This is a new section and it is currently under development.
1. Are you a medical doctor or psychiatrist?
No I am not.
2. Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia are genetic conditions right?
It is not yet proven that those illnesses are genetic. Genes only tell part of the story. Biopsychiatry researchers are searching for genes to blame but so far there is nothing conclusive.
3. Bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are just chemical imbalances right?
The chemical imbalance theory has been thoroughly debunked. The people that promulgate the chemical imbalance theory are psychiatrists and pharmaceutical corporation reps.
4. What meds were you on? What meds are you on now? What meds do you recommend?
Under penalty of restraint and injection I was coerced to take 500mg lithium carbonate 3xs daily and liquid Trilafon at 8mg twice daily for six months. I have not been on ‘meds’ since I was fifteen. I self medicated with cannabis during my late teens and early twenties. I do not recommend any meds at all nor any other drug to anyone ever.
5. Have you ever tried counseling? Do you recommend it?
I had over eight years of court ordered therapy with clinical psychologists as a minor and it had very little effect on my behavior or mental states. Part of the reason I did not get benefit was that I was not ready to talk, to be open or to heal.
When I was finally ready I did get counseling and I got it from ordinary to extraordinary people. Some of the best counseling I ever had I got from a martial arts master who I was learning meditation from. I do recommend counseling but you need to be spiritually ready to be brutally honest with yourself and others for it to be really effective.
6. Did anyone else in your family have mental illness?
Growing up I guess we all thought it was normal but it turned out that both my mother and my stepfather were real rageaholics and control freaks. They were extremely religious, anti-technology and very good at pretending to be normal in front of other people. If you met them at church on Sundays they would be all smiles and affection and they could and would tranform back into monsters when we got home.
My mother spent a lot of time brooding and depressed. She would write poems, pray on the rosary and chain smoke all day. Sometimes she would sleep all day. Dirty clothes piled up and piled up. Both my mother and stepfather were hitters. They would hit anything when they were upset. Walls, tables, appliances and us.
All of us kids had problems growing up. We became hitters too, especially me. Some had bed wetting issues into their teens. Compulsive food hoarding was an issue with one sister. One brother got the ADD label and was drugged for it for awhile.One sister eventually got Bipolar 1 diagnosis when she became suicidal as a young adult.
We all became unstable after being raised by unstable and immature parents. Some of my siblings still suffer to this day from what happened when we grew up in this nondescript little house at the bottom of a hill in the middle of small town in rural New England.
7. What kinds of placements were you in?
My first was a 70 day stay at a private psychiatric hospital in 1989. Then I spent about seven months in a State facility that was both a special needs school and a lock down for teens with Dxs (1989-1990)
Next was another private psychiatric hospital for almost a month.(1991) After that was nine months in privately run group home for emotionally and behaviorally challenged teens. (1991-1992) After that was a low security transitional program for about four months.(1992-1993)
Two years later I spent a week on a psych ward at a city hospital (1995) . I was never hospitalized and or treated for mental health issues again.
8. When you say you are ‘cured’ what do you mean? I’ve been told there is no cure for bipolar disorder or schizophrenia and that no one gets over PTSD.
When I say that I am cured this is what I mean. My last suicide attempt was almost 15 years ago. The last time I suffered an episode of major depression was over thirteen years ago.
I have not experienced clinical manic episodes in over a decade. Symptoms like racing thoughts, racing speech, flight of ideas, grandiosity began to subside, gradually, by small degrees until they became insignificant and then gone outright.
My last series of experiences of night terrors, excessive hypervigilance and flashbacks happened around 1998. Subsequently I experienced fewer anxiety/paranoia attacks related to my perception of my personal safety and extreme situational awareness. In other words, I became a lot more chill and relaxed. Eventually no memory had any power over me anymore.
It took a long time for my screwed up adrenaline response to rebalance but it did. One day I realized I could stop practicing martial arts every single day out of fear. That was a subtle, obsessive thing I did that persisted even though I was no longer having flashbacks. PTSD roots itself in your entire body being effecting your subconscious desires and motivations. It takes awhile to heal but it’s doable.
Thought Broadcasting Delusion was another issue I had and partly why I received the schizoaffective label. Thought broadcasting delusions came on me around the age of six or seven. It was most severe during and after puberty. It tapered somewhat when I took up a blue collar worker lifestyle as a young adult. It was altogether gone by my mid twenties.
That is what I mean when I say cured. I am remitted from the symptoms of depression, mania, paranoia, extreme rages and stalking behaviors and getting into fights all the time. No thought broadcasting or other delusional states. No hypervigilance and all the emotional triggers related to trauma are gone as though they were never there.
9. If you had to pick one single thing that helped you the most what would it be?
That’s hard to do in part because there was a synergistic effect that occurred by stacking a lot of factors in favor of self healing. I could lecture on the wonders of living one day at a time, getting enough sleep, eating healthy and playing with supplements or practicing yoga and tai chi.
Forced to pick the single most important thing in my recovery I will tell you. Meditation. Very early in the game I learned to practice meditation when I was walking to work, riding a bike, doing martial arts or physical labor or sitting on a pillow on the floor of my living room.
For me it became a lifestyle. It was something to do when I was waiting for the bus and when I got on the bus. I would sit for hours in the woods. I did standing chi gung meditation and practiced a lot of tai chi which is a great vehicle to practice meditation. I started off barely being able to sit still for ten minutes and within a year I could sit for six hours. In less than five years I could sit for a couple of days.
10. I am [insert:Bipolar, Borderline, SZ] and I do meditation. It helps a little but there is no way meditation can cure [insert: Bipolar, PTSD, Schizophrenia, OCD] Surely it was something else?
Unfortunately, these days anything can be called meditation. You will hear people say with conviction that there is no one real meditation or that meditation is highly personal and open to creative interpretation. People make up any definition they want and call it meditation and for the most part they have no idea what they are doing.
I was fascinated by meditation when I was very young. I knew literally dozens of meditation techniques in my late teens. I thought I was doing meditation back then and I may have been temporarily focused or relaxed but I never stayed that way for long. I always cycled back to the anger, the sadness, the fear and self loathing. The voices always came back.
One day I was forced to humble myself as I finally realized that I never really practiced properly for a prolonged period of time. In addition, until I found certain techniques in Taoist meditation I did not have a means to deal with PTSD triggers and flashbacks, fixations and obsessions, paranoia, grandiosity. Meditation would stir up subconscious stuff and could actually seem to make me worse.
The main issue people are going to have first of all is learning proper meditation. Most of the stuff floating around out there is not real meditation. If your teacher does not know how to use meditation to fix things inside themselves then chances are you are not going to obtain that ability from that teacher. You have to find a teacher that has used meditation to get over their issues.
