bipolar recovery is possible and even permanent.

I am with Philip. I was certified insane. Now, I want to be certified sane. Is that too much to ask for? I want to be Unlabeled. Sure, I still have a creative, occasionally moody personality. Gone are the depression and thought disturbances that made living with my personality traits so challenging.

I define recovery as the complete cessation, permanently of disabling mental health symptoms. I achieved this through experiment, trial and error, patience, perseverance and discipline.

This video by Psychetruth helps shed some light on the current definition of recovery.

Recovery for Mental Illness ReDefined by Psychetruth

I want to clear the air on a few things.

The first thing is an observation. People see what they want to see. Sometimes this filter restricts them from seeing what is actually there.

On my videos, and now here on my blog I have talked about my experiences with mental health services and drugs.

One of the approaches to dealing with mental illness is the psychiatric solution, that solution is management of symptoms through drug therapy.

During my years as a teen, I entered mental health services voluntarily only once. After my suicide attempt by overdose. My paternal grandparents had graciously accepted me into their life and home after I was kicked out the house I grew up in by my stepfather. They were in their late 60s and were at wits end in dealing with my anger, belligerence, depression, bad attitude, confrontational, ill tempered and distance. My suicide attempt was understandably the last straw and my grandmother drove me to a for profit private psychiatric hospital. After my grandparents and my mother gave up their custody rights to the State life proceeded to get even worse.

I now had a social worker from CPS to place me, and when my father’s insurance ran out I was transferred to a state run residential treatment facility for juveniles. From that time forth I had very little rights and very little say over what happened to me.

Over the course of that time frame and afterward I was force medicated with drugs that took me straight to hell. Hell is feeling your mind dying a little each day and watching your lean and fit body decaying into weakness and obesity and being absolutely powerless to stop it. This was the treatment for my diagnosed mental illness. The was the punishment I received because I was suicidal. If it is not clear, let me say that this therapy, this involuntary punishment for my weaknesses did not help me at all. Coupled with the ongoing violence and histrionics of living in places like this. Coupled with my entire family turning their backs on me. I wanted to die even more. My time in mental health services exacerbated every single mental illness inside me. It make more depressed, more manic, more paranoid, more distrustful, more cynical, more desperate, more anxious, more survivalist, more hateful, more suicidal and less physically,mentally, emotionally and spiritually healthy every single day.

I fought for both my release, and my right to refuse consent to medical treatment, (i.e.meds) in court when I was 15 and I won my release from that nightmare. I was pardoned for my mental and social crimes and given a fresh chance in society.

Understandably people sometimes hear me talk about Habeous Corpus, restraints and lock downs, they view my psychiatric medication side effect videos and somehow conclude I am either anti psychiatry or anti drug.

This is my statement regarding those things

I am not anti psychiatry.

I do not have any particular fondness for them, but I am not against psychiatry.

One of my loyal viewers z8tl is always reminding me, “Forgive them, they know not what they do”.

This I have done. I am a scientist at heart. I am too terminally right brained and artistically bent to ever be a good scientist myself but I love science. I want science to figure everything out. I want that. For psychiatry, remember Alfred Nobel? He blew himself up in his lab several times learning the formula for TNT. Marie Curie died of her discoveries. I would rather not see people destroyed by the tentative footsteps taken by psychiatry during the stone age of the science. Maybe psychiatry will be noble some day.

For me it was just a nightmare, a total dead end. Psychiatry hurt me and I can never forget it. I can forgive and move on. For that reason I have and will continue to turn down invitations to join groups, organizations or talk about anti psychiatry ideas or agendas in any way. I am not an anti psychiatry activist. That is not my dharma in this life.

Nor am I anti drug. My stance on drugs is this.

What would you do, how would cope with your mental illness 80 years ago? How did any one cope with mental illness from the Dawn of Man until the 1900 AD? How did people cope? How would you cope without modern pharmaceuticals?

That was me from age 15-25.

After I went off psychiatric medications at the age of 15, my mental illness, which had never gone away, eventually took over me again. And again and again. I can not drink alcohol. I can, but I can not drink much. Not much more than a glass of wine or a beer. Slowly. Otherwise, I get extreme vertigo and I lose psycho motor precision. That makes me feel like a cat without whiskers or tail. I have no grace and I feel overwhelmingly vulnerable if I can not walk a straight line. Alcoholism was not possible for me.

