RE: Mental Health Awareness Week, Oct 2-8
October 12, 2011 at 12:43 am
(This post was last modified: October 12, 2011 at 12:54 am by Jackalope.)
(October 12, 2011 at 12:17 am)Cinjin Wrote: I just kinda thought everybody was a little fucked up in some way or another.
I can say this - after spending countless hours with mental health professionals, I've become pretty good at spotting dysfunction in "normal" people. They oughtta give me a degree or something.
But - speaking from experience, there's a big difference between ordinary dysfunction and the pathological.
If I go off my meds for more than a couple of days... It isn't pretty, and it sure as hell ain't much fun. If I go a couple of weeks, it can take months to get back to something approaching baseline. I know better than to go off them, but it happens.
Manic depression is a fucking bitch with a bad attitude.
I will share a quote from Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison's "An Unquiet Mind" (which I highly recommend). Dr. Jamison is an author and professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins and like myself, suffers from Type 1 bipolar disorder.
Quote:Manic depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live. It is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet one that feels psychological in the experience of it; an illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure, yet one that brings in its wake almost unendurable suffering and, not infrequently, suicide.
That in a nutshell represents my personal experience with this illness that went undiagnosed for decades. As near as I can tell, I may have started to become symptomatic in 1977 at the age of 10, and the illness was certainly well-advanced by 1985.
I don't recall the source, but it has been estimated that 1 in 3 people with bipolar disorder die from suicide.
