Cut and Paste, Start Again ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- a modern disease My father, after decades of unstable emotions, anxiety, and self medicating substance abuse, was finally diagnosed as having bipolar disorder this week... something I could have told you 10 years ago when I first started noticing the symptoms in myself and began spending afternoons in the mental health section of the library reading about the disorder. He's being put on medication, and he's starting therapy because over the last few months his lows have gotten so low that he's given up on sobriety and gotten to the point of feeling actively suicidal. His wife is the kind of person who believes that depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and most other mental disorders are simply diseases of modern society. That people are over-diagnosed, and really, they're deficiencies of will-power or moral strength rather than diseases of the mind. Her lack of empathy makes me sick, but that's besides the point. We had a conversation today while he was over for coffee, about the fact that he (greatly in response to her attitude) is feeling very ashamed of having to admit that the doctors are right to have put this label on his behaviour. But, the one thing that alleviated a little bit of this shame was that while with his doctor earlier this week he was given a list of famous people who had bipolar disorder. While looking at the list, his first thought was that some of these people had been absolutely brilliant and lived without modern medicines to help them, which reinforced the idea of it being just a "modern disease" that he could live with if only he had more will power. But looking over the list a second time he started to realize just how many of those brilliant people had been suicides. And for the first time it clicked that the alternative to addressing this problem wasn't just a life of ups and downs, it was the risk that as the highs get higher and the lows get lower, he might lose control and add to the statistics that put manic depressives at 30 times more likely to die by their own hand than the overall population. 19:22 - 23 March 2008 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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