Congrats to you. Your posts here have been awesome, thanks very much for the insight (others too! but that particular one was a thrill ride. :))
I have the opposite - clinical depression. It’s rather mild, hereditary, seems to follow a set pattern among family members, which can include panic disorder (check) and postpartum depression (check) at different times.
An average bout of depression, for me, is an inability to hit the highs and lows of emotion. It’s just not there. One with BP seems to hit exaggerated highs and lows without much middle ground; I personally may not have any sort of moods to speak of, or know that anything is really wrong, until something either extremely good or bad happens and I can’t work up an emotional response to it. Left unchecked I might end up in a state of constant sleep or something - BTDT. I’m not on meds at the moment and I’m functional on or off them; Zoloft (to name one) works well in extreme cases like the post-partum, but I prefer not to use it. It works, but it costs me something too, and I don’t even think I can articulate what that’s all about. (Guess you have to be there.)
The current trend of receiving an Rx for Paxil, or Zoloft or something, from a GP after one visit alarms me. (A friend just got one last Monday and she’s asking, ‘what does this do?’) That probably also explains the increase in ADD/ADHD meds given out…I sincerely hope it doesn’t explain the (apparent?) increase in people being diagnosed with BP disorder.
Opalcat, I have learned a tremendous amount from your posts. I have to thank you. I feel that I can really understand what my cousin has been going through now. I’m so glad you and others have been helped by your medications!!! My cousin is now on medication as well. She seems to be in that tricky stage where her doctor is trying to get the right dose - but now I really feel that ultimately she will be helped.
I think you make a good point. The field of psychology is still in its infancy. They don’t even really know why the drugs we have do what they do. It’s pretty much trial and error. And we don’t have any drugs that “cure” mental illness - they just control the symptoms. And therapy is pretty hit-and-miss. People go to therapists for years and years and never get cured. Still, it’s better than it used to be - when the only two options were just suffering through it, or being put in a mental institution.
Oh, hell, World Eater you seem to be running out of steam, so let me send you off with this.
You’re not full of crap.
I’m a full-on nut job, bipolar or depressive, depending on which shrink you ask. I currently pop 6 pills a day, and once spent some time in the Bin. At times I was so depressed I couldn’t get out of bed. Holding a steady job is still an iffy thing for me.
And yet there is no question that at times I have done things or entertained thoughts and attitudes that were simply not helpful. I deliberately, consciously chose to do things that I knew would make my depression worse, and I have known others who did the same.
I had a freind in college who was on the same meds as I was, same dosage. She decided she wanted to be a psuedo-goth, and sat around her dorm wearing black and reading Poe (I am not exagerrating), turning down invitations from understanding, caring people to do things that she would have liked. Was she “really” depressed? Sure. Was she doing her best to get better, or at least to manage the illness? No. Have I always? No.
I have also worked in the mental health field, and I have seen doctors prescribe meds for kids whose depression started the day his parents announced their plans to divorce. Take that for what it’s worth.
I have found, for myself, that there are some advantages to depression. It really feeds my need to feel superior (“I’m depressed because I’m artistic and sensitive”). It gives me victim status. It gives me a rationalization. One of the hardest things about negotiating with it is that I never really know what I’m thinking; it’s a struggle to know when it’s “fair” to demand more of myself, and when to cut myself some slack. But there is no doubt that at times I’ve cheated.
**I do not doubt, question, dispute or minimize the testimonies of any of the people above. This is not an attack or a refutation. It is only the testimony of someone who has had a different experience. **
Blowero is exactly right in saying we just don’t know. I actually think we never will. Human beings are (IMO) products of our genes, our background and our choices. I don’t know the percentages; ask God. I know my depression has genetic roots by looking at my family history, and seeing that drugs do make a difference that nothing else did. I know it has roots in my background because a decade of therapy has told me so. But I’d be lying if I said that my choices had nothing to do with it.
My mother was a severe manic depressive for roughly 20 years. She was frequently locked up in various mental hospitals for months at a time (until the hospitals were shut down by a Tory government and the land flogged to property developers, but that’s another story).
Anyway, she was on lithium for a long time. It worked too - she only went nuts when she stopped taking it. What’s interesting is that these days she shows almost no signs of mental instability, having stopped taking lithium some years ago. What is the wonder drug that’s taken it’s place?
Religion! Specifically, the Religion of Peace ™. The daft old mare found wherever Allah had been hiding all those years, and has never looked back.
