Thanks for coming in.  The drugs used to “treat” the so-called mental illnesses do indeed have potential adverse side-effects, some of which can be quite devastating.

My purpose in saying that the condition known as bipolar disorder consists essentially of rudeness and irresponsibility is not to cut anyone down, but rather simply to tell the truth.  If you read the DSM criteria carefully, I don’t think you can avoid the conclusion that what’s being described is rudeness and irresponsibility.  And Nick wasn’t just “a little rude.”  He was downright vicious and obnoxious.  But you’re right, I was dismissive, and perhaps I should have been more sensitive. 

You go on to mention that you experience thoughts of worthlessness and suicide, and you ask why would you have these feelings.  The question has a rhetorical feel to it because you apparently believe the answer is: because you have bipolar disorder.  But how do you know you have bipolar disorder?  Presumably because of the negative feelings.  In other words: you have negative feelings because you have negative feelings.  This isn’t getting you anywhere.  Furthermore, if you hang around the mental health system long
enough, you’ll pick up lots more “diagnoses,” each one as meaningless as the next. 

But to get back to your question:  why do you have these feelings?  The only answer I can give you is I don’t know.  I don’t know you and it would be
wrong of me to speculate.  However, the fact that you have posed the
question (even if it was rhetorical) is a very positive first step towards
finding a resolution.  Work with the question:  why do you have feelings of
worthlessness?  Have you experienced a great deal of failure?  Did your parents/teachers set impossibly high standards?  Pursue the question.  Ask others whom you trust for their input, etc., etc.. 

Also, since the feelings you describe are more like depression than mania, perhaps you would like to have a look at my post on depression  http://behaviorismandmentalhealth.com/2009/07/28/depression/– particularly the seven natural antidepressants. 

Also, you say: “…if bipolar disorder isn’t a real illness, and I have to accept these harrowing thoughts as a permanent part of my personality…”  You have accepted the fallacy that the only things that can be changed are medical illnesses.  Ian, it is a good deal easier to change our behavior than you think.  And thoughts are behaviors.  One of my biggest points of
contention with the mental health system is the systematic way in which it
disempowers people – exactly as it has done to you.  They’ve convinced you that you can’t do anything about your feelings and behaviors without their
“magic pills.”  The fact is that we can change.  People have been changing in fundamental ways since the beginning of history.  Read around some of my other posts.  You can make your life better.  If you feel you need pills, take pills; if not, don’t.  But Ian, you’re not sick!  You’ve just gone down a side road, and you’ve got to find your way back to the highway.  Do come back if you have further thoughts.

It seems that you are missing the point to the behaviorist approach of mental illness. As someone who has studied and worked with mental patients, there is no physical proof pinpointing the so called “bipolar disorder.” On top of that, the widely used drugs to treat this disorder are directly linked to brain damage. Anyone who is suggested they need lithium as a treatment should seriously consider the side effects. Often than not, patients I have seen treated with drugs for years will admit that they feel much different coming off them prior to ever having taken them. That is because brain damage happens with long term use. Countless patients who were diagnosed with bipolar disorder at one point in time eventually developed schizophrenia years down the road. With speculations, I could only imagine that this is a result of these dangerous drugs used to treat a disorder that has no basis in reality, outside the erratic and offensive behaviors of these individuals emit. I think you should self-reflect your own behavior and come to terms with who you are and how you want to act and then possibly enroll in CBT therapy. 

Don 

Thanks for an interesting and impassioned comment. Your rudeness serves only to undermine your position. The behavior known as bipolar does indeed exist. But as I’ve stated in the above post, it is more accurately conceptualized as rudeness and irresponsibility than as a medical illness. Your comment would seem to support my position. If you’d like to have some serious dialogue, please come back, but without the vituperation and invective.

First, my apologies for the delay in approving your comment. It’s been a long week!

Thanks for your very interesting comment. Because I do not know you personally, it would not be appropriate for me to comment directly on your situation. What I can do, however, is provide some general comments which you can mull over and decide if they have any relevance.

The decision to take or not take drugs is a personal one, on which I take no stand other than encouraging people to explore – in depth – the negative side effects. If you feel you need to take drugs to keep yourself on the straight and narrow, and that the side effects are worth it, then it is no part of my business to suggest otherwise.

It is clear from your comment that something went awry in your life last year, and that this resulted in your being committed to a mental hospital. In the mental hospital you were told that you had had a “manic episode” and that you needed to take pills, probably for life. You were probably told that the “manic episode” was caused by something going wrong in your brain, and was not triggered by anything going on in your life at that time. I would guess that no attempt was made to explore this aspect of the matter. In fact, I would guess that little attention was paid to your history in general.

Now it is clear from your comment that you have accepted the psychiatric formulation. What this means is that when you look back on and recount the incidents of last year, you are inevitably seeing them through the lens of pharmaceutical psychiatry. Now I’m not suggesting for a moment that you are fabricating or deliberately distorting this material. Your account of these matters rings very true. But when we are seeing things (especially past events) through a certain perspective, it is easy for that perspective to shape the images that we see.