A lot of the stuff involving guided visualizations, chanting affirmations that’s not the real deal folks. It’s fluff and puff. Meditation is not sitting in an easy chair smoking a joint while listening to Enya.
If you are not getting lasting mental stability from your meditation practice then that does mean meditation does not work for you. It may mean that you have not learned how to meditate properly or you are not practicing it enough or both.
11. Anecdotal stories are neat and all but is there any science at all that might explain how this is possible?
As a matter of fact, there is. I was curious as to that answer myself and have done some fact finding in that direction. Meditation in the U.S. has been around at least since the 60s. One of the first books about the medical benefits was published by an Ivy League professor in the 70s.
Meditation has been proven to have a mood stabilizing effect. Tension and stress are two health killers and meditation promotes relaxation and relieves stress. Meditation has been shown to be more effective than both placebos and some psych meds in research studies done in the last ten years for treating depression, anxiety, compulsions and phobias.
Meditation has real medical effects and can increase blood oxygen levels and lower blood pressure. It can aid memory, sharpen concentration and calm the speed of thoughts in your mind. It has helped people with chronic pain and sleep disorders.
Why does this happen?
Scientists are still trying to figure it all out. Some of the things that have been discovered by using brain scans is a definite growth an increase in development of the prefrontal cortex. It becomes denser and grows more interconnections with itself and other structures.
The prefrontal cortex is the area of the brain responsible for mental and emotional processing. It’s like a switchboard between the thoughts of our frontal lobes and our emotional states and gland firing. Like a translator or concert conductor of sorts.
The prefrontal cortex is smaller in children and teens than in adults. The development of the brain’s connections is in part due to aging and experiences and trainings. The prefrontal cortex has been fingered as a culprit, accused in some research, of being underdeveloped in adults with bipolar disorder.
The brain can change, can grow new circuits and connections. It can do that because the brain has an inherent neuroplasticity to it. The same plasticity is used when a stroke victim recovers lost functioning. It allows us to learn to swim and bike and play musical instruments or sports.
What meditation is doing is building a circuit of stillness. A circuit of equilibrium. It builds this circuit in the area of the brain that deals with moods and impulses. Meditation brings out deeper brain wave states that are associated with restful brain activity. This is what we know right now.
When you practice meditation you begin to grow new brain wiring. The studies done to date show that this growth happens to beginner meditators and is much more developed in long term meditators.
12. Can anyone meditate and cure themselves of mental problems?
Theoretically, ‘anyone’ can meditate and get those same benefits. That’s not likely. Some people are drawn to meditation. I personally, have met people who probably could never meditate. They really don’t see the point. The idea of sitting still and doing nothing really is appalling to them. They crave mental stimulation at all times.
The person I am thinking of in this example is very close to me and she has a massive IQ and is a math genius.. She’s just not cut out to be a meditator. She has two left brains and no right brain. I suspect there is a lot of people like that.
The people I have seen who really were into meditation and going places with it were, as a general rule, smarter than average if not very intelligent. They were drawn to meditation and tended to be very well read and philosophical types. They had a really good reason to pursue it. They tended to be people who cross trained and were experienced with all different kinds of meditation techniques. Those kinds of people are going get the most out of this.
13. Are you totally against all drugs or what?
Not at all. There’s all kinds of substances that can have physical, mental or emotional effects and I certainly enjoy them from time to time. I have no problem with caffeine, alcohol, opiates, cannabis, chocolate, sugar. I think a lot of ‘as needed’ drugs like muscle relaxants and pain killers are fine. I have no problem with that stuff. If anything I am more pro drugs than I am anti drugs. Life is about having experiences. There is nothing inherently wrong with having chemical experiences that make you feel good or less stressed or whatever.
My problem with drugs is related to those used for treating mental disorders. The insidious and misleading tactics used to sell these drugs to people who are looking for help and the cover ups or out right lies that are presented as fact when it comes to side effects and risks. Covering up incriminating data to preserve the sales of a new drug is a common and well documented practice of pharma companies.
We are also going through a time when influential and ‘expert’ psychiatrists in fields such as child bipolar are telling everyone how awesome it is to treat kids with drugs X,Y and Z for conditions A, B and C. These men and women take in thousands of dollars in consulting fees from big pharma companies. Some of these bought and paid for psychiatrists have been busted guaranteeing the outcome of a drug effectiveness study before the study even begins.
All the big name mental health orgs are bought out by one pharma company or another and thereby co-opted. (DBSA and NAMI for starters) There is a major conflict of interest in the area of drug treatments for the mentally ill. It’s all just good business to these guys.
Then you have the psych drugs themselves. At least when you eat chocolate, drink some wine, maybe try a muscle relaxant you feel better. You feel sensations of well being.
These psych meds are poisons. The drugs used to treat bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, namely lithium and antipsychotics are really disgusting. I felt as though I was always stupid, always tired, always befuddled, always fogged, always disconnected from reality and always sick when I was on them. I felt diminished and disabled. Not empowered or tranquil or content or balanced.
I felt old before my time and the absurd weight gain damaged my already fragile self esteem back then. All in all, psych meds are a waste of your time. Taking them damages both your physical body and your mind. You can’t escape the mind body connection even when you close your eyes and stick your fingers in your ears.
If you are on psych meds you are not as healthy as you could be and in my opinion, you are hurting yourself. If it were up to me it would be against the law to treat anyone under the age of 18 with any psych med ever with the possible exception of maybe Tourette’s. I consider myself a fairly open-minded and flexible person on a lot of subjects but this is not one of them.
14. Are you by any chance a Scientologist? Be honest. Aren’t you aware that anyone that says bad things about psych meds is automatically an antipsychiatry nutjob and that means you are automatically a Scientologist?
The truth is, I have a copy of Dianetics. Hardcover. I picked it up at a yard sale for a dollar in my early 20s and gave it a read. It was interesting for about 10 pages when I began to feel my bullshit meter pinging. I am big fan of science fiction and I try read the good ones but as science fiction goes, this fails pretty hard. As a religion it fails even harder.
Yes, I have seen the Southpark episode about it and loved it. If you are asking the above question or using it as a accusation you need to grow up. Understand that people can have strong feelings and opinions based on their life experiences and that it’s unfair and really pathetic to dismiss those experiences and concerns by ‘labeling’ anyone that talks smack about psychiatry a $cientologist.
To accuse someone of being a scientologist because they have ‘anti’ psychiatrity views is a logical fallacy partly based on the False Dichotomy. Generally speaking the people that levy that accusation at me are males, between the ages of 15-25 that find my stuff on Youtube. The only women who have accused me of that were one bipolar and one schizophrenic. Both women were in their forties and were taking antipsychotics (which as we know diminishes frontal lobe activity).