Although I personally don’t have much time for Islam, it’s a much better solution than drugs. Lithium kept her stable enough, but she was never really happy before. Islam has clearly filled one or more psychological needs of some kind or other… she has a community she loves and a sense of identity and belonging within that community. And that keeps her stable.
That’s very possible. For some people, there is a “trigger.” I for one, am perfectly fine without medication. My episodes are triggered by certain specific stress factors – once I hit a certain threshold, the burden of stress seems to kickstart the chemistry that makes me quakers – it’s like having “crazy glands” that only wake up under certain conditions. Instead of an adrenalin rush, I get a bonkers rush.
For me, therapy really works because for me it’s about preventing the conditions that would lead to an episode. Using the diabetes analogy, it would be as if I’m controlling it through diet.
The devout follower of a faith may easily reap similar rewards. The structure of a religion and the benefits of its philosophy are excellent tools for a general sense of well-being and provide you with an excellent support system in emotionally temultuous times. Belief in a benevolent higher being who can keep you well is also a powerful influence that can do wonderful things with respect to prevention and management.
Oh, I agree with you there. There is a certain “edge” I have when I’m less-than-stable. The artwork I produce then is of a quality that is completely different then when I’m oh-so-stable. In fact, I have little to no interest in my artwork if I haven’t got that extra little edge. I haven’t had a decent photoshoot in two years, so I’ve temporarily put my camera away. No exhibits for me for awhile.
I’m trying to learn how to “see” the way I used to when I was cycling. When I am stable, I have greater compositional skill, but I lack the intensity and passion in my work without the bi-polar boost. So I’m going through a learning process to see if I can duplicate that “feeling” without actually being in a hypomanic state. So far, no success, but I’m working on it.
Don’t forget though, it’s not about a “cure” it’s about managing a condition that will probably never go away.
I’m thrilled that my posts have helped you understand someone else who is suffering from this. The more people understand, and the more we can stamp out the misconceptions, the better the world will be for the mentally ill.
It may take a year or more for your cousin to get on a medication(s) and dose that helps her. Tell her not to be afraid to tell her doctor that the medication isn’t working and ask for a different one. If it isn’t working two months out, I’d ask for a different one. My first psychiatrist put me on Paxil and then just adjusted my dose all over the place. It wasn’t until several years later that a doctor suggested that I might try a different medication. Now I’m on Celexa which is much better for me. It controls my depression about as well, but it stays in the system a bit better. With Paxil if I missed a dose, I’d wake up in the night with horrible nightmares, and the next day I’d be in a total downswing. With Celexa it’s a bit more gentle. I don’t totally flip out for 2 or 3 days This spring I’m changing again to Welbutrin with the hope that it will work as well but without the negative sexual side effects.
It can be frustrating during the adjustment periods, and it can be really easy to just be totally passive and let the doctor do all the work, but she really needs to take charge. If it isn’t working, she has to say so. If it isn’t working enough, she has to say something. I have a lot of faith in the current medications available and I am sure that she will find something that works and her life will be much better.
Not running out of steam, I just seem to be learning more by keeping my mouth shut. Thanks everyone for sharing your experiences, it’s very educational.
I think I can sort of understand where the OP was coming from, and it’s not at all denying that bi-polar disorder exists or that it’s a serious thing.
It just seems that if you meet 50 random people in a day and talk to them, say at the coffee shop at a book store, that odds are not very high of 45 of them being bi-polar. Yet it seems that everyone I meet lately, regardless of where I am (pool hall, coffee shop, grocery store, library) is on some combination of psychiatric drugs.
Another example is that I work in a college, and I have contact with a lot of students because of this. Roughly 75% of them are on Paxil, Prozac, lithium, valium, Celexa, Ritalin or some combination of psychiatric drugs and say that they are diagnosed with bi-polar, ADHD or clinical depression.
Perhaps I’m woefully naive, but I find it hard to believe that 75% of the student body in a small private college (less than 1,000 students) would have these conditions. How common are these disorders in terms of percent of population as a whole? Because it does seem odd that such a high percentage of people that I meet are on some pretty heavy medication.
It seems as odd as if 75% of the student body were on some form of medication for diabetes or hypoglycemia, that perhaps people are being diagnosed and given drugs where a disease doesn’t exist sometimes. Again, not saying that there are not geniune sufferers of these disorders, but to say that 75% of the student body here has these disorders seems an awfully high percentage to have them all be accurate diagnoses. Some very likely are, I’m sure, but all?
