Ah, the judgment and persecution of happy, well adjusted people, a universal theme in literature, history, philosophy, maybe even religion. Besides, are hypomanics overactive or are the rest of us underactive? I see a pill in the making. Afterall, these folks are happier and do better in life.

Philip wrote "I also have to wonder if the meds I was taking all those years caused the little episodes I once had or if something else was at work."

You know that's CRAZY talk, how could you write that down?

If I , as a schizophrenic who doesn't take meds write the same thing, whats happens then?

Again, what utility is there in giving it a name, or even lumping these people together as though they have the same personalities and are cut from the same 'disease' cloth. There is a billion dollar industry of prestige seeking autocrats to meddle and lump us together in stats. It only helps them. There is no utility in it for anyone but them.

I am 'pleased' to see the blogger is starting to critique the many years of artificially contrived neurological perturbment, and coupling his musings on what may and may not have been with the actual real world forces behind the treatment rationale ideology. It should go without saying that I am not surprised at all that no psychiatric events have occurred since returning to organic neurology. Organic neurology that was never objectively tested and found to be defective I have to add as I always do.

I terms of understanding any 'instability' of those years, I would think it would be wise to consider the three axis situation of guesswork perturbation of neurology with neurotoxic rubbish that they had to adjust with such advanced technology as making sure lithium was not at the level that they set as toxic, yet it is all toxic, all the other guesswork pharmacology that was manipulating how you experienced the prime of your life in every respect, that's one prong. The psychosocial power of suggestion and disease model overpathologizing self stigma prong, and finally just the all and nothing of life in modern civilization as you went through it. You will never know. But at least you will and do know some measure of how much of it is hype and needless iatrogenic control slash damage. Otherwise you wouldn't have faced your fear and woke up that fateful day and not ingested the chemical lobotomy. Which is the most courageous thing anyone who has lived years under the influence of biopsych ideology can ever do. You'll never forget your organic neurology date. Celebrate it every year. Depends how many years since your brain began the war against what you did to every day with pills, but I am sure your brain is very happy to finally work unhindered and will reward you with a richer fuller human experience and clarity of executive function that will blow you away and you will love it, it is like meeting yourself again after many years. A rich intellectual life and clarity overcomes you after organic neurology is mixed with the right amount of the key ingredient that psychiatry likes to kill in every person, that is 'hope'. When you see no objective reason to fear a coming adverse organic event, and further see no evidence that events when you were young came from a 'disease', then you can face and embrace the future with hope, with psych's faith based ideology completely gone, with its filthy gloved hand of mind rape off your neurology, your neurology with thank you. Every hour of every day, every neuron was fighting against this invading compound/s, and there is not a shred of reason that anyone's neurology should be put through it. Unless and until they can get a real brain disease and be under the care of a neurologist. A guesswork pharmacology ideologue, a faith based autocratic meddler with a zyprexa logo on his plastic pens is a threat to your mental health, not a member of any so called 'helping' profession.

Little episodes you once had you say, the blogger says. With respect, i'd draw you to the fact that if overwhelm episodes have any biological component it is centuries from being understood if at all, and the whole notion that you can remedy thought with a compound is foolish, and seems to speak to the public as if there is a science out there that can reverse engineer the human brain, yet nobody in the profession has won a nobel prize since the lobotomy nobel prize, which is saying something. The rise of this filthy guesswork pharmacology has happened in the same time when media saturation and consumerism rose to untold dizzy heights, and the democracy became a corporatocracy where your vote buys one vote but some dude with millions gets an hour with the senator of his choice.

If you wonder about little episodes throughout the years consider these key facts. If there is any biological bending of the natural order of things going in the first instance consider this, psychiatric intervention ENSURES that organic neurology will never been seen again, and in exceptional cases like yours, it is seen again when self determination shines and you end the treatment for the disease that was never objectively proven to exist in your brain.

Consider this important point, your brain could have healed in spite of the 'treatment' and been saddled with burden of the treatments effects for many years afterward, fighting a way daily to clear the compound from the system, which it inevitably does if you stop administering it. Considering it is not replacing a known vital bodily element, the insulin for diabetes thing, then you have to ask yourself what are you doing. It is guesswork. Natural healing and resolution of exteme psychoses occur in the cases where neuroleptics are not administered. It may not occur in all of these cases, but in a majority the WHO studies show this. But forget others. You are supposed to know your own self. When delusion is absent, why is psychiatry present in your life? When there is no delusion, why are they there? Just in case? and in the meantime waiting for this self fulfilling prophecy to occur people enter the neuroprison of perturbed neurology?

Don't forget in asking the questions about your past little episodes this other key fact. You were told to expect them. In some form or other, initially, you were 'psychoeducated' and indoctrinated and informed of how the manic depressive life 'should play out' and you internalize these prophecies as you enter the self critique phase that lasts a lifetime after diagnosis.

