Why isn’t the main reason for her erratic behavior assigned to it plain ol’ massive intake of recreational and prescription drugs? Isn’t this bi-polar thing kind of fig leaf to cover the fact she’s a hard core drug addict?
This really belongs in IMHO. would a mod please move it.
Why can’t it be both? A lot of bipolar people not getting proper treatment turn to drugs and/or heavy drinking to self-medicate.
My guess would be that the bi-polarism - if indeed that’s the problem she has - leads her to “medicate” with drugs. She seems to have had psychological problems for quite a while now (remember her bailing on a concert in Mexico several years ago after performing only three songs or so, with the plaintiff wail “I’m sorry, Mexico”?) She seems to have developed an inability to do certain things (finishing concerts, showing up for depositions and court dates, etc.) that she knows she should do - and which would clearly be in her best interest to do - but she can’t seem to bring herself to follow through on them.
I’m suspecting some other type of psychological malady is to blame for her problems, and that whatever it is has caused her to feel insecure and unsettled - and to think less of herself as a result - and this in turn has led her to turn to drugs to try to deal with and enjoy life as best she’s able. Clearly though this hasn’t been working, and it’s only added another level of considerable difficulty to her already troubled life.
It’s easy to dislike Britney for her wacky and sometimes spoiled-brat behavior. She’s pretty and wealthy and to most of us it seems she should have the world on a string, but she is thoroughly lost and miserable and from her perspective there probably appears to be no way out. I feel sorry for her.
Since the only people who can comment factually on this are probably those involved in Britney’s medical care, IMHO is probably a better place for it.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
She’s so lucky, she’s a star
But she cry, cry, cries in her lonely heart, thinking
If there is nothing missing in my life
Then why do these tears come at night.
:’(
I’m not an expert, but I think that those are all symptoms of garden variety drug addiction, even without bipolar disorder. Anyway, if Spears is simply a drug addict, I wouldn’t be surprised if her publicists started rumors that she’s bi-polar. As a fig leaf, like the OP said.
On the other hand, I agree that many people with mental health problems self medicate with drugs.
So it’s kinda hard to say, but my best guess is that she just has a drug problem. Simple Bayesian reasoning – there are a lot of celebrities who abuse drugs, while bi-polar disorder is comparatively rare.
I am a successfully treated bipolar person (it is the major mental illness with the best prognosis once an effective treatment plan is found and followed). I am also a recovering alcoholic. I have gotten to know lots and lots of other bipolar people over the years. Boston has the largest educational and group therapy program for bipolar people in the world with many hundreds of members. I have also participated in studies with group interviews with other bipolar patients. Most bipolar people have substance abuse issues. I am always surprised when I meet one that doesn’t.
Overcoming the substance issue still doesn’t get rid of the bipolar symptoms though. The two are highly correlated but separate problems. One of the symptoms of bipolar disorder is depression of course. That isn’t a very good indicator of bipolar disorder because another mental illness is depression itself and the two aren’t related. I literally almost got killed from being treated for depression even though I was bipolar. Bipolar people often have paradoxical reactions to drugs that aren’t specifically for bipolar treatment.
However, bipolar mania is very easy to recognize even if you have only seen it once. I had to go inpatient a few times and it was painfully easy to spot other bipolar people. They tend to be smart and fun to talk with even though they (and me) were out of our minds at the time. I just hung out with them.
I have no idea if Britney is really bipolar because everything she does gets filtered through the media. However, I acted so much like her reported behavior 3 1/2 years ago that it is erie. I am sad to say that it basically involved abandoning my wife and two year old daughter and going on an 11,000 mile road trip by myself for the entire summer on one days notice that I came up with out of nowhere. Needless to say, it freaked out my family. That fits the mode of bipolar mania perfectly. Luckily, my wife took me back when I drove back up to Boston and checked myself into the best mental hospital there is. The treatment work within a week and the prognosis is great…
I won’t give an arm chair diagnosis but there isn’t any indication that she isn’t bipolar and she sure seems like it based on the media reports.
It’s difficult to make accurate psychiatric diagnoses while the patient is under the influence of mood-altering drugs. The ideal approach is to take away the drugs, and see what happens to the symptoms. Many peoples’ manic signs & symptoms go away when the cocaine and methamphetamine are out of their systems. Many folks no longer have signs & symptoms of depression once the alcohol, benzos, barbiturates, &/or opiates are of their system.
Of course, if the drugs are safely out of the system after a decent detox period (one long enough for the nervous system to recover), and the symptoms of mental illness remain, then a diagnosis of bipolar (or whatever) may be much more reliably made.
I know for a fact that is true but oddly enough, I have never taken a single illegal drug in my life including marijuana. Meth would be totally out of the question as would cocaine. However, my bipolar disorder mimicked a meth addiction in some ways. I only slept about 4 - 6 hours once every three days and I lost 20 pounds in a month. I could not stomach any food and I got concerned so I bought cans of Ensure so that I had some nutrition at all.
