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According to some sources, over 2 million adults in the America suffer from Manic Depression.
In September 2007 the New York Times reported a 40 fold increase in Bipolar Disorder diagnoses in a 4 state survey . In 1994 there were 20, 000 cases of Bipolar. In 2003, 800,000 diagnoses of Bipolar Disorder.
There is an epidemic of manic depression growing across this country and this epidemic was created out of thin air by doctors and therapists working in the mental health field.
Over the past 20 years doctors and clinicians have been striving to accurately diagnose this supposed biological illness. In their own words therapists have been deliberately trying to identify this illness as early as possible in order to effect “treatment”.
In the process of trying to save people from this illness, the severity of the symptoms required to render a diagnoses of manic depression have been relaxed to the point of becoming all inclusive.
As part of this attempt to “more accurately diagnose sooner” this illness, therapists, using their expanded criteria have been looking to diagnose earlier and earlier in any given individuals life. Where once this illness was primarily diagnosed in adults, teenagers and children are now being diagnosed with Bipolar at earlier and earlier ages.
This continues despite the fact that there is not one single biological laboratory test that medically proves unambiguously that these children are afflicted with a real medical problem.
As though under a broad mandate, this myopic and all inclusive quest to diagnose earlier and more accurately by mental health professionals has directly led to the current epidemic.
A person need merely type in the words manic depression or bipolar disorder to find thousands of resources, support and personal stories available on the internet made for and by sufferers of Bipolar Disorder and other mental illnesses. Some of the resources and informational sites include bipolar and mental health forums and bulletin boards. Other sites include thousands of personal and collective blogs and online journals as well as videos which can found online at such sites like Youtube. Still more resources are to be found at mental health websites and organizations such as NAMI, NIMH, DBSA, and others.
Invariably, all the informational sites on the subject of Bipolar Disorder reinforce the claim that bipolar is an incurable mental illness based entirely off an unproven chemical imbalance theory somehow triggered in people by stress, chance or heredity.
As someone who comes from a family rife with mental illness I agree that the there is a susceptibility to mental illness in the genes.
I also agree within significant limits, that by the very nature of being carbon based organic lifeforms with a rich and complex biochemistry that influences our thoughts and feelings, some kind of imbalance or shift in the natural biochemistry of people with rampant mental illness is probably occurring.
Where I part ways with the mental health professionals is that despite these factors, we are not helpless victims doomed to mental illness permanently. We are not incapable of controlling our thoughts and feelings through conscious volition. We are not at the mercy of some unspecified biochemical imbalance. In fact this concept is simply untrue.
Another area I part ways with the establishment on mental health issues is in effective treatment and recovery.
Nearly every single medical and psychiatric support website espouses that the only way to successfully manage your lifelong mental illness is through ongoing therapy and permanent psychiatric drug maintenance.
For myself I found this was not true.
In 1989, when I was Dxd inpatient after my first of several suicide attempts, I too was told this fabrication, that I had a incurable genetic chemical imbalance and that I would never be free of it. That only with therapy and drugs could I ever hope to have a semblance of a normal life. My psychiatrist solemnly informed me that without support, psychiatric drugs and constant therapy. I would be doomed to suffer continual spirals of morbid depression, florid mania, mercurial mood swings, mixed states of all kinds and recurring psychosis and mania.
As if gifted with oracular vision, her prediction came true. After talk therapy, counseling and psychiatric medications had categorically failed to even begin to heal or help me. I went it alone. Without resources or support, my life unfolded as though she had read my fortune.
In the years that followed, I failed at life in every way imaginable, and I suffered myriad mental illnesses without let up. I was a walking statistic, a veritable advertisement of life with unmanaged mental illness.
After a near death experience resulting from my sixth and final suicide attempt in 1995, I reset my entire life and started over from scratch. Living one day at a time, I dedicated myself to self therapy.
I spent the next five years in relative isolation. With little money or resources, under no supervision, with no family or support network of any kind I delved into the country of the mind. I practiced genuine meditation full time, hours and hours a day, every single day.
Five years after this intensive journey into self therapy and mental discipline I was finally free of the disabling symptoms of Bipolar Disorder. First the depression and anxiety left me for good. Then sometime later, the last of my triggers and the incessant mania was finally gone.
By the end of the year 2000, my mental illness was finally and completely gone. This achievement was accomplished without therapy or psychiatric drugs of any kind.
Now, as we close out 2007 and prepare for 2008, I continue to live, and function successfully, despite every prediction and prognosis. It has been over a decade since I have been disabled by suicidal depression, mania, or anxiety. The voices and triggers are gone as though they had never been there.
Whatever chemical imbalances were once there, are long since gone, corrected or rebalanced.
During the process of self therapy I used several non standard forms of therapy such supplemental vitamins and supplements, stress management, proper diet and exercise.
None of those things were enough, in and of themselves to effect a permanent cure for my mental health issues.
What actually permanently banished my mental illness was prolonged meditation combined with all the healthy living choices and careful stress management.
Now in this day and age of the ever increasing Bipolar Epidemic, this information needs to be available to everyone.
Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia are significant mental illness that can be permanently cured naturally without support of any kind. These illness will probably never go away unless you take personal responsibility for making them go away.
A lot of people think Bipolar is life sentence or that Bipolar will never go away. In my experience this is not true. Bipolar will not spontaneously go away, no. With attention, sensitivity, patience and determination, many of the most disabling symptoms can be controlled. For me to over come manic depression I needed to go within and understand myself. Much of this blog and my work on Youtube is to share my journey with bipolar and inform my bipolar brothers and sisters that for some of us, there is hope for a permanent recovery from major mental illness.
Various mental health resource websites define recovery as functioning in life despite ongoing mental illness through drug management. Within this paradigm, true healing is not only not recognized but considered impossible.
I define recovery as the permanent resolution, a complete cessation of all mental illness symptoms. Within this paradigm, true healing is not only possible but inevitable.
