Twelve Myths About Bipolar Disorder

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I have to rebut these when they are said by family members, fellow patients, and random members of the public. Every one of us who lives with the condition has heard some if not all of these time and again. You might even have a few of your own to add. You may note that I don’t include “It’s all in your head” (though the issue of faking is covered below). It is all in my head! Bipolar disorder is an organic brain dysfunction and the brain resides inside my skull. So I don’t count that a myth, just a misapprehension of the truth.

Here are my twelve most common myths:

Bipolar disorder is just something psychiatrists made up so that they can get rich.

Not too long ago, a Fox Radio commentator told a caller that she had been duped by her psychiatrist. They just made it up to get your money, he told her. She begged to differ but he was having none of it. Even when he was forced by his employer to apologize, he equivocated.

There are a few things wrong with this belief. The first any person with bipolar disorder can tell you: the highs, the lows, the paranoia, the hallucinations, and the delusions are all too real. Physicians have observed the disease in patients since the time of Hippocrates. And patients have suffered, suffered mightily.

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Reality Testing in Virtual Reality

Social media has become a large part of my daily activities. My friends live in my computer. I am married and have a family and do interact in the real world, too.

One thing about the Internet is things go so fast. And then you can’t take back that email or tweet. I can go off on tangents in 140 characters or less.

It is easy to feel like you are being cyberstalked. People do hack computers or follow people ‘s online activity, but paranoia can make you feel like it is happening, also.

Stress exacerbates my symptoms so it really is not a good idea for me to stay up getting tense in debates. I like to discuss ideas and facts just not argue.

I used to get messages through media. They would be hidden in written words, spoken, sometimes visual. They stopped years ago. But, I would search for clues. Everyone thought the computer was making me crazy, but the messages were everywhere.

My delusions are a lot like the Truman Show where I think everyone else is acting, filming, with product placement even. That I just can’t break through that 4th wall. Delusions are different depending on culture. I have heard voices. They weren’t mean. They would guide me and humor me. I actually missed them, I felt lost when they stopped.

Learned Helplessness

I have read articles on learned helplessness or co-dependency in relationship to mental illness. They read like pep talks or “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” to me.

I actually could use a little of that, gentle prodding, to take baby steps to do a little bit more and more. I do have certain limitations. I don’t have the physical energy to keep up with my family, but I can take showers. And, when you are capable of taking care of yourself it will only help you feel, cope better if you do.

But, there are other people who have more limitations than I do. I have in the past. Things that seem simple are difficult for them. I have seen people feel pressured to do too much, and relapsing, because others wouldn’t accept their limitations.

It really is a delicate balance that moves at what I am capable of at any given time.

Book Review:

Stop Pretending, what happened when my big sister went crazy by Sonya Sones  ★★★★★★

 

This is a great book for siblings, who sometimes get lost in the shuffle. I know when my brother was very symptomatic all the attention was on him and I felt neglected.

This is a book of free verse. If you don’t like poetry, give it a chance. It is a quick read. The writing draws you in and you want to follow the story.

Review: Rethinking Positive Thinking

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Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation by Gabriele Oettingen ★★★★★

I don’t know how many times I have listened to people in support groups declare that they have decided to apply positive thinking to their lives and then watched them crash and burn. People declare all kinds of objectives for their affirmations. They will lose weight. They will master their drug problem. They will control their anger. They will grow rich. Money will come to them without effort. They will find a millionaire and marry him. They will find a fabulous new job and leave all the cares of the old one behind them. Some goals are realistic. Others are simply fantastic.

Studies show that plain old positive thinking drags people into a depressive rut. Oettingen cites the example of her work examining the attitudes of East Germans versus West Germans. East Germans spend a lot of time thinking positively. They see themselves as rich, as coming into opportunities of a lifetime which change their life situation for the better. But they still end up at bars trying to drink their melancholy away, and they never get anywhere with these plans. West Germans set reasonable objectives, put in the work, and succeed. Even though their goals are less grandiose, they are happier than their former Communist counterparts.

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Focus

I wake up and throw myself into rants about how I am irritated with a multitude of issues in my life that are all intersecting to make my day frustrating and uncertain.

After ranting for two hours to various people, I start studying. I am fixated trying to complete problem after problem with undying devotion. When I get stuck I force myself to turn my attention to what is more important- the assignments due tomorrow.