My personality changed completely and it was really disturbing. The normally quiet and reserved me got to experience what it is like to live as an aggressive sleaze-bag. The disturbing part is that most people, including attractive females seemed to like the manic bipolar me much more than my normally quiet and reserved me that was my normal personality I have never cheated on my wife and will never will but turning into a complete manic sleaze bag somehow made the opportunities jump out of the walls time and time again. I didn’t like to learn that about women or anybody else.
Shag, sounds unpleasant. But I’m not surprised the women flocked to you in that state. Nothing says “alpha male” like hypomania slipping into mania.
Your experience is exactly why one needs to detox a patient who is on drugs before declaring them to be bipolar.
There are many reasons I am proud to be a doper, and the personal accounts and professional -off-the-record thoughts are by far, the best stuff on the web.
Thank you Shag and QtM for your insites into such a dark, frightening, yet fascinating world.
I’m sitting next to a psychologist. I asked her if I was remembering correctly that there was a high rate of illicit substance abuse in people with bipolar disorder. “Oh, yeah,” she says, “It’s about 70% comorbidity.” It’s also worth noting that substance use can knock a vulnerable person off-kilter and precipitate bipolar (and other) episodes.
Could you please elaborate on this a little, Qadgop? Specifically, how long does it take for one’s nervous system to recover from specific drugs? Alcohol? When does the brain begin to resemble its “normal” functioning? It would seem to be a while - lots of folks detox for a few weeks, but never actually “clean up” and wind up falling into the hole again. I understand that depth of addiction is a factor here, but if you’d care to generalize that would be fine. There is much conflicting information in this area on the web. Not sure what to believe, frankly.
Thank you for your continued informed opinions.
sangfroid, one thing to consider - the mind isn’t necessarily going to go back to a status quo ante. Patterns of thought get established during both mental illness, and drug addiction. Even after the drugs are out of the system, the habits of thought can remain. Similarly, mental illnesses with a physical cause can persist even after the original physical cause has been treated. So, while the patient has to be detoxed to see what is there, assuming that the patient is going to revert to a status quo ante is unrealistically optimistic, IMNSHO.
One of the bigger problems for long-term detox is that many of the people who ended up self-medicating are both resistant to learning new coping techniques, and either have no others besides self-medicating or more frequently find that their former coping techniques no longer work. Leaving many people with the perception that the only choice they might have for coping is to self-medicate. Then there’s the problems I’ve seen and heard with forced treatment for people: If the patient doesn’t believe that they have a problem and that they have to change their behavior, they’ll just go through the motions in a detox program long enough to get people off their backs, and return to, or accelerate, their usage.
As for conflicting information the web: A lot of it is simply the collection of personal anecdotes. There’s a phrase you’ll often see on the Dope: The plural of anecdote is not data. That’s an oversimplification, but it does touch on a number of important points. What works for person A may not work for many others. Even more insidiously, a number of addicts, users or whatever term you care to use will, like any other population, say what they think their audience wants to hear, rather than recounting the truth. For an example: the day before she died of a drug overdose Dana Plato recorded an interview where she assured her interviewer that it had been a long struggle, but she was clean and sober, now.
I’m not trying to suggest that it’s impossible for people to stop using, just that there’s reason to maintain a healthy skepticism towards personal claims, especially those one sees on the Web.
Wasn’t she diagnosed with Histronic Personality Disorder, as well as being bi-polar?
Frankly for most people who were on significant amounts of alcohol and/or drugs for lengthy periods of time, I’d say it’s at least 18 months of abstinence, best case scenario, and closer to 2 years on average, before the brain really starts functioning “normally”. This has been borne out on PET scans (which show brain function, along with structure).
Not that one would need to wait that long to diagnose some comorbid psychiatric conditions.
Personally, I always thought my brain was fine in early recovery. But once I got about 20 months of continuing sobriety in me, I realized my brain really was working better for me than it had ever been before.
This phase, where the cerebral function really is ticking along like that of a ‘normie’, is called Stage Two Recovery, and folks that make it to this stage have a much lower relapse rate in the long run.
And OtakuLoki speaks true, many an addict has covered up countless relapses. But eventually the crash and burn happens.
I don’t know, but I’d think that would be hard to sort out from drug abuse and its effects. There’s a whole section of the DSM that basically gives you diagnoses of “substance induced X.” You can’t tell without getting the substances out of the picture. Plus, every spoiled brat doesn’t have a personality disorder. “Annoying as hell” is an observation, not a diagnosis.
Shagnasty , I don’t know if this is a hijack, and I apologize if it is, but how are you doing now? Is your prognosis good? Is your wife an angel?