15. What is your opinion about Truehope or supplementation in general?
Here is a post I made answering that question. Truehope or Truehype? An analysis of EMpower.
16. Are you a quack, fraud, shyster, false guru or snake oil seller?
I don’t pretend to have any medical expertise. With that said I definitely consider myself an authority on my own mental health and recovery. I am not selling any cures for anything at the moment. I do hold two rather controversial (contrary to whatever your MD or Pdoc told you) positions about mental illness.
The first is that psych meds are bad for your health and a waste of your time. There is more than enough proof out there that the vast majority of psych meds not only never cure you of your issues but eventually cause iatrogenesis or medicine induce damage. Therefore I do not encourage people to take them. This is considered by some to be Bipolar heresy.
The other position I hold is that, regardless of genetics the majority of these emotion/behavior/mood disorders are not incurable. There is a lot of stories out there on the internet about people beating such and such mental disorder contrary to their prognosis. Mine is one of them.
Those two positions, although certainly controversial do not make me a quack or a shyster. I am far from alone in harboring such heresies. I am hardly the only one who was ever cured of supposedly incurable disorders and talked about it.
To be a fraud or a snake oil seller you have to be selling bogus medical cures. One of the telltale signs of a bogus cure is the infamous ‘cure-all’ which can fix whatever ails you. Other signs include marketing or selling quack devices and other dubious cure-alls or propagating pseudoscience.
There are a few things I will guarantee you as a reader/consumer. I will never sell crystals, magnets, miracle supplements, foods or beverages. I will never sell ‘Zappers’ or foot baths which supposedly draw metals out of your feet. I will never sell Quantum products of any kind, colon cleansing formulas or equipment, herbs or anything that vibrates your molecules, aura or DNA.
I’ve had it up to my eyeballs with illegitimate pseudoscience based technologies or theories. Yes, I was one of those people who tried a lot of that stuff in my early twenties when I was both desperate and naive. I was into crystal healing and muscle testing and all that stuff. I have had my fill of nutritional scares that try to convince you that you have lead or mercury poisoning, gut, liver and brain parasites not found in the American food and water supply as well as nonspecific deficiencies and toxins.
I have now and then referred to certain alternative treatments as cures and for good reason. Meditation as well as tai chi and yoga cured me of many things not the least of which was depression, anxiety, manic thinking, delusions, aversions and recurring sickness from my formerly strained immune system. I gained abilities and advantages that I lacked that other people take for granted from these practices such as self esteem, self confidence and self love none of which can you give someone by running a hose into their colon or giving them a pill.
Furthermore, science is right behind meditation and to a lesser extent yoga and tai chi. There have been many studies done as early as the 60s and 70s which demonstrate meditation has a complimentary effect on physical and mental health which is in keeping with the notion of a sound mind in a sound body.
I am not selling cures-alls. Nor am I selling quick fixes. Theoretically, almost anyone can learn meditation and tai chi or yoga to really get long term benefits that last you need to get invested into these kinds of practices. These things are not particulary easy to do and you have to be very patient if you want to see lasting results.
I am promoting a cure that is hard work to start and adhere to in a disciplined way that is time consuming. I offer no guarantee as to how fast these things will work since it is very much up to the individual to perform these self-cures consistently enough for them to gain the benefits. I tell people that for me, it took years of slow gradual but constant improvement.
Anyone following my advice or suggestions is in for the same thing. A long road with incremental progress. Hard work done over a long time to maybe get some results is not the modus operandi of miracle cures, easy quick fixes or cure-alls that anyone can do. If anything my methods should very much discourage people who quit easily, are daunted by the idea of self discipline or who have no patience.
17. What is your opinion on Transcendental Meditation?
18. What is the best meditation? What meditation do you recommend?
19. I’ve heard that you actually recommend isolation? That’s crazy. Everyone knows that having a support network is part of coping with bipolar and or schizophrenia.
Is that so? I have read on a lot of people’s blogs that that their family has been supportive. Two very well known mental illness memoirs, ‘Prozac Nation’ and ‘Unquiet Mind’ were dedicated to the mothers of the authors who described their mother’s support as being constant and or indispensable.
What do you do if you just don’t have any family support at all? You can always reach out and go to support groups right? There is group therapy too but none of that ever interested me.
My own mother had mental illness. It’s easy to think of someone with deep depressions as being fairly harmless (except to themselves perhaps) and somewhat vulnerable. Not with her. She was an abuser. She could rouse herself from depression, become a rageaholic and hysteric in the blink of an eye only to fall back into brooding.
My mother abandoned me when I was 13 and then finalized our separation when I was 14 by turning me over to the State. I can tell you now my memoir will not be dedicated to Mommy Dearest.
What about my Dad? He’s lived on the opposite side of the planet my entire life.
What about my grandparents? I lived with them for a little while when my mother abandoned me. My grandmother was a hardcase who had survived the Depression. Her whole attitude was that I better grab my boot straps and grow up. My grandfather’s counsel was to get on my knees and pray to Jesus. The thing of it is is, I had long since stopped getting on my knees and praying to Jesus. It never helped.
What about my siblings? Couldn’t they have supported me? Well, aside from the fact that I was separated from my siblings at the age of 14 when I did finally catch up with them as an adult they were in no better shape than me. One was a narcissist with depression. The other had OCD and was a criminal (and a complete failure at it too.) One sister was a cutter with eating disorders, depression and the works.
Sibling support was unthinkable. I didn’t even really like my siblings and there was a lot of bad blood left over from the things we did to each back when we were a family.
Why didn’t I get into a good Bipolar support group or group therapy? I did group therapy inpatient and it was not optional for me. It was go to the meeting or go to the Quiet Room for noncompliance with staff and structure.
I always felt uncomfortable forced to sit in a group of people I didn’t know and hear their problems and I sure as hell was not ready to talk about my stuff with anyone. Not with myself, not my shrinks and sure as hell not a bunch of strangers.
I never accepted the labels. My psychology was like Teflon. The psychiatric labeling crap did not stick. I was not deceiving myself that I had problems I just did not believe that I had a genetic disease so I never bought into the ‘I am bipolar or have bipolarity’ crap.
A lot of folks would call that denial but in my case I knew deep down that these so called mental health experts were really nothing of the sort. I figured that out after a couple weeks inpatient as a teenager so, I don’t get how adults buy into it.
As far as friends go. I’ve never been the kind of person who defines my personal life or success by how many phone numbers I had in my address book. It was hard to make lasting friendships when you have mental illness and you bounce around a lot. That said I did have a few friends and most of them were friends that I maintained down the years. However I always kept my problems to myself.