If I were still a practicing psychologist and someone had come to me with the kind of presentation you describe, here are some of the issues I would have explored.

Firstly, I would try to establish a sequence of events. Did these unusual behaviors start up overnight, so to speak, or was there a period of gradual building-up? Secondly, I would ask about precipitating events. What keeps people on an even keel from day to day and from year to year is reinforcement. We do things and we get a pay-off. This applies to everything from getting up in the morning to going to bed at night. We do the things that pay off, and we stop doing the things that don’t. So I would explore what kind of pay-offs the individual was receiving prior to the episode in question, and in particular I would explore if there had been any significant losses of pay-offs in recent weeks/months. I would also try to determine what, if any, pay-offs were associated with the episode of dysfunctional behavior. Although dysfunctional behavior often involves negative consequences, there are often positive pay-offs as well. Attention is the obvious pay-off, but release from responsibilities, sympathy and solicitousness of others, diminished expectations, etc., are all potential candidates.

My general principle here, which is based on a wealth of research, is that when a person’s behavior changes in significant ways, it is usually because significant changes in reinforcement (pay-off) have occurred. This principle is very basic to an understanding of behavior, and I would look very carefully before abandoning this perspective and pursuing alternative hypotheses.

Your position, I believe, is that something went wrong in your brain. And, of course, this could be true. Brain injuries and malfunctions can have a serous effect on behavior. However, nobody, to the best of my knowledge, has specified what sort of malfunction would result in this kind of behavioral change. Also, when brains malfunction, the usual result, in my experience, is more chaotic and fragmented than your self-description. Admittedly, words like “chaotic” and “fragmented” have a subjective ring, but your description of your manic episode – indeed the descriptions I hear of all manic episodes – sound to me more like someone who, for some reason or another, has lost his anchors and is desperately casting around for new ones.

So we can agree to differ. If you would like to tell your story in more detail, click on the Tell Your Story tab at the top of this page.

Once again, thanks for coming in. If there are any points here that you would like to pick up and pursue further, please come back.

Best wishes.

However, toward the later stages I started to begin believing that I was chosen in some way, that I was perhaps the second coming of satan, or buddha, or what have you. And I’m an atheist, so why would I begin to develop grandiose thoughts like this? Because I wasn’t raised right?

Being in a “manic episode” was, for me, like being on a strong, internally-generated drug, and the high lasted for weeks. This wasn’t a “problem of living” or questionable parenting – from my perspective, looking back, I’m pretty sure there was something funky going on at a chemical level with my brain.

After being arrested (long story) and forcibly hospitalized for 72 hours, and taking their meds, all of my religious delusions began to evaporate. Which again, as an atheist, I ended up viewing as a good thing.

Bottom line – I don’t care how it’s labeled, but what happened to me was extremely powerful, strange, and disruptive. Do I like being known as a person with bipolar? No. Do I enjoy taking medication? Not really. But I can’t really afford to go through what I went through last year again. So if bowing down to the psych profession is part of the deal, then I’d rather make a deal with the devil than live under the mistaken impression that I’m him.

Thoughts?

Thanks for your interesting comment. Actually, I spent almost all of my career working in prisons, addiction units, and community mental health centers. Indeed, it is my first-hand knowledge of what the mainstream mental health system has done, and continues to do, to the people in its care that motivates me to keep writing. The history of psychiatry is a history of client abuse, and the current disease and drug-pushing model – despite its façade of apparent concern and helpfulness – is the most damaging and destructive chapter to date in psychiatry’s biography of shame.

My position – which I’ve stated clearly throughout the blog – is:

1. Almost all of the problems categorized in DSM are simply problems of living, which the APA has medicalized to falsely legitimize drug-pushing.

2. All of the so-called “symptoms” in the DSM criteria lists are behaviors, and are best conceptualized in terms of the well-known and well-researched principles of behavior acquisition.

3. The so-called diagnoses have no explanatory value, but are constantly presented to clients and to the public as if they did.

4. Feelings such as depression, elation, anxiety, fear, etc., are not illnesses, despite the massive PR efforts of the psychiatric-pharma industry to convince us otherwise.

Your suggestions that perhaps I have simply misunderstood the DSM, and that I lack first-hand experience, are particularly interesting, in that they suggest a kind of elitism that I’m sure was not your intention, but which is very common in mental health circles. This kind of elitism is understandable and occurs to some extent in all professional groups, but is particularly perverse in the mental health industry, in that it promotes a self-congratulatory smugness that militates against critical self-appraisal.

Essentially, it doesn’t matter whether I have experience or not. What matters is: Are the issues that I have raised valid? Have I missed some important fact? Have I stated something that is simply false? And you haven’t addressed these kinds of questions.

Once again, thanks for your comment. I am a great believer in dialogue and discussion, and I hope you will come back in more detail. You clearly believe that my analysis of the situation is faulty or deficient in some respect. Please spell this out.

Best wishes.