There are different degrees of bipolar. I've had several friends that have been diagnosed with it; some have had their lives totally messed up but others you would never know. Some people seem to be able to work through it gradually through medication, counseling, and a desire to improve; one of my good friends is officially bipolar and no one would ever know. Others are all right as long as they know to keep taking their meds, like some stories above. Just saying to anyone who has dealt with this, there are a whole lot more people out there in your situation than you think.
What exactly happens when someone who is bipolar doesn't take their medication? Uber depression? or massive anger tantrums?
My mother had been on bi-polar medication for decades. If she doesn't take her medication (or switches to a new one) she can become physically ill or simply too depressed to get out of bed for seemingly days at a time.
There is bipolar type 1 and 2, there are many variants. Some people experience what is called "rapid cycling" while others go through more controlled changes in mood, sometimes coinciding with seasonal weather changes. It isn't just about being "moody". It isn't about the normal highs and lows everyone experiences. You rarely fly off the handle and became angry for no reason. It has to be something within your own mind that provokes you. I have an advanced intuitive understanding of human psychology, which makes me extremely neurotic to boot. My father who I haven't seen in 20 years was almost certainly bipolar. He could read dictionaries and memorize every word in the English language and then use that knowledge to write poetry no one could easily decipher. Eventually he would stay awake all night for weeks at a time and alienate everyone around him. A lot of people with bipolar disorder are mild-mannered, well-adjusted people who have creative talents. It is partially genetic, partially environmental... whatever it is, it causes chemical imbalances in your brain. The highs are very high. You feel invincible or very confident and full of yourself. This can cause you to go out and spend money like there is no tomorrow. You are very impulse driven when you're experiencing the mania. You don't make wise decisions. In the extreme cases the delusions and the hallucinations happen and you can even think you have super-powers. Substance is abuse is very common. You talk really fast, ideas are cycling within your head, there seems to be different "themes" with people. My theme is probably comedy. I'm always carefully judging everything I say as if I was saying it in front of people. Sometimes you are extremely productive when experiencing mania or hypomania, you can have enormous amounts of energy, and generally you have a great optimism about everything which makes you actually pleasant to be around. Bipolar disease increases your risk of developing heart disease, diabetes and obesity, sometimes due to a coinciding thyroid problem. The lows are a wave of depression that hits like a ton of bricks and doesn't leave easily. This is when you might just decide to not go to work/school for the next week or two. Your outlook on life turns so bleak that you convince yourself that being so depressed all the time isn't worth it. Many people with bipolar disorder are misdiagnosed as schizophrenic or ADHD. The worst thing is you push away the people you love. They can't understand what you're going through, they have no idea what it is like, and only with understanding can you work through it. Imagine being a huge burden on the person you want to spend your life with. They can't deal with your **** right now, they've got enough of their own issues to deal with, and why would they want to be in a relationship where they have to deal with a partner who is extremely confident and happy sometimes, yet extremely impulsive, can be extremely verbally abusive for no reason, and ultimately a threat to harm themselves. Nobody should have to deal with that.
agree with both points from BJ and Thadeus. there are many people who take drugs, who don`t need them, for whatever reason. then there are those who do need them. without them, perhaps they are suicidal. for those people, by all means, consult a doctor, get immediate help.
Several of these things fit my friend, Moes. He has trouble with his weight. Like so often with people who don't have this disorder, when he's feeling really down, he eats. Then he feels down because he's put on weight. I was struck by the thyroid comment. He recently had that checked and it turned out that his thyroid count was low. Started taking a little pill for it a couple of times a day and had much more energy and, amazingly, lost 15 pounds in about 3 weeks (I was shocked and asked how that was possible. Besides, it didn't look like it. He replied that "of course it doesn't look like it, because I weigh twice what you do!"). That also coincided with changing his diet, but I think the diet change was driven more by fixing his thyroid level than simply being a coincidence. He seems to have had this "gift" passed on by his father, as well. Genetics! Can't live with them, can't live without them. He can be incredibly productive when he's "up," or simply "on the level," but especially when he's up and manic. That's another thing, besides the sex side effect, that bothers him, that'll lead to deciding "Hell, I don't need the meds. I feel fine and their messin' with my fun and my work." Always a big mistake. When he stays on the medications, he actually productive and a heck of a lot easier to be around. I understand him very well, so I just blow off his mood swings. People that don't know him as well as I do might not "get it," because the condition isn't one that people trumpet to the world. In fact, there can be a stigma involved with those who are uneducated, basically dense, possibly stupid, and frequently inherently bigoted. Those people aren't worth knowing anyway, but sometimes one has to work with them, so being discreet isn't a bad thing. Just don't cut off your loved ones and the friends that love you. I can't stress that enough. The "burden" you mentioned isn't that heavy. It really isn't. Far worse is cutting ones self off from those who care, which hurts both them and "you." So don't say no one should have to deal with someone with this. Bull ****. It is treatable, they love you, and life can be far more normal than it might sound right now, with all this info being tossed around. Seriously.