Pride was in no small way part of why I never talked about my issues with other people. I was not proud of myself back then. I was embarrassed at being disturbed and dysfunctional. I was ashamed. I knew I was walking around with feces on my face and I knew that people who were better functioning than I could tell that I was sitting in my own stink after awhile.
How are you going to attract mentally healthy people into your life when you have these suicidal depressive phases or these pathological rages? I was an abuser and a user. I burned people out back then into not wanting to have anything to do with me. I learned to keep my problems to myself and not advertise them.
It seems some people have this image that folks with bipolar or schizophrenia are just benign or vulnerable and more likely to hurt themselves. Maybe that’s true for a lot of folks. Maybe that’s NAMI or NIMH propaganda to reduce stigma but it does not represent what I’ve seen in my life.
Almost everyone I’ve ever known with significant mental health issues has performed criminal or immoral or uncivil activities like theft (and denial, even after you busted them), child abuse and neglect, assault and battery, stalking, pathologically lying, you name it. I don’t know where all these helpless or harmless bipolars and schizos live but I’ve never met one in person and instead have always been on-guard and prepared when dealing with people with mental illness in order to not be victimized or abused by them.
It was not just my family either. I learned to watch my back in group homes and institutions since you never knew for sure when someone would go off and start assaulting people on a rampage before getting themselves restrained.
That all applies to me too. I was a violent person for a long time. I would lose my temper and assault things, people and even animals. I was far from being one of those harmless and withdrawn schizos.
You were potentially in real danger when you were with me during my teens and early twenties. Whenever I was not locked down I was always walking around with weapons hidden on my person back then usually knives and a garrote. I had studied several different kinds of karate. I was a loaded weapon ready to go. You probably did not want me to darken your doorstep back then.
By the time I was 18 I had forgotten about those Dxs and the labels. I didn’t like people as a general rule. I’ve seen real good evidence that civilization and morality is a thin veneer on most people and it’s not hard to turn someone into a dangerous animal and see the worst behavior imaginable come out of them in the blink of an eye. I saw the beast within whenever I looked at people. When I became a legal adult I wanted to be left the hell alone.
Two and half years later I was living by myself in California. I loved my solitude and my sanctuary. I had started getting back into meditation but really serious this time. One of the very first things that happened was that my anger started to subside a bit at a time.
During the course of my spiritual recovery I made an majorly important discovery. It’s something a lot of people know intellectually but they don’t understand viscerally. We influence each other with our thoughts, emotions, body language, tone of voice, posture, attitude and so on.
Within a year of living a fairly isolated existence that involved practicing yoga, tai chi and meditation I discovered that I felt better when I was by myself and I felt worse around other people. My mind was quieter when I was by myself than when I was around people.
From a rhetoric point of view nearly everything in life can be seen as a distraction. College is an environment notorious for that. If you are working part time and going to college and you live with room mates and you are into the social, party, romance life you almost never spend time by yourself, with nothing to do and nothing that needs doing.
In fact the college life for your average 20-something is nothing but a distraction which severs you from being Here, Now. It’s no wonder that so many people get their first Dx or label while they are in college or within a few years of graduating.
You lived too fast, you absorbed too much stress, you got involved with so many different projects. Where in that lifestyle is there room for self reflection and self healing? There isn’t any!
Sleep deprivation is very common in college kids and it’s a known fact that sleep deprivation can cause psychosis. Poor diet and drug use is also a part of college life. Then you have expectaction stress trying to keep your grades up and your parents proud. All that is burdened by any relationship dramas you are going through with other college students.
I could make a case that the bustling college life is really a breeding ground of unnatural stress, excessive distractions and a studious lack of balance that leads a lot of people straight to the psychiatrist. That’s not how I spent my late teens and 20s.
Instead I went into the woods and sat by river’s edge meditating. I slowed my mind down. I learned to balance myself and listen to my stress levels and how my body was communicating with me. As I was curing my mental problems in isolation others my age were coming down with them on campus.
In isolation you can not hide from yourself. Sooner or later you when you isolate yourself eventually come face to face with yourself. You have to face the content of your mind.
As you are doing that you will finally realize how it is that you made other people uncomfortable or how they made you uncomfortable. When you factor out the (for lack of a better word) psychic and emotional energy of other people you will find that people were part of your problem. Your reactions to them, their problems and stress, their personality and head space was part of your problem.
You also find yourself a gross emotional or psychic polluter. Whether they realize it or not you are effecting other people when you have emotional or mental problems. I saw it first hand in my family. We all went crazy. We were just one big insane family.
I saw it first hand in institutions. The staff at these places could and would be petty, indifferent, abusive, controlling, unpredictable and so on. The burden of working with disturbed people is that it etches away at your sanity and some of the staff that I met back then should have been patients.
When I connected all the dots I realized I was doing humanity a big favor by being in isolation and keeping to myself. By doing so I wasn’t using or burning people. I wasn’t getting into fights anymore. Every day that passed and I was living in solitude I was healing from having been forced to be with other people for eighteen years.
Why would anyone go to a support group? To give off your vibes and make other people to feel your internal problems? Perhaps you are not happy with having just your own personal problems and you want to absorb the emotions and vibes coming from other people with mental illness. How is that healing at all?
How many of you know someone who is constantly on the phone? It’s even easier to do then ever before now. How many people do you know who come home from work and the first thing they do is call friends and family or flip on the TV or all of the above? How many people can not simply sit still and do nothing but be alone and listen to the silence for longer than a minute?
The reason they can’t do that is two-fold. They are hooked on stimulation. They have to be visually, or audibly or intellectually stimulated at all times.
Alternately they can not sit still by alone by themselves doing nothing because if they do that for very long they become aware of the turmoil inside themselves. They are not comfortable with themselves.
I’ve had people tell me they have anxiety attacks if they are by themselves for awhile. Why? Why should you have anxiety simply because there are no other human beings around? To me that is a flaw. If you are completely comfortable with yourself and your internal world and you are at peace there is no reason you shouldn’t be able to be by yourself for long periods.
Wasn’t there ever a time when you had no problems being alone? What about when you were growing up? Remembering being able to play out in the yard or build things in the snow or climb trees and you had no problem being by yourself for hours.
At some point you lost the ability to be by yourself. The silence around you began to make you feel anxious or uneasy. Sooner or later you begin to sense that the source of the uneasy feelings is you and your inner world that you are now totally out of touch with. When that happens in order to escape reality you click the remote and call up some cable TV, grab some ice cream to maw on and call your girl friends up one after another just to chat about whatever.
I know this is the case with people. What I did was learn to face the silence without and eventually I created silence within. Eventually I was very happy and content to live simply, alone in isolation. I could have days of silence and solitude and I was quite fine with it. That is how I got my mental health back.
