I am always slightly bemused when I hear the latest celebrity declare they are Bipolar...
It is as if somehow, they have seen the light ..
Some people are just of a certain type of personality , just because they suffer changeable moods doesn't mean they are psychiatrically ill...
I mean seriously, who doesn't suffer mood swings?..
It is also not uncommon for artistic types to be more prone to the highs and lows of life..
A friend of mine is an artist, she has always been "different" and her moods have always reflected in her art..
She was recently diagnosed with bipolar , and she too, like Mel Gibson feels a sense of relief because of the diagnosis..
And here in lies the deception..
How relieving it must be to be "validated" and to find a name for your personality and range of temperament? And how comforting must it be to know that the "disease" you have can be medicated? ..
This is how psychiatry ensnares people...
My artist friend is now on one of the new genration anti-psychotics (such fun) and praises her psychiatrist as if he was an oracle of mystical understanding..
The last time I met her , I noticed the quality of her painting had severely declined (and so had her personality) , her art work had become soulless, lifeless and bland just like the psychiatric regime which she has unknowingly been trapped in..
What a shame...

Yep.
I believe you must have seen Stephen Frears documentary reporting different treatments for bipolarity.
In another he talks to Robin Williams who is only "depressed".
It's amazing knowing that Mrs. Doubtfire can be sad for a single minute!

Wrong.
Stephen FRY!
It was on Youtube but they deleted.

what are you getting at, "truthman"? who honestly believes that mood swings = bipolar disorder? everyone can be moody; the point, "truthman," is that people with bipolar disorder have uncontrollable moods that interfere with their quality of life. do you not get that?

"How relieving it must be to be "validated" and to find a name for your personality and range of temperament? And how comforting must it be to know that the "disease" you have can be medicated? ..
This is how psychiatry ensnares people..."

This sounds just like what happened to me...thank god I escaped with my wits and my health intact.

Oh good another crazy celebrity "diagnosed" to make people think that everyone with bipolar disorder is like them!

with the new flexibility of the term bipolar, it can validly be used to label mood variability of all kinds, life affirming, life destroying, da works

the point, "truthman," is that people with bipolar disorder have uncontrollable moods that interfere with their quality of life. do you not get that?

Posted by aaron at May 15, 2008 01:06 PM

Of course I get it Aaron, I was using evocative statements to provoke thought not to inflame or offend..

All of you who think you are under the control, or your moods are under the control of some phantom force deep within your brains, have been sold bill of goods and hopefully one day you will come to know it.

It takes a special kind of person to biologically intervene in their own body's crucial brain processes after merely taking a guy with a checklist's word for it that they have a defective brain. It further still takes a special kind of person to sign up to a career where you routinely biologically intervene against people's will whose brains you've never once seen with any objective understanding of what is occurring.

Guesswork pharmacology is the greatest mistake we will make with our society this century.

And let us not conflate true informed consent with a power of suggestion by those you turn to that your only chance of a healthy and safe life is to take a prophylactic against unproven defect. That my friends, is called peddling in fear and terror.

It is just below the surface. Any one of you, even through the chemical lobotomies you give yourselves each day, still have the cognitive function left hopefully to do a little research into your situations. The mainstream media, and a profession entirely reliant on Big Pharma's pills for its existence, are not the places you are going to find the truth. You would be foolish to think that is the place where you can learn about your situations. Any mature half intelligent adult can see that when trillions of dollars worth careers and corporate profits and research prestige is involved, you can't trust them.

To the people who 'like' that they have a 'name for their pain'. I put it to you, how well does it sit with you that these dangerous drugs with tangible records of doing more harm than good are floating around perturbing your every synapse? How do you feel about eugenic pressures to end your very lineage from a society prepared to have you think without any objective biomarker that you are the holder of defective genes? You might like having a name for you pain, but ask yourself? how easy was this name to get? was it too easy? were forces in society too eager to have you in the situation you are in now? Was it your first port of call? biopsychiatry? was that the first place you look for 'help' for your human distress?

Mel Gibson may say he 'found out' he was bipolar. Now, finding out I have high cholesterol involves objective science. 'Finding out you have Bipolar' is matter of faith. The man with the checklist might diagnose you as an asshole, are you gonna go home and tell your wife you 'found out' today you are an asshole? Well I would counter that I diagnosed you as an asshole by observing your behavior, and i've spent a career dealing with and classifying assholes.