You may be touching on some little-understood correlations regarding mental illness.
To folks in the know on this thread, I posit the following: isn’t it true that there’s a strong correlation between high intelligence and the mental illnesses we’re discussing in this thread? Right now, this info goes into the “anecdote I’ve read many times over the years” category, but I’m wondering if I’m remembering right.
I’m more confident that there IS a correlation between raw creativity and mental illness. While I can’t think of a cite offhand, I’m sure a Google search would prove fruitful.
…
BTW, OpalCat, Ferret Herder, Witch, techchick, loinburger, guinastasia, Eats_Crayons and anyone I am forgetting – thanks for the candid and highly informative replies.
Jarbabyj, you don’t happen to have been told what happens neurochemically at the onset of a depressive state such as the one you described?
DoctorJ has addressed my questions concerning neurochemical research with his line above. I wasn’t sure whether what was going on in the brain neurochemically could be directly measured somehow, either through a blood test or through somehow drawing brain fluid from a live patient.
Anecdotally, I’m inclined to agree with you (I’m thinking in particular of my lithium-loathing friend–who is an extremely talented painter/sculptor/dancer/seamstress, plays at least 5 instruments (self-taught on 3), and is the smartest friggin’ person I know to boot (she leaves me slackjawed)–but am also thinking of the other people I know with kick-ass talent and/or intellect), but haven’t read any other evidence (anecdotal or otherwise) on the issue. I’d be interested in a link, if you have it.
Catsix, I had a similar experience teaching at a summer program a few years ago (in terms of a large percentage of the (high school) students being on some sort of medication), but to be fair, it was sort of an “academic boot camp” program for kids with flagging grades, learning issues, and/or behavioral issues. But let me tell you what, it was no joke when some of those kids forgot to go to take their medication (which was safely in the hands of the nurse for proper disbursement)!!! You could really tell a difference sometimes.
At the risk of offending several people here that I respect and care about, and at the risk of being misinterpreted as someone who is belittling the pain and suffering experienced by people diagnosed as “bipolar”/“manic-depressive” or the relief they get from the medication they take –
Witch:
Logical fallacy. I lived for years in a grad-student building with a guy who could not face the world without smoking a joint. This does not constitute proof that he suffered from a metabolic THC insufficiency. Not to pick on you, Witch, this is exactly the kind of fallacious argument put forth by the pharmaceutical folks and the mental health system as part of their justification for insisting, mantra-like, that “bipolar disorder is a mental illness. mental illnesses are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain. mental patients need to take their medications or they cannot function.”
DoctorJ:
Exactly. Look, people, I need you to acknowledge something. To declare that all observable states of emotional misery and suffering are medical states caused by problems in the suffering persons’ brain is to make a profoundly political statement. To declare that the default assumption about anyone exhibiting prolonged emotional misery and suffering should be that they are probably suffering from some form of mental illness is only one step behind that. If these statements are not self-explanatory and compellingly true for you, please indicate that this is the case and I’ll elaborate. Otherwise, please acknowledge that you get this. I, in turn, will readily acknowledge that its truth ** in no way invalidates the fact that many people find psychiatric medication a godsend that gave them their lives back**. I would never hurl insulting names or comments at you for utilizing something that enables you to function.
Now, concerning the possibility that various miseries and melancholies and profoundly unpleasant emotional states – even intractable ongoing debilitating emotional states – are experienced by some people who feel that way because life has just drop-kicked them in the metaphorical teeth, or has done so on a never-ending basis for a long long time for that matter – well, yeah, I hold that truth to be self-evident as well.
And insofar as those emotional states are therefore not maladies of a misbehaving brain but are normal natural and healthy emotional responses to shitty things happening, the long-term ideal solution here would be to fix the underlying problem (if it isn’t accidental or coincidental), whatever it is that is causing life to suck for this suffering person, which isn’t an Antidepressant Deficiency Disease at all. Does that translate into “Yo, look around and assess your sucky-ass life, dust your butt off and get your house in order and take responsibility for why your life sucks”?? NO, that’s ANOTHER TYPE OF VICTIM-BLAMING, as it implicitly assigns causal responsibility for the suckiness of life to the suffering person, which is yet another profoundly political statement. (Like blaming the suffering person’s neurons, it locates the problem inside the suffering individual, although this time holding them morally culpable in the process). In fact, one of my pet peeves is the tendency of “liberal” people to embrace the medical model of mental illness because it doesn’t hold suffering people morally culpable (‘cuz if its’ their neurons you can’t say their suffering is their own fault), oblivious to the fact that it still locates the source of the suffering within the victims themselves.