I don’t recommend group therapy or support meetings. I don’t see how that’s conducive to recovery. I do recommend solitude and isolation. That’s the best way to face your demons and inner turmoil and get a resolution going that is going to leave you with inner peace. It increases your capabilities and gives you an advantage that people who can’t or don’t or won’t do that kind of work do not possess.
Once you have been in solitude and faced your demons and purged yourself of them you are going to be a healthier person to be around. Your emotional and psychic vibes are going to be a whole lot better than they were when you were suffering. You will start to attract people with your mental health rather than repel them as you did when you were mentally ill.
Reasons why you would not use a support group or rely on family support. Reasons why you would prefer solitude or isolation.
- You have no family that really cares about you or your family has just as many problems as you do. (maternal side for me)
- Your family has declared that you are persona non grata due to how much your illness has messed up their lives. (paternal side for me)
- You are not a safe person to be around.
- You are ashamed at having mental illness and you feel it’s nobody’s business. You are reluctant to talk about it.
- You are poor and embarrassed about sharing the same space as well heeled people with means.
- You don’t like people especially other people with mental illness.
- You don’t trust people and/or you are afraid of them, especially people with mental illness.
- You feel less anxiety when no one is around you, not more.
- You notice you are not triggered by other people when secluded.
- You want to find out who you are inside without external distractions.
- You need time to heal and be left alone with your wounds.
- You know your emotions and thoughts are toxic and polluting and you know you have no right to visit yourself and your problems on unsuspecting and innocent people.
- You want to learn how to be content by yourself.
20. You have said you are not a doctor so you can’t be an expert can you? Why should anyone listen to you then?
Not one psychiatrist or psychologist ever gave me the keys to understanding myself when I was ill. I have yet to hear of a story where a psychiatrist cured someone permanently with a brief application of psych meds. The patient always has to take the drug(s) indefinitely.
I don’t consider someone sporting a psychology degree or a Pdoc to be necessarily an expert on mental health and mental illness. I don’t recognize them as authorities in mental health treatment. Why should I? I have seen no proof that they have any idea what they are doing.
I’ve been in state of the art psychiatric treatment centers and I was physically and mentally violated and mistreated while I was there. I saw this happen to others too. You are dehumanized and they truly think they are better than you because you are the sick patient and they get to go home to normal life at night.
As soon as the forced drugging begins they have the intellectual power advantage over you because your brain is being poisoned and your cognitive abilities, alertness and perceptions are all messed up. Once you are nice and stupid and sedated and diminished you are improving according to their standards. It’s useless treatment that has never healed anyone. It just makes it so others don’t have to deal with you.
People are changed when they come out of long term (or even short term) psychiatric care and not for the better. Psychiatric treatment was something I survived as a teen. It was something that I had to get over later on as an adult.
The study of the mind and behavior is psychology. I have had hands on personal experience learning to understand how my own mind and behavior worked. Since my diagnoses in 1989 I have been studying psychology ever since. That is over 20 years of self reflection, self analysis, self critique and self therapy.
At the very least I am an authority on my own mental and emotional health. I know how my mind became ill. I know why I stayed ill for so long. I succeeded in healing myself when most everyone else had written me off. I taught myself psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.
I never believed that I should be saved from myself by anyone else. I have always felt it was my responsibility to find a way to heal and I did. It was not easy. It was not a shortcut. Considering I faced a lifetime of psych hospital visits, psychiatric drugs and counseling it was well worth the sacrifices I made to pursue alternative healing paths.
The thing of it is this. I did not invent some new science of the mind or some new kind of meditation or anything top secret or bleeding edge. I used philosophies from Buddhism and Taoism to guide me.
The Buddhists refer to the ‘Four Noble truths ‘ and the Taoists talk about letting go, simplicity and becoming a mature human being by overcoming our baser impulses and instincts.
When I first started I was influenced by Buddhism. In Buddhism you have the Four Noble Truths.
Here is one set of definitions. Here is another.
Basically it boils down to this.
1. Life can seriously suck because you are alive.
2. Part of your problem is your endless attaching to things and the pain of losing things you are attached to.
3. Freedom from suffering the suckage of life is possible.
4. The way to that freedom is the 8 fold path.
Beyond that there are the things that are holding you back from enlightenment. The Ten Fetters and the Five Hindrances. These things must be overcome to attain freedom from the mind and suffering. This was the psychology I was using on myself between age 20 and 22 or so.
Then I became head over heels obsessed with Taoism around that time and lost my appetite for Buddhism and the whole shtick. I knew that I could not follow most of the Precepts. (actually I couldn’t follow any of them back then.)
When I got involved with Taoist meditation I relearned some of the same basic meditation stuff that you learn in Vipassana with regards to sitting and breathing and intent. In Taoism I learned about the different Bodies of Being and how to access them with consciousness and intent. I learned a process called dissolving that allowed me to apply my consciousness in the most gentle manner whenever or wherever I was suffering.
With Buddhism you had all these very Biblicalesque ‘Thou Shall” and “Thou Shall Nots” With Taoism you had this, “Relax and stop fighting the natural way of things. Stop hurting yourself. Do only what is necessary and don’t do things that are not necessary.”
Basically, my new path boiled down to this.
1. Life can seriously suck because you are alive and it is normal and natural and it is perfect that it is so.
2. Part of your problem is trying so hard all the time. Part of your problem is the things you do as a result of the things you feel which are a result of the things you are thinking about.
3. Freedom from mental and emotional turmoil is possible.
4. The way to that freedom is to become fully present and to liberate the tensions and blocks in your body, your awareness, your emotions and thoughts by dissolving your entire Being until everything releases and settles down. You create inner balance long enough and it will last. You will change.
I started doing this kind of meditation at the age of 22 and it totally healed me of my problems over the course of a few years. I have been using this form of self psychology ever since. How this is done is one of the things I know most about. These intensive, hands-on experiences are my qualifications.
21. I have read some of your writings and comments here and there and sometimes you say you think bipolar is a not real disorder. Everyone knows bipolar is like diabetes and without meds you will die. How can you even say there is no such thing as bipolar disorder?
If bipolar disorder was like diabetes I would be dead a long time ago by lack of bipolar insulin. According to the experts Bipolar Disorder is ongoing chemical imbalance caused by genetic expression. We have already established that despite all the years of claiming bipolar is a genetically caused chemical imbalance we have neither any complicit genes to blame nor is there any evidence of a ‘chemical imbalance’.