What I want to know is, how, HOW, HOW IN THE @#*% can anyone, anyone at all, accept such a low, nonexistent even, standard of evidence of legitimate biological defect, before embarking on extraordinarily far reaching life changing decisions, such as never again experiencing a day in your life of organic neurology without a synthetic chemical mask filter between you and the entire human experience as it has been known since time immemorial?

How could you take a drug, a vastly globally all over frontal lobe acting psychoactive drug, which will color your human experience with hues and tones never before in the history of nature used to face life in human civilization. From the whole gamut of human emotions, love, hate, work life, sex life, the setting of the sun as viewed through your eyes, to the death of a relative, to the birth of your child, all encased in a synthetic guesswork patchwork of hypotheses and neurological perturbment for the rest of your natural life? all on the basis of a flimsy checklist, demonstrable over the past few decades to shapeshift at the political whims of its creators?

I cannot understand that logic. Other than to assume you've all been sold fear and terror as the alternative. That it is the power of suggestion, a brainwashing coercive force of ideology and indoctrination, and placebo. How could it be anything else?

Further, how could anyone actually make the serious decision to choose not to literally have children based on a prevailing dogma and ideology and not demanding to see objective evidence of your own body's defect before cutting short the hard work and nurturing of countless generations of humanity back to time immemorial that got your so called 'defective' genes all the way here to 2008.

Why? oh god why? is the burden of proof not on the accusers? Any of you who will come on here and claim you are moody to the point of brain disease, I suggest you examine the possibility that a contrivance of fear, terror and the power of suggestion, combined with a guesswork perturbed neurology from guesswork pharmacology, brought you to this place. There is a lot more evidence that external confected ideologies and manipulations and your suggestibility have driven to a state of disability, combined with legitimate human trauma, and distress, than there is evidence that the pills you took this morning are the only thing standing between you and the progression of a brain disease.

They've diagnosed your brain disease with a checklist. Spat in the face of your ancestors forward marches through life to get you and your genes here. They have saddled you with a lifelong cross to bear of stigma. They have done this 'for your own good'. You're happy to have a name for your pain. It is, in your mind beyond the realm of human possibility that living in advanced human civilizations, with massive social change and morphing life roles, massive psychosocial pressures where your worth is measured by the size of your wallet or the trophies on the shelf, the cars in the garage, the abuse you may have suffered, the all and nothing of modern life, it is beyond the realm of possibility that this may be make you not want to get out of bed in the morning isn't it? You'd rather a scientific sounding man with a plush office and a big car of his own, tell you its a brain disease.

So get ready to become, a neurotic, hypervigilant mental patient role player, with a daily pathologizing of your every thought, mood, and behavior as the checklist mentalilty begins to rule your soul. Because you've sold youself up the river, and hopefully the kind shrinks and big pharma can keep you 'stable' offering at best, palliative care for the progression of your horrible brain disease that you could not subject the next generation of your family to, so you will not have children. Never seen any proof though, but you 'know you have it', right? yeah, well hey it is 'widely believed', yeah its the prevailing ideology of the day, the best guess, well hey we have had prevailing ideologies in societies that were counterproductive before, only catch is in your lifetime, you're living in a time where one ideology says we have a lifelong problem and need a trillion dollar machine of guesswork science built around it. The other ideology says human distress is fleeting and a few hundred thousand decent caring non-ideologue psychotherapists provided at low cost could fill the gaps left in our secular society where dont turn to the old style clergy any more, but the pills, we are, and I am secular, and we will remain so, but we need more counsel, COUNSEL, were the hell do we go for counsel, some ideologue who views you as a malfunctioning automaton to be lubed up and tuned up with guesswork pharmacology? and with a nasty eugenic hint to his ideology??

Face it, the prevailing monopoly on human distress, held by biopsychiatry, was not earned, it was built on immoral human experimentation of forced patients, and extrapolated from there over the decades, with guesswork pill after guesswork pill. The biopsychiatry ideology has a monopoly on human distress. Ideology is all over our neurology. The reason this powerful monopoly, this soaking of media and public opinion exists? It is the model that makes the money. Mainly this is the reason.