Organic neurology. Never proven defective. Delusion gone very quick. Yet. Medicated for decades. The fear and terror is the reason this decision is made. You won't take antibiotics for 20 years after a days long infection. Yet in psychiatry there is an impetus for lifelong control. Society doesn't trust ANYONE who has ever for one day lost control. They scare the shit out of them. Hence stigma. The unreliability of it all casts a pall over your whole future and you internalize this view of yourself when encouraged to by the guesswork pharmacology and guesswork disease industry who you got handed to when needing understanding and care.

When looking back on it all, try to remember. Was I told to expect something to happen. Did it happen. Did that, when it did happen, bolster somebody's case who was originally trying to indoctrinate you to hold a view for which there is very little evidence? No evidence in individual cases in fact. Ask yourself, in other areas of life such as romantic love, or nationalism, or religion, how powerful is the power of suggestion in human life, 'dominant widely held beliefs' passed through generations. And ask yourself what kind of training these ideologues go through, and ask yourself what kind of environment is faced by dissidents who enter their profession. Are they ripped to shreds if they do not hold the dominant views? Ask yourself, if alcohol masked your sorrow, on the night your girlfriend may have left you when you were young, would you then take drinks every day for twenty years because someone thinks that sorrow is a disease? And don't let the fact that drinks are less socially acceptable come into it. Think of it from a standpoint of perturbing, bothering, poking and manipulating your mind and brain that night you felt so damn crushed by the breakup, which a numb drunk feeling got rid of, or at least changed and manipulated into something else.

Ask yourself honestly. Do you think there were hunter gatherers getting around and at the drop of a hat becoming psychotic from a brain disease currently being treated by psychiatry? these people would have been pariahs, killed, not found a mate, and over millions of years selected out. Ask yourself, what is your first instinct when I ask the question 'are you sure you haven't been cheated out of the colors and hues of the human experience during extraordinarily long periods of your life from guesswork pharmacology being thrown into battle against organic neurology that was never proven defective in the first place? and how do you feel about that? do you feel a sense of loss, anger even?' or do you hold the view that the all mighty enlightened educated expert artful doctors saved your life from complete fear and terror and helped you so so much and didn't harm at all.

When, oh when, is it gonna become clear that it does more harm than good. How can we on the one hand lie to ourselves and say antipsychotics are compounds that act on a known etiology of disease and create a safe fully functional state with no decrease in cognitive function, and are the reason the asylums are emptied, and on the other hand witness them being used as major tranquilizers on foster kids and immigrants, which just proves what they are. The asylums are now in the community, the zombie indoctrinated masses of disease model indoctrinated ideologues and 'model patients' are now in the community. They are still bereft of hope, still plagued with fear, still under complete and I mean complete control with fear and terror at not complying, and handily removing themselves from the gene pool by thinking they hold the poison in sperm and eggs. If someone somewhere wanted population control, no better tool to use than a guesswork science where the sheep who are labeled need and ask for no standard of evidence to make the most life changing decisions. More money for pharma too.

The myriad external factors that go into PROLONGING original legtimate illness for years, exacerbating it with guesswork and identity destroying saddling with pariah pejorative labels, the eugenic tinge, the power of suggestion, there is a powder keg of real world eternal influence on the course and outcomes of mental illness, and the only thing being studied is the pathetic guesswork pharmacology and its outcomes on these dynamic people who are under attack from so many external meddling forces it is just not funny.

The cabal of research interests is so pernicious, that when you hear a megalomaniac human satan like Torrey speak, and really step back, you can see what is going on here. No one will be helped by psychiatry this century. Taking psychosocial distress that is here and now, and turning it into a lifelong timeline of expectations and intervention that never ends, the cold, soulless clinical medicalization of human distress isn't going to get us anywhere. We need to face that our society is what it is in the modern age. We don't speak to or know our neighbors, there is no replacement offered to us for the former role of counsel in clergy, the new secular society, where mens and womens roles have completely changed, the media saturation, the vanity obsessed culture, the vacuous television we are raised on, the political apathy, nothing is sacred to us but money. The cradle to grave manipulation is what needs to be looked at. Not the efficacy this way or the other of how the masking of symptoms plays out over a lifetime.

People have masked thing for lifetimes forever. The truth is masked from people. Now we have pills to mask the sorrow and the emptyness. We take four year old kids and mask their cognitive function for life whisper sweet nothings about otherness, defect and disease at them from a young age, they will be carted off to the therapist and some guesswork adjustment will ensue, and its a crime yet we have loving parents doing it. The same people who see no problem in a three month old child being in all day childcare while a mother climbs the corporate ladder, hell many women are so confused when they have a child having been raised in a nontraditional female role of feminism they get post natally full of confusion and distress and overwhelm.