In fact when we begin to focus a spotlight on the ‘chemicals’ involved we find shaky research, poor experimental protocols and tons of weasel words that really don’t mean anything like, could be, may be, perhaps, possibly, theoretically, sheds some light on, seem to indicate that, and so on and so forth. That is how all these pharma funded bipolar (and schizophrenia) tests and surveys are worded. Very weak science that has not proven anything.
Another claim that you will find in the DSM is the claim that there is no cure for bipolar and that it will never go away. I call this The Big Lie and The Party Line. I was told this to my face by a psychiatrist during my first hospitalization. It turned out she had no idea what she was talking about because here I sit with over ten years of remission. Long enough to call it a cure.
Consider that despite years of research and tons of money the very same researchers making claims about the causes of bipolar have not remotely proved those claims to be true. Neuroscientists and psychophamaceutical drug makers have yet to prove these claims they make about genetics and chemical imbalances are ‘real’.
Consider that 20 years ago I was told that bipolar was not well understood and that scientists were still trying to figure it all out. Consider that they are no closer to that understanding today than they were when they told me this the summer of 1989.
Consider that if we dig deep into the history of research done on bipolar/manic depression we find there have been no substantial developments in the understanding of or causes of this illness in not just twenty or fifty years but over a hundred years and there is absolutely zero understanding of this ‘very real and serious medical condition’. Zero understanding. Zero hard science or evidence.
Consider that I am not only one who has cured themselves of Bipolar. I did it with meditation. I have heard of others who have also cured themselves of bipolar as well. I have heard people say that religion and prayer, supplements and spiritual awakenings have all cured them of bipolar.
I do not believe anymore that there is a genetic condition that is incurable involving uncontrollable mood swings called bipolar disorder. When I healed myself the first thing that went away was my anger and tension. The second thing was my depression. I continued to experience what are called manic symptoms at less than clinical severity for another year or so after my depression swings had stopped. First I stopped going to the ‘down’ pole. Then I stopped going to the ‘up’ pole.
In the process of going within and listening with meditation I discovered that manic states and depressive states where not connected in a hierarchy of pressure or supremacy. In other words I discovered that it was not necessarily true that having a manic phase would ‘inevitably or invariably’ precede or launch a depressive phase.
Sheer psychiatric heresy right there I know. I found this discovery through experiential ontology. The entire idea of the ‘mood swings of bipolar being your inability to stay balanced at the equator’ was not true. The old name, ‘manic depression’ was really more accurate.
Clinically obvious and debilitating manias and depressions. Not this fantasy about a disease that makes you bounce from one emotional ‘pole’ to another beyond your control. I have never denied the existence of suicidal depression or manias. Even if I personally had never had mental illness I grew up with it for ten years and I’ve seen plenty of sick people in psych hospitals.
Mood swings and erratic thought patterns, obsessions and compulsions, major depression and ‘mania’ are all really ancient states of mind that have most likely been with us for all time down through the ages. It should be obvious that I not saying suffering does not exist or that your suffering is not real.
When someone says to me “Bipolar is real, I am proof of it you idiot” they are forgetting that I had the same diagnosis too for presenting the same cluster of symptoms on a certain scale of deviance from the norm. In that we are ‘brothers and sisters of depression’ or ‘manic siblings’. I’ve been through it and you’ve been through it. We are talking about the same stuff here.
What happens after that is that you have accepted the psychiatric song and dance uncritically and you identify yourself as the condition. What happened to me is, I asked myself, quite seriously,
“Is it true my emotions and thoughts are stuck in one extreme or another forever?” “Is it really true this is permanent and I have no control over it?” “Is it actually true that there is nothing I can do that could cause that situation to change or remit?”
For me the answer was no, no and no, respectively.
Because of my discoveries I don’t think there is an incurable genetic disease called bipolar. They need to prove it exists. Until then become satisfied with the fact that I cured my manic phases and depression phases and therefore cured myself of manic depression. A mental disorder inappropriately called bipolar disorder (considered a ‘medical’ disorder now).
22. Wait what? I am still confused. How can you cure something that does not exist? You are contradicting yourself. Can you explain that better?
This whole issue could have and should have been moot from the get go. If my psychiatrist had told me the real truth about manic depression we wouldn’t be having this conversation. She was a biopsychiatrist with a head full of hard case notions about manic depression. Maybe she read Dr Kay Jamison’s stuff, who knows. Either way she had only been collecting stories of sick patients. She did not know anything about real recovery.
I would have preferred that she mention that some people do just fine without meds. That’s a fact. The Bipolar Fascists may try to beat you down for that thoughtcrime but it’s a fact.
Another ‘inconvenient truth’ is that people do recover permanently without meds or therapy. The numbers of those recovered people are increasing visibility-wise as they post their stories on the internet. I am one of them.
Had I been told that bipolar can and does go into remission and heal or that people can do just fine without medications then this whole issue would be null. I would like it if the forthcoming DSM V included that information for their bipolar entry.
Which brings us back to what is really known about so-called bipolar disorder. Nothing. Nothing is known about bipolar disorder. I keep checking online medical journals and I keep my eye open for new findings.
No one knows what causes it. Nor is it known how it starts. It is not known why it can seem to come and go in severity over time.
A loose history goes like this.
The word melancholia is coined in Olde Times to describe brooding people.
Emil Kraepelin coins a term called ‘manic depressive psychosis’ and is considered by some to be the primogen of psychiatry.
Karl Leonhard came along and really laid it down how manic depression can be subtyped and it’s very interesting. He could possibly be considered the father of modern day nosology or how we diagnose and classify things in the mental health arena.
Kay Redfield Jamison (a supposed expert on bipolar) comes along and coauthors a ‘canonical’ textbook on manic depression still used by clinicians today. She writes a memoir in which she shares with the world her Litany of Submission of the Mind and Body to Lithium.
Not to mention that in her opinion, not treating someone diagnosed with bipolar with lithium and antipsychotics is malpractice. Of course the taking of antipsychotics is beneath Her Majesty as she must maintain her cognitive abilities in order to remain in academia. All the plebes and proles have to take it though.
Now we get to modern times and the psychiatric bible, the DSM. It’s important to understand one of the biggest problems with ‘nosoligical’ classification.
“diseases often cannot be defined and classified clearly, especially when etiology or pathogenesis are unknown. Thus diagnostic terms often only reflect a symptom or set of symptoms” (culled from wiki)
The DSM changes their entries and definitions around with every printing. Consider that homosexuality was considered a psychiatric disorder at one time. Anyone who has done some reading or associated with gay folks knows that homosexuality is as natural as being born with red curly hair.
In the DSM III Mania was still a stand alone ’syndrome’. You can be a maniac and that would be that. No other baggage with that.
Magically in the DSM IV mania was gone. The only place mania was presented was in manic depression. When and why did that happen? Who decided that people just could not have stand alone mania anymore? Who decided that if you have a manic episode it’s basically undiagnosed bipolar and you just don’t know it yet?