So when you ask yourself how you got a diagnosis don't only ask what evidence is there of defect. Because there's none. Otherwise you'd be able to place it beside my cholesterol test and make me understand and I would feel empathy for you that you have a brain disease and support your preemptive decision not to breed. Get behind the shrinks one hundred percent I would also. But that is not the environment we are operating in. Not at all. Ask yourself who stands to gain from your long term treatment and public identification as having a psych disorder slash brain disease? You gain? I fail to see how. My dog gains from not knowing it will one day die, keeps him very carefree. I see every long term psych patient as living a conflated fiction. Real, tangible human distress that cannot be denied is intertwined with self delusion that you are under the control of 'the disease' you have no proof you even have. Real illicit drug abuse, real human trauma and death and abuse, can bring on the overwhelmed state known as psychosis. But buyer beware, all psychosocial stressors will be ignored by the shrinks. You'll be sucked into the statistics, and cultivated and groomed to become a statistic. The skulls and bodies are all then placed in a pyramid to form the statistics that make up the perpetuation of psychiatric mythology. And the diagnostic and statistical manual is a manual on how to turn the diagnosed into statistics. Because psychiatry is a machine, the more lives it labels and monitors the outcome of, the more it grows and thrives. Each of these lives will have bowling balls thrown under their feet daily, with stigma, and guesswork volatile pharmacology, and for good measure you'll have the fear and terror put into you.

Nothing can save the average indoctrinated mental patient role player. Some of the brightest of them, still cant get out of the maze. They will even write blogs which scratch the surface, but in the end they allow themselves to be defined by the definers. You'll find righteous, well intended anger against drug approval processes and 'overdiagnoses', 'overmedication' will rub people the wrong way. But never, and I mean never, do the sheep ever question the 'nuts and bolts' of this horrific global mistake called biopsychiatry.

The community is up in arms about an infant science like GM crops being unleashed on the world. Yet 16% of the women are on antidepressants. Women are the incubator of the next generation and 50% of the dna. Are you kidding me WORLD?

ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Seriously, to me, to my mind, living in this nightmare world of psychiatry in the early twenty first century, with its absurdity and widespread harm, is such a challenge. It is the biggest 'defect' I see in my society. I think anybody who is operating on perturbed artificially mucked with, and guesswork pharmacology synthetically manipulated neurology, is under an obligation to tell me why they are partaking, and becoming part of a body of acceptability that allows others to be forcibly drugged. The faith you have in your neurology's captor's is obscene to me. You act like a sheep when you defer to 'authority' without ever demanding a high standard of proof. Lives are at stake. Lineages are at stake. Your good name is at stake.

Its the poisonous pedagogy, the forced schooling, the what? what is it? what is it inside all of you that creates this mindless defer to authority ethos? It's killing people.

Masterson, I enjoy your rage vicariously, as I have mostly lost my own.

One problem with your text "Nothing can save the average indoctrinated mental patient role player. Some of the brightest of them, still cant get out of the maze."

They can't get out of the maze cause I expect they need money. Along with our subconcious mind that may be terrified of failure(indoctrinated with fear if someone has been institutionalized) or fear of success, it expresses itself with obstacles and coincidence.

We live in a capitalistic world. We have to hold a job/income that pays the bills. To hold down whatever job , we have to fit within societies definition of acceptable normal, plus have the endurance to do the eight hours/whatever time the job is.
In the big picture, psychiatry helps people continue to work . In small picture, the individual (mental) patients, the long term use of psychiatric medications, is just like a life time use of alcohol, the chemicals damage the body. Switching from alcohol to pharma drugs to cope with life is no solution, but people want the magic pill( depressive effects of alcohol on the central nervous sytem VS the lethargic effects of Lithium- you can't smell Lithium on the breath).

The poisonous effects and the placebo effect works for some, and it's considered a success. Belief , religion and organized hucksterism will be here for some time to come.

Psychiatry doesn't help people to work, it MAKES people COMPLY...
It Coerces people and traps them into a dangerous system..
Psychiatric "care" is without compassion...
It should be abolished..

Went to see an talk to my crazy friends today.
All I know is that they want tenderness, care someone to hear their stories, their problems with family, their views on their own conditions.
Some of them don't want to talk.

They all want cigarettes, of course.