Without ever addressing the myriad problems in our lives and the key importance of early childhood environments, we have a cabal of raving lunatic faith healers called psychiatrists who are backed by an endless corporate snowstorm of money. What is more profitable than a disease with no cure that needs lifelong maintenance treatment. Theres nothing more profitable. Add a healthy mix of contempt and concern by a society that doesn't trust anyone to solve their own problems.

I think it the most obscene, grotesque, heaving, ugly, dripping with evil creation in the history of man when you leave out war. Psychiatry is war. It sends inviduals to war with themselves. It draws the battle lines, sells us the line, goes to the UN with the smoking gun, and we go along with the line, yet you get stuck in it for years, when your original problem could have been solved through diplomagtic means. Your personality is relatively intact before psychiatry. There may be some distress, some overwhelm. Psychiatry convinces you that you are under the control of a foreign dictator and presents the flimsy case. With shock and awe, fear and nightmares, it enters your system, and ends up never leaving. The invading force claims to have secured you and got the dictator under control, but only if you sign up for life and sign away your oil, then the personality splits in two and a civil war gets you all bogged down for years. But the invader makes hundreds of billions of dollars while your life becomes a living hell. The contractors come in with the backup support for the invaders. The contractors get in the news for some shoddy products and faulty tactics but the invading commanders never get questioned. The moment someone accepts, or a set of parents accept a psych diagnosis is like the colin powell moment at the un with WMD photos, you get the shiny fMRI examples and the bile and the line, and then those with the power to persuade move right on in.

Psychiatry survivors are very much like war veterans, except each one has fought an untold, ununderstood war, the sick thing is that so many actual war veterans are offered psychiatric indoctrination and lifelong numbing as a cure to seeing the darkest side of human nature. There's nothing fucking disordered about being traumatised by war. The people that should be intervened on are those who come back fine.

A name for your pain. A prolonging of your pain by those whose mortgages are paid with keeping you in a perpetual state of neediness and control. A prolonged adolescence, a needless period of extended waste and hindered possibilities and potential. At best, denial and masking, at worst eugenic mass manslaughter. What do we need? Do we need 2025 to be the year we meet and shake hands with the new tardive dyskenesia, its replacement? psychiatry's SECOND real disease that it created from scratch where nature never saddled a human being organically with such an affliction? do we need to see tens of thousands of hardcore neurological horror stories from the drug damage from these current four year old 'bipolars'? Do we need to see some glaring examples of maiming and disfigurement that make for good tv instead of the slow burn disablement and hermitdom that psychiatry creates daily? What's it gonna take for the sheep to see that psychiatry is nothing more than bloodletting for the electron microscope age. Just because we have a better magnifying glass doesn't mean we understand a thing about the brain. A little squirt of seratonin here, a little monoamine oxidase there, are you kidding me? that's not science that's voodoo pharmacology and sickening high stakes guesswork. It's bloodletting, only evolved a couple of hundred years, its arrogance, its taking a mile when you have an inch of knowledge, its a threat to public health. And its financed by your government and you line up for it.

Im sorry to the blogger about the long comments today and yesterday, I am riled up and I've got no community no connection and I am isolated. The only people to turn to and remain secular are not even as secular as previously thought before they betrayed me. They are in fact very faith based. The things I took on faith were my very downfall. Far more devastating than any legitimate overwhelming distress I entered the system with. Now my life has changed forever. I've seen the darkest side of humanity in these ideologues. The bigger the lie, the more they believe it, is what hitler said, I just cannot get any peace while they are still out there doing this to other people, more specifically understanding that you cannot blame one group, we are all responsible with our mindless consent to these happenings. I don't have any psychiatric events anymore and don't expect to. I have extricated myself from that mindset. I am daily filled with sorrow and loss and despair at what I see around me and when I think of all those kids that will be harmed today, not much brings happiness now that this is my pet issue, the issue closest to my heart, escaping psychiatry is the only reason I am alive today. And given this, I am completely always going to be driven by a need to explain exactly why and how this strange seemingly counter intuitive life situation came to be. This system is harming people, it is completely delusional this system and its training its building blocks are cancerous to human health, it is completely misguided and it kills. If it doesn't kill the very best it does is needlessly hinder and perturb and mold people unnecessarily into manufactured indoctrinated mindsets about human distress, its the ugliest thing I am ever likely to see in my life barring all out world war. Again im sorry to the blogger for long posts. I'll understand if you cut it out or down.

I'm not trying to say I can possibly judge you from over cyberspace but sometimes it strikes me that someone who can turn out the number of posts you do on a daily basis could be just slightly "hypomanic" -- as Clin Psyc said the other day (with accompanying picture) "You're on fire." But maybe it doesn't feel fun the way it's supposed to if it's "hypomanic."