The DSM committee is who decided this.They may be doing it again. Some of these changes are improvements and some are just total nonscience nonsense.
Among the changes, some would like the entry on gender identity disorder dropped from the DSM entirely. To those who have had the diagnosis there is nothing wrong with their minds at all! Their body is the issue. This is just like the homosexuality angle in some ways. That is a change for the better.
Another change that I am ambivalent about concerns schizoaffective disorder.
“On the other hand we hope to get rid of schizoaffective disorder.” Dr. William Carpenter, U of Maryland, chair of psychotic disorders on the developement of the DSM V
Where else but in psychiatry can you just invent disorders and deinvent them whenever you want? They have been diagnosing and treating people for schizoaffective for decades and now with a little hope and a lot of mental gymnastics this disorder will magically no longer exist. Gone as though it was never there. Isn’t nosology great?
They want to take the symptom clusters and merge them with the existing definition for schizophrenia. I was told when I was dxd with it that schizoaffective was a precursor to schizophrenia. Schizophrenia was not normally ever diagnosed in children and teens but if they presented schizoid symptoms then they would get the schizoaffective. The definitions are not radically different.
What I have done on this blog and on my videos is actually way ahead of these guys. In recent years when I started talking about this stuff I simply intermixed the terms freely. Sometimes I say I am recovered from schizoaffective and sometimes I say I am recovered from schizophrenia. I already did the mental gymnastics some time ago and realized this Dxing stuff was totally arbitrary. I make it clear that I did not suffer from the negative symptoms of schizophrenia and only the positive ones.
I don’t really care if they abolish schizoaffective and we are all supposed to mind job ourselves into rethinking it as just schizophrenia with a mood component. I guarentee they will change the definitions around again 20 and 40 years from now. That is my prediction.
We know they are probably going to invent out of thin air both Bipolar Disorder 3 and Childhood onset Bipolar Disorder. This is a change for the worse and this is why.
Bipolar 2 is sketchy enough as it is and cyclothymia is a joke. The people I have met inpatient who like me had a Bipolar 1 Dx were troubled individuals. For Bipolar 2 you don’t even need a suicide attempt or a psychotic episode. No sir. You can have some major mood swings and presto! just like that you have an incurable genetic disorder.
Bipolar 3 is going to be even less significant symptom clusters and deviation. Compulsive shopper? Bipolar for life. Had sex with three different people in one week? Diseased for life. Where does it end? The line between pathological symptoms and natural emotional flux and human behavior is very unclear with this.
If someone tells me they have Bipolar 3 I will be hard pressed to take them seriously. I may laugh at them outright and tell them.
“You do not have a freakin genetic disorder dude. You are suffering from life and being alive and owning a human body. Get over yourself and learn to cope for Pete’s sake. If I can get over Bipolar 1 without meds and therapy then you Bipolar 2s and 3s can at least try to cope and quit feeling sorry for yourselves and your insurmountable life long affliction.”
Then we have childhood bipolar. All the big name child bipolar researchers stink of Big Pharma money. These guys and gals are being popped left and right with their undisclosed fees they are raking in from Pharma. It’s all about getting children on drugs. That’s all it is.
Think about it for a minute. Children are developing people. Their brain structures are not as developed as they will be later on as adults.
Not everyone matures at the same rate. Childhood would be the best possible time to get a head start on learning to cope with extreme mental and emotional states with behavioral therapy models.Teach them to cope before they get into adult age and their brains have ‘ossified’ into deviant patterns.
I was diagnosed at the age of 14 with Bipolar 1. This was back in ‘89 when it was very uncommon to diagnose a teenager with Bipolar. That’s not exactly child age but it is considered a juvenile phase, certainly not ‘adult’ although some would call it young adult.
A ‘proper’ diagnosis must involve the patients input and self reported symptoms. I was a direct contributor of my diagnosis. I was open and honest with my clinicians. I told them I had been depressed since childhood. By today’s standards that means I was a bipolar child before I was a bipolar teen.
Today I have no symptoms. They are gone as though they were never there. I did struggle as an adult in my late teens and early 20s but by my mid 20s my supposedly uncontrollable mood swings were gone and I lived at the emotional ‘equator’ without the ‘help’ of psych meds.
Children are not active participants in their diagnosis. Every age you go back it becomes more and more irresponsible and unscientific to diagnose bipolar in kids. It’s shady to Dx in the teens. It’s irresponsible to Dx in preteens and it’s criminal to Dx in kids between the ages of 2-8.
These kids are not taught to cope. They are summarily ‘treated’. Usually with a cocktail these days. They have no say or rights at all. They are coerced into taking brain, gland and nervous system damaging drugs. They have got to take them for life. Their Dx came from merely observing these kids.
That is nosology gone insane. It’s arrogance and malpractice to give these kids a label and a fucking life sentence when there is no proof at all not even lucid, self conscious and articulate input from the patient themselves!
The makers of the DSM are allowed to take contributions, fees and payouts from the very same Big Pharma companies that are rolling out one med after another designed to treat ‘pediatric bipolar.’ There is a major conflict of interest here.
Personal anecdote about controlling manic symptoms without drugs.
To all you parents who are dosing or allowing their supposedly bipolar teens and children to be treated with psychiatric meds listen up.
At the age of 15 I stopped taking bipolar medications. I deceived my keepers into thinking I was being ‘med compliant’ but after painstakingly earning their trust for months they were no longer watching me closely at the nurses station anymore and it was no big deal.
In order to escape this place legally and by the book I needed to make a case that I had not had acute symptoms for thirty days while not being on meds. In order to succeed I needed to make sure my keepers did not think I was manic anymore.
I had taken karate and yoga in my early teens and I learned basic meditation and biofeedback when I was 13. I used my disciplines to constantly monitor my inner world in the hope of intercepting manic impulses before they manifested behaviorally.
Without the brain destroying and emotion robbing cocktail of antipsychotics and lithium my moods and thoughts came back full swing. That means the short temper, the racing thoughts, the agitated behaviors and derailing speech, grandiosity and impatience with everything came back within days.
My performance needed to be perfect. To me this was almost life and death serious. It was as if someone put a gun to my head metaphorically speaking and told me,
“If you show one manic symptom you will never leave. If you show many manic symptoms they may force drug you again and you will never leave.”
That was a big motivator. I had no choice but to take this seriously. I used biofeedback and mindfulness to listen very carefully to manic impulses. Then I would intercept and abort them with my awareness.
It was hard work but I improved. I had no choice at all. The performance had to be perfect. As the days went by and I disciplined my mind and impulses I got better and better at using sheer force of will to abort mania. It became a skill. A real coping mechanism.
