Real, Tough Men Cry Too
Do you think “real” men cry? What do you think “real” men are like? I’m a man and I say tough guys are sensitive and real guys cry too.
Do you think “real” men cry? What do you think “real” men are like? I’m a man and I say tough guys are sensitive and real guys cry too.
I work very hard to be productive every day in spite of depression. My depression would like me to stay in bed — forever — but I fight back. I get out of bed, I have coffee, I write and so on. And at the end of the day, I look back and see how productive I was. I find this metric very important. It turns out it’s the depression that makes me judge my productivity very harshly.
I’m in the process of being judged by a doctor and I know the doctor will be judging me for having a mental illness, not to mention my mental illness treatment. This is happening because I just put in an application for a new general practitioner (GP). On the application, I had to write down my medical conditions, medical concerns and all medications being taken. As I looked at it all, I knew it didn’t look good for me. It’s funny that having a serious mental illness makes you appear like a less-than-desirable patient seeing as you’re one of the people who actually need help more. And that’s because of judgment. It’s about a doctor judging you for your mental illness and your treatment. It’s unfair, but it definitely happens.
Suicide is likely the most popular topic here on the Bipolar Burble and anxiety is pretty much popular everywhere so both suicide and anxiety needed the webinar treatment. In the case of suicide, the webinar’s focus will be on the nitty-gritty of suicide and suicide prevention and the anxiety webinar will be about all things bipolar and anxiety, including tips on how to fight anxiety. The first offering of each will be in the next couple of weeks.
People with mental illness frequently stop taking their medication. This is known as medication non-adherence or medication noncompliance. No matter what doctors choose to call it, however, it’s a problem. By and large, when the mentally ill stop taking their medication bad things happen to them. But if this is the case, then why do people with mental illness stop taking their medication?
Can people with serious mental illnesses recover? That’s the question. It depends on your definition of “recovery” of course, but we’ll get to that in a minute. “Recovery” is now the goal when it comes to mental illnesses and, if your doctor is anything like the one I had when I was diagnosed, he will have told you that you will recover. But I’m not sure that recovery isn’t a myth for those with serious mental illness. Read one for more about not recovering from serious mental illness.
I think it’s important to mourn a life with a disability like bipolar disorder. Not everyone with bipolar disorder is disabled, of course, there is a range of functionalities associated with bipolar disorder, but for those for whom it is a disability, mourning it is part of the bipolar diagnosis acceptance process. Unfortunately, this is rarely focused on or even discussed by healthcare professionals. This doesn’t make it unimportant, however. I believe mourning a bipolar disability is actually something that can improve one’s mental health.
I wrote a piece here called “How a Person with Bipolar Disorder Thinks.” It has been one of the most popular articles here with almost one million people (really) having read it. But, of course, a short article on thinking in bipolar disorder is just the tip of the iceberg. I didn’t even touch on the errors in thinking, called cognitive distortions, that are common in bipolar disorder. That’s why I developed a webinar on just such a topic. This new webinar is called: Get Real 4: How People with BIpolar Think — Cognitive Distortions.
Today I want to talk about how hopelessness plus suffering often equals suicide. Just suffering or just being hopeless often isn’t enough. It’s when these things come together that a suicide attempt is made. And while these two variables are not the only ones that can lead to suicide, hopelessness and suffering sure are big ones.
Many people are saying “defund the police” right now, and while this tends to be with regards to saving the lives of (mostly) Black men who are unjustly killed by the police, what few people realize is that defunding the police would also save the lives of the mentally ill too. Now, I know the idea of defunding the police is scary to some, but read on to find out why defunding the police should be done and how it will save the lives of people with mental illness.
As many of you know, I’ve started rolling out live, mental health webinars. Thanks to the coronavirus, we’re all forced to review our business models and I don’t think I need to tell you that there haven’t been any in-person speaking engagements recently. But that’s okay because it has given me the opportunity to reach out to you, directly, with webinars I think you can use. I’ve now rolled out five webinars and two of them are free depression and bipolar webinars!
I decided to take a look at race and racism’s effects on mental health because as the title says, black mental health matters (and this goes for all skin tones, of course). But what I realized is that I’m not the best person for this. Just as I believe the voices of people with bipolar disorder need to be in discussions about bipolar disorder, I believe people of color need to be in discussions about race and racism’s effect on mental health.
Luckily for me, I happen to know Mike Veny — an African American, a preeminent mental health speaker and author of Transforming Stigma: How to Become a Mental Wellness Superhero. You might remember Mike from his well-received guest post here, “Improving Men’s Mental Health Before It Becomes a Crisis.” And while no one can speak for an entire group, so many of Mike’s words ring true and clear.
Mike and I sat down this morning to talk about race and mental health and how uncomfortable conversations about race and mental health are the ones we desperately need to have.
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