What should have been a half hour at best of work, turns into what feels like over an hour. I write an abstract for my lab report and spend an immense amount of time editing it until it is “perfect.”
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A Response to Marya Hornbacher’s Research Project

Kitt O’Malley put me onto a research project by Marya Hornbacher who is writing a book that “will profile the lives of people who have a mental illness or who work in the field, and she’s trying to develop a deeper understanding of how the public views mental illness.” I couldn’t resist throwing in my own two cents. Because I have a long track record of never being included in such studies, I thought I would share my answers to her questionnaire here for your consideration and discussion:

Has mental illness affected you personally? If so, how?

Yes, I live with bipolar disorder, PTSD, and ADD. I lived in quiet torment for many years, occasionally bubbling over in rages that left my wife emotionally overwhelmed. This left me with feelings of deep guilt, but I didn’t do anything at first because I had been told that suffering was part of life and I should just buck up and endure it. When I finally did seek help, I was diagnosed with major depression and put on Prozac. Because I was “cured” the next day, I sought no further insights into my diagnosis until I came to the brink of committing suicide at age 47.
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On Victor Frankl, and logotherapy

We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles – whatever one may choose to call them – we know: the best of us did not return.

I have just finished reading Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor E. Frankl. The book is written in two parts. The first part is an account of Victor Frankl’s experiences in several concentration camps, during WWII. The second is an account of Frankl’s system of therapy, called logotherapy, a humanistic variety of psychotherapy centered around the importance of finding meaning in your life. As Frankl says, in the first part, quoting Nietzsche,

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.

What ties the two parts together is the fact that, in relating his concentration camp experiences, Frankl focuses, beyond the bare fact of the abuses to which he and other Jews were subjected in the camps (those few who did somehow survive), on the psychology of being a concentration camp prisoner, both for worse (the decline, from constant hunger and weakness as much as anything, into numbness and apathy) and for better (where did prisoners find the resilience to keep going in the face of that horror). These sources of resilience include relishing brief moments of respite (a stolen potato or the chance to remove lice) or beauty (a sunset or a song), the memory of particular lines of literature and philosophy that speak to Frankl (Nietzsche, Lessing, Dostoevsky), hanging onto memories of the past (for Frankl, especially, the image of his wife, who would eventually prove to have died in another camp), humor, and seeking sources of meaning (for Frankl, an attempt to reconstruct, on scraps in shorthand, a manuscript that had been taken from him at Auschwitz, and a fantasy of a future Frankl, having survived, giving a lecture on the psychology of prisoners in concentration camps). That and a sheet of paper with the Shema Yisrael, received in the coat pocket of one who had already died, in place of the manuscript that had been taken from Frankl. When Frankl titles a postscript after his second part “The Case for a Tragic Optimism,” the fact that he has surely earned the “tragic” part of that case makes me trust the “optimism” part more.

Logotherapy, the school of psychotherapy that Frankl founded, and which he describes in the second part of his book, is a third school of Viennese psychotherapy, after Freud’s psychoanalysis and Adler’s individual therapy. In contrast to Freud’s will to pleasure, or Adler’s will to power, Frankl centers his psychotherapy on a will to meaning.
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Introducing myself

Hi. I promised Joel that I’d blog here at least once a month. It probably won’t be much more than that, between my job and my volunteer work and miscellaneous other things. But I do have a book review that I want to get up within the next couple of days.

I have been married for nearly half my life to someone who lives with bipolar disorder. I myself am mostly neurotypical; I went through some episodes of depression (with definite provoking incidents) when I was much younger, and was even briefly hospitalized, once, very long ago, but some people do manage to recover from depression and stay stable without medication, and I have been lucky enough to be one of them. Cognitive therapy helped some there, and I may write about that later.

In college I majored in psychology at a school whose psychology department was strong in experimental psychology, with the clinical classes in the department having a cognitive behavioral orientation. I didn’t continue in that field, though. Instead, I’ve held various computer jobs: system administration, technical support, software development, and software quality assurance. At this point, I can tell you a lot more about computers than I can about psychology, but computers aren’t the topic of this blog, so you probably won’t hear computer stuff from me here.

 

The Disease Didn’t Do It — You Did

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Many people in bipolar support groups counsel the newly diagnosed not to feel shame for things they did while they were in episode: it was the disease that did it, not them is the reasoning. This cleaving of the self, I think, does not help us get a handle on the illness and its effects on others in our life. In fact, it strikes me as downright irresponsible: you never have to make amends for anything you did.

Denial of the damage we cause is linked to this exculpation due to mania. Some say that making amends has nothing to do with apologizing. Warped logic causes it to mean nothing more than admitting to yourself what you did without making restitution or apology to those we harmed while addicted or in the throes of mental illness. I find this cheap recovery and I am suspicious of anyone who flaunts it.
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