Mark : "Natural healing and resolution of exteme psychoses occur in the cases where neuroleptics are not administered. It may not occur in all of these cases, but in a majority the WHO studies show this."

How does one get some of this original research?

I strongly disagree that permanent hypomania is some sort of ideal that the rest of us should aspire to imitate. Some of the great leaders in modern history (Lincoln, Churchill) suffered from terrible bouts of depression, and yet they were indispensable in times of crisis - maybe because their personal experiences of despair steeled them to face the worst. A certain amount of anxiety and pessimism may be needed to counterbalance the boundless optimism idealized by our society today, even as it careens recklessly toward disaster. And we would definitely not have much of our great art and literature if it were not for artists and writers who were able to see the dark side of the human condition.

If one acknowledges hypomanic as being something real whereas had it/lost it then how can someone know what it really is? I also believe the writing here isn't a result of any hypomania (as Sara ponders)I think it's because this is this man's job/career/talent. Journalists write. Someone else might be a chef and amaze people with what they crank out per day. Who knows is the answer. I have always been a "perky" type and frankly, with a recent taper down of Xanax, and the subsequent depression that followed, I actually was wishing I was wound up---then this week I have actually wondered if the Xanax was giving me an "edge" a "buzz" that is paradoxical in what benzos typically do, but then I remembered how wild and insomnia filled my daughter's days were on Ativan --and the first time a doctor said the word "paradoxical" to me.
So as Philip wrote "I may never know"; I think it's suspect (the meds) all I know is I'd rather not feel as dull as I do right now on less meds!
I also agree with Garth's comment about the pain/suffering of depression being driving forces to great works of art, etc. It's one comment my daughter said at age 17 that rings true: "Is it me or the meds?" One may never know.

I'm jealous of those "pure" hypomanics. sulk. :).

Masterson, you write very well. And very much. No blog? :)

its not really a condition. its a label scientists apply to a broad category of people. i doubt hypomania is the same for any one person, and that there is therefore no "legit" hypomania. i have plenty of these symptoms and i know allot of other people who have them also. i wouldnt go as far as to call ourselves hypomaniacs. its stupid.

Dearest Philip:

It's pretty amazing to me that you would have some comments saying this isn't real or being hypo manic all the time would be a terrible and egregious state. This obviously comes from those who have not experienced the euphoric, energized, productive , functional, joy filled, laughter induced, creative, and clarity it can bring to your life experience (their loss is all can say {laughing}). I myself tend to be hypo manic roughly 60% to 65% of my life. That's why I have seldom complained or cursed the fact of being diagnosed bipolar ( in fact I have embraced exactly the person I am in spite of the label and inert social bias/prejudice there is against those with life altering mental conditions). It's just a label society and the medical community places on us to try to futilely understand our rich lived experience that constantly test the boundaries of the social norm, and the very limits of the human exercise. If I personally could be hypo manic 100% of the time, I would jump on that ship in a heartbeat and sail away into the sunset.

But unfortunately I do get those pesky overwhelming manic times, some low some depressions and a few major psychotic depressive episodes thrown in the mix just to keep me humbled. What we have got here is bunch of know it all doctor types or want to be clinicians who fancy telling tell me the judgmental sum of my life experience. I've been there and done that already folks; those people in my personal opinion are like water off a ducks back to me anymore. I write from personal experience and express personal opinion. If I want to be preached to; I will go to an evangelical church and lay hands on others while speaking in tongues, while being moved by the passionate harmonious moving voice of a holy preacher of almighty god himself ( Halleluiah brothers and sisters { cracking up}). I certainly would not tell anyone how to treat their illness without presenting all the options available, and having them choice the route they wish to follow. I happen to believe strongly in self determination. That's means exactly what it says! If something works for you like medications, therapy, yoga, or just standing on your head singing an old Monkey's tune "I'm a believer", then go for it. If you screw up and make bad choices, you should live with them and accept the consequences of your actions. Your doctor or others don't live your life; you live your own life 24/7. I would think/hope you would do what was ever possible to make that experience as rich, meaningful, gratifying, and contented while you have this precious gift of breath going for you. I should hear some howling from the peanut galleries on this comment. All I can say here; is give it your best shot (hit me with your best shot and take me away {smirk}).

Is this an intellectual debate or just a mental masturbation session? Hummm? You know curious bipolar minds want to know {what a hoot, laughing my SSS off}. Carol Barrel, show them what they have won behind curtain number one {laughing}.

The longer I live, the more I learn, thus the more I know, it’s so ironical that have come to the conclusion and realized I know so very little in reality.

Yours Truly
Stan

Is this an intellectual debate or just a mental masturbation session? Hummm?
Stan

This is the point!