Very interesting Deckard, thanks for breaking that down. For the record I was just meaning that nobody should have to deal with this as long as there are meds available that can control it. I'm going to do whatever it takes to keep myself on the level, I need normalcy.
First, the most important thing to recognize is that "depression" and "manic depression" and "ADHD" and "obsessive compulsive disorder" are Platonic disease ideals. They very rarely correspond exactly to the real world. That is lesson #1 in Abnormal Psychology classes. You get presented with case studies that never ever correspond to the textbook definitions, because textbook definition aren't real. And the DSM categories are intentionally so vague that usually people can be coded into several categories. Coding people into rigid categories has two benefits. First it lets doctors bill insurance companies. Second, patients (as demonstrated in this thread) feel better if they are given a rigid label to correspond with their symptoms - "Oh! It's all better now! I have X!" It doesn't really change anything, but they feel "diagnosed". And for some reason, at this point in time, if you tell people they are suffering from manic-depression, they feel much better than if you tell them they are suffering from classic depression. I remember drug treatment studies where all the cocaine addicts looked down on the drunks and heroin addicts in the 1980's. They somehow felt their addiction was cooler and more productive. They refused to do drug treatment with them because they weren't "like those losers". Same thing. But as I said it is the same as diagnosis for ADHD used to be. It's not done for "kicks". But if a kid comes in and presents as mopey, acting up in class, not paying attention, not trying to achieve, etc. The differentiation between ADHD and depression is essentially impossible without a whole lot of additional work. And if you diagnose for depression, you have drugs that may or may not work, and potentially a whole lot of messy therapy. But the doctor has been reading a whole bunch of journal articles on the new treatments for and studies of ADHD. So what doctors do is they ask several leading questions, and code you as ADHD so they can move on to the next patient. I remember a psychiatrist once told me that the most rewarding thing to do in their profession is to declare a diagnosis, prescribe drugs, and "solve a problem". That the most unpleasant part of the job is all the lingering unwell patients who don't respond to simple medication. Between the mid 1980's and the mid 1990's, diagnosis for ADHD in the USA increased something like 100 fold, but stayed relatively the same in the rest of the world. You tell me what that means. In the same sense, manic-depression it the most rapidly increasing diagnosis over the last decade by a long shot. Specifically in the last decade, diagnosis in children has increased 40x according to the NIH. From the NIMH: [rquoter] "It is likely that this impressive increase reflects a recent tendency to over-diagnose bipolar disorder in young people, a correction of historical under recognition, or a combination of these trends. Clearly, we need to learn more about what criteria physicians in the community are actually using to diagnose bipolar disorder in children and adolescents and how physicians are arriving at decisions concerning clinical management," said Dr. Olfson. The fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) provides general guidelines that can help doctors identify bipolar disorder in young patients. However, some studies show that youths with symptoms of mania (over-excited, elated mood)—one of the classic signs of bipolar disorder—often do not meet the full criteria for a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Other disorders, such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), may have symptoms that overlap, so some of these conditions may be mistaken for bipolar disorder as well. For example, in a study conducted in 2001, nearly one-half of bipolar diagnoses in adolescent inpatients made by community clinicians were later re-classified as other mental disorders. [/rquoter] If you are a doctor and someone comes in your office and presents symptoms that could be coded as straight up depression or as bipolar depression, the doctors in the last decade have an extremely strong bias towards bipolar, both in terms of the volumes of research that have been done on the subject, and the perceived way that it is an exclusively biological problem with a simple pharmacological fix.
that still doesn't explain the dirty diaper theft. i really don't know where to begin with this other than... obtuse much? i've read your posts following this one, but in the quote above... what is your definition of human? and cham, your last sentence quoted above in response to the thadeus is certainly ironic.