Well. I am not so enamoured of this soapbox that I cannot see that some people some of the time are indeed culpably responsible for their own miseries, and I am also not so much of an ideological monomaniac that I can’t acknowledge the medical possibility that some emotional states (and cognitive states as well) that are unpleasant and dysfunctional can be caused, in their entirety, by misbehaving neurons. So I am certainly not saying that “everything that is called ‘mental illness’ is really the individual manifestation of Oppression by The Man” or some such reductionistically political thing.
But. Yes, a great deal of the emotional suffering that is caused by social circumstances and/or by unfortunate sequences of shitty things happening is diagnosed these days as one form of “mental illness” or another, because that has become the default assumption even for lay persons confronted with protracted emotional suffering (or cognitive incoherency). And yes in spades, the psychiatric profession is not disposed to offer a diagnosis of "miserable to the point of debilitation for reasons other than ‘mental illness’ ", so cases brought to psychiatric attention result in formal official diagnostic criteria being applied, along with a prescription for something that will allow the debilitated person to face the day. And yes, with huge fucking bullet points, this is a form of oppression.
(And we haven’t even addressed forced treatment but you can kind of see where that would fit in, right? I knew you could…)
We need not posit premeditated conscious oppression by the Big Evil Man. Oppression of the inconvenient sufferers by those not currently forced to suffer by whatever brought them down is sufficient explanation.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote once of the canaries they used to take down into the mines. The canaries were more susceptable to lethal fumes than human miners, so when the canaries died, the miners knew to evacuate. The psychiatrization of emotional distress is akin to a bunch of miners saying “Look at those weak little canaries dying in their cage. Must be something wrong with canaries”, and asserting that it could not happen to them because none of them is a canary.
Except that with mental illness, there are no yellow wings to differentiate canries from miners. Only the act of collapsing determines that one is a canary.
I think there are definitely a great number of people who also DIAGNOSE THEMSELVES with such things as bi polar and depression. Just as there are people who think everytime they have a bad headache it’s a MIGRAINE, there are folks who say “gosh, this three days of rain really has me depressed.” And my sister always said “it makes you sad, not depressed…you don’t know what depression is.”
Unfortunately, about five years later, I did.
So yes, definitely, it can be a catchall phrase for people who just need to take a hot bath and wrap a hot towel around their head.
AHunter3: Take this as a sincere question. Thought and emotion are essentially electrochemical in nature. If what we currently call mental illnesses are not caused by brain problems, then what are the other possible causes?
Kay Redfield Jamison’s Touched With Fire addresses the possibility of a connection between creativity, genius, and bipolar disporder and manic depressive illness. I haven’t looked at it in a while, so someone more informed can offer a more in-depth review, but I thought Jamison performs an interesting analysis of a number of writers, artists, etc., connecting their work to their illnesses.
Since thought and emotion are essentially electrochemical in nature, your act of pushing down a bunch of keyboard keys and doing the requisite mouse clicks resulting in your post appearing here is…caused by chemical processes in your brain?
On some level, yes, but as an explanation for why you posted it – how YOU’D explain your reasons for posting it and also the most useful THIRD-PARTY explanations that a bunch of us trying to understand your behavior could come up with – it isn’t worth much.
Ever heard the joke about the Seattle-area pilot lost in the fog with a broken radio? Saw an office building with employees on a terrace; did a close fly-by with a sign held up so they could see it, “Where am I?” Next fly-by, saw the employees holding up a sign: “You are in an airplane”. Pilot says to co-pilot, “We are obviously at Microsoft HQ. I got an answer that’s technically correct but useless”. With apologies to Dooku
Saying that “since thoughts and emotions are essentially electrochemical in nature, the causes of any particular feelings or thoughts that are unpleasant are located in the brain” is similarly technically correct but useless.
Only if there are no exterior causes, so that the emotional and/or cognitive state can be said to be other than a response to the environment, such that the emotional or cognitive state is an unpleasant and debilitating ANOMALY, does it make sense to say that such a state is caused by brain problems.
No exhibits for me for awhile.
This spring I’m changing again to Welbutrin with the hope that it will work as well but without the negative sexual side effects.