I suffered my internal world every day until I discovered pot. The first time I got really really stoned on pot at the age of 18, I had multiple orgasms without touching myself while lying on the floor. For the first time in my life I was physically and neurologically relaxed from the hypervigilance I had experienced all my life. Like going from DefCon 4 to Nirvana. I just cried the whole time in joy. Marijuana not only relaxed me, but enough of it would silence the voices in my head. When that happened, I could think clearly! The manic hurricane would stop and my thoughts came slow and easy to deal with. Nature’s own benzo. Like any other drug pot has its own side effect profile which must be dealt with if one is to keep a therapeutic blood level of this medication at all times. The other issue is that due to it’s legal classification it is not covered by insurance. It can not be patented so it will never be mass marketed. It can occasionally get you in trouble. That is the price you pay for sanity and function. I was able to make living, pay check to pay check and always had my meds so I would not harm myself or others. It was my social responsibility to make sure I was sufficiently medicated before going to work or out shopping in order to manage my mental illness symptoms.

Like many people on psyche meds or illicit ( not immoral…just not patentable* ) I became dependent. It was a long hard road weaning off my meds. Through full time meditation practice and things like tai chi and yoga, my mind and body both eventually simultaneously became calm and quiet enough to move undrugged though life.

During my quest for optimal health and stress reduction, I moved from a state that had both harsh weather and harsh drug use penalites ( N.H. and M.A. ) to a place with clement weather and where one could obtain a medical prescription for marijuana ( C.A.)

This led to me being able to use my meds while sitting in the warm sun during the winter dodging both Seasonal Affect Disorder and the Immorality Police in the process. This led to overall stress reduction and life satisfaction.

As a result of self medicating with an assortment of drugs in my life. I can not and will never be anti drug. An if the anti pharma move destroys all pills in the world and I can not get codeine for my spinal pain, then I will be grateful I can still eat or smoke a natural herb that has so fortuitously been with us since the Neanderthal age. Here in California, if I chose to turn down pharmaceuticals for my pain because I don’t want to deal with those side effects, I still have a choice of alternative natural drugs available to me with far less social stigma then in other states. In fact if I go to a cannabis dispensary I pay California sales tax on any purchases and the local cops are out front making sure no one is harrassed. California voters have decided that it is simply not worth criminalizing it. I love California.

So no, I am not anti drug, and I am not anti psychiatry. I am pro self healing, self therapy, and I have no patience for those that buy the party line that Bipolar and other axis 1 mood and personality disorders have no known cause or cure. That is just not true.

Mental illness sets in because of a rubiks cube-like assortment of factors mostly relating to stress and personality traits. Unmitigated physical, emotional, mental/cognitive, and spiritual stress, alone or in any combination, causes mental illness.

In chinese medicine terms, energy blockages in your mind body and emotional chi. In our cultural and way of thinking, it’s stress.

You then have to work out each facet, each face of this mind-body puzzle-box until the stress and tension of everything about your life will ease up and release you from your symptoms. All those chemicals become balanced again, naturally. Then you have to work at keeping them there as life changes and stress will always be defacing some of the sides of your Rubiks Cube unless you live in a hole or in retreat at an isolated monastery. To function and interact in this modern world and life in this culture is to be always be facing the possibility even inevitability of mind-body-social stress.

You can’t insure yourself against life happening to you. When life happens you have to be vigilant in order not to lose yourself and your sense of who and what you are. If you have never spent any time unraveling your own heart and mind, then you are lost. You seen an alien in the mirror. You do not know who you, why you are here and what you really want. You have just been existing and pressing onward on the steam of subconscious imperatives and stress overwhelms you and mental illness derails you. You not only are trying to reach mental wellness, you have to finish growing up and discover what you really are.

* what can not be patentable must be made illegal to ensure morally upright and civic minded responsible types have no other choice.

Hello there folks! I am writing this to welcome all my viewers and subscribers to my vlog.

My name is Jane and I talk about life with Bipolar, and life without Bipolar.

I wanted to say that real recovery from Manic Depression and other mental illnesses may be possible in your lifetime. It happened to me and I did not have kind of safety net, support network or therapists involved.

Here is a little video from my channel that I made as a bridge to guide my fellow bloggers to my vlog, and give my vlog viewers some blogging text to read.