It worked. I demonstrated that I was not acutely or subacutely manic and that I had maintained for over four weeks without psychiatric meds. I was capable of controlling myself and did not need drugs or confinement.
I was fifteen years old when my strategy for self control won against my professionally rendered prognosis. Flying in the face of everything we know to be ‘true’ about Bipolar 1 I did it. There is a very good chance your son or daughter could learn how to do that and develop a life long ability that would sever their needless dependency on these nervous system damaging drugs. The earlier you teach them the better.
Which brings us back to bipolar being ‘real’ and whether or not I believe in it. Bipolar research is for sale these days. Other than these nosological symptoms assessments there is no biological markers, blood tests, dna tests or any other clinical lab test. It’s totally arbitrary.
All we are left with is extreme behavioral and mood swings. That is the human condition and is as old as dirt. No one knows why or how some people have minor swings and why some have major swings. We are not talking about having a birth defect here but normal deviation.
If you were born blind or missing internal organs or limbs you are probably screwed. You do have genetic or congenital condition that may never be truly curable but only treatable. You can’t do much about being born color blind or anemic or diabetic. Those are functional or neurological problems which are not likely to remit spontaneously or clear up with cognitive therapy.
While we may not be able to repair someone’s colorblindness we can teach people and ourselves how to change our behaviors and cognitions. If we change our thinking we can change our moods and this results in changes in behavior.
Bipolar supposedly is a mood and thought disorder but moods and thoughts are not set in stone like being born with Down Syndrome. You can not reverse Down’s Syndrome. There is no law of physics or medicine or psychology that says you simply can’t learn to control mania or depression or get rid of these issues on your own by your own cognizance and effort.
To sum up:
Bipolar is a nosological disorder. It’s arbitrary. My lived personal experience informs me that it’s not a permanent disability. I know you can take control of your own mind and change how your symptoms present themselves. I was able to do so as a teenager.
In light of the fact that people are slowly coming out of the woodwork who are cured of bipolar we are faced with a kind of paradox. You have some cognitive dissonance going on right? You are faced with two conflicting ideas.
A. Bipolar is incurable and everyone who has it should be on meds or they will die.
B. Some people have been cured of bipolar and never take meds. I have stopped taking meds and yet I live.
How is that possible? Why am I not dead? Does not compute. Your brain just sizzles and pops from the short circuit doesn’t it? Chances are rather than adjust your perceptions you will simply resort to the misdiagnosis fallacy as it is the easiest way to resolve the dissonance.
You: “Bipolar has no cure”
Me: “I was Dxd with it and I am cured”
You: “No true bipolar can ever be cured, ergo you never had bipolar and were misdiagnosed.”
That’s a variation of the No True Scotsman fallacy and you should understand that fallacy and why it applies to that response.
My attempts at explaining my own cognitive dissonance around this have been lackluster or verbose if not rambling. Suffice it say my own cognitive dissonance sprouted two more ideas to deal with the problem.
A. Perhaps psychiatrists just don’t have the full picture. They don’t understand that bipolar is not a life sentence. They need to understand that the complete picture of bipolar is that meds are not for everyone and that if you work on the causes and not the symptoms you are more likely to get a real recovery.
B. This bipolar disorder can’t be real. The symptoms are real enough but since I am cured how can what they say about bipolar be true? If it’s not true how can it be legit?
Idea B is my meager attempt at thinking outside the box and idea A I suppose is my idea of cautious reappraisal. On any given day I am on the fence between ideas A and B. The problem is easily understood when you examine what it means that these psychiatric disorders are nosological. Arbitrary labels of conditions which can be invented and deinvented as needed. The definitions of which can be expanded, truncated or merged into other disorders at the whim and fancy of the DSM committee.
If I was able to sneak in and change the DSM right before it goes out to the publishers I might make the follow changes based on some suspicions and personal experiences.
Bipolar might be a condition predisposed by inheritance. The gene expression for active symptoms can be switched off by changing life habits the same way it may have been turned on by life stresses and pressures. Because the gene expression that results in wild ‘roller coaster’ moods can be turned back off Bipolar is not a life sentence or incurable.
While some people prefer to perpetually treat their symptoms with pills others prefer to micromanage their mental health through physical, mental or emotional training modalities, nutritional awareness and stress management eventually resulting in a reversal of the actual causes for the bipolar symptoms. What matters is finding the treatment that works best for you.
The DSM is filled with invented disorders and most of these are considered ‘genetic chemical imbalances’ and ‘incurable’ and nearly all are amenable to ‘treatment’ which is always drugs. We don’t believe homosexuality is a ‘real’ illness anymore and soon we are supposed to no longer believe that schizoaffective is a ‘real’ illness anymore. It’s been uncreated! It’s not a big stretch to look at the definition of bipolar and say gee, I don’t think that is a real disorder either.
There is no progress in understanding bipolar as a genetic ailment. None. Not in over one hundred years has there been a single monumental or significant discovery or advance in understanding the causes and ways it manifests. Zero scientific understanding.
All they have done is arrange and rearrange the names and symptoms over the years and the latest ‘treatment protocols’ are always the latest FDA approved psych meds. These drugs have never cured anyone ever. No one ever took lithium for four weeks and then stopped because their bipolar was cured.
It is simply not true that you are bipolar for life. That is has no cure and no one ever gets over bipolar. The whole ‘it’s like diabetes’ myth is NAMI pharmaganda.
The 18th and 19th century European psychiatrists observed a relationship between melancholia and mania in patients and this had led to the canonical claim that these polar mood shifts are part of the same spectrum of the disorder.
After thousands of hours of meditation where I was inside myself and observing detachedly the functioning and flow of my moods and thoughts I discovered that the mania and melancholia are two separate issues only tangentially related. That is why you can have so called ‘mixed’ episodes.
It is not true that a manic episode necessarily always leads to depression. That is a correlation that is easy to make by observing the external behaviors and moods but subjectively speaking, from observing internally both depression and manic swings can be triggered by thoughts and the resulting emotions.
Those thoughts can be controlled. The emotions can be released. The depression and manic phases can be dodged or sidestepped or prevented naturally by constant internal monitoring, self awareness, self perception and self critique. A timely change in what you are thinking about and constant surveillance of how one’s own thoughts create moods and impulses can change how manic depression manifests or whether it manifests at all.
If you consciously intercept and inhibit your extreme moods swings you can get acclimated to it. It becomes a skill. It can change the health of your mind and body. One day you may find that years have passed without the inevitable mood swings and extreme states. On that day you will realize you have cured yourself and be a bipolar heretic like me.
What do you think about religion as a means to cure mental disorders.?
