The Bipolar Burble welcomes guest Karen Tyrell. Karen is an Australian mental health advocate and author of the new mental health memoir Me & Her: A Memoir of Madness.
Today Karen shares a little about her life and the place writing has had in her bipolar disorder recovery.
Read MoreAs many people know from my last post on hypomania, last week I was filmed for a documentary by Andy Fiore. The documentary is about bipolar disorder and I was one of three people interviewed. Michael Schratter of Ride Don’t Hide, an international tour and movement to battle mental illness stigma, was also interviewed.
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I’m not sure how your average person deals with stress. Bingeing? Talking? Ranting? Raging? Running? I just don’t know. As far as I can see, people do all those things when they’re stressed.
But for a person with bipolar disorder, stress can lead to hypomania. And one has to deal with the stress and deal with the hypomania combined – which is kind of stressful in and of itself.
Tomorrow I’m being filmed for a documentary by Andy Fiore of Fiore Films. It is for a documentary about people who have learned to successfully live with bipolar disorder. As many of us do, I successfully live with bipolar disorder type 2 even if it’s a rocky path much of the time. And one might argue, I have turned my bipolar disorder into a positive by becoming a mental health writer and helping create a positive path for others living with bipolar disorder.
But I admit, I’m nervous. Stressed. I’m stressed about appearing on camera. Even though I do a video spot for HealthyPlace once a month, I still don’t feel particularly comfortable looking into the black abyss of a camera lens.
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Yesterday I was having a good day. This doesn’t happen to me all that often but I was being all productive and downright cheery. Miracles. Every day.
But then something happened. It wasn’t an earth-shattering thing, it was just a thing. A life thing. A thing that your average person would feel bad about but not the end of the world.
Just the end of my world.
Depression is a funny thing. Not so much funny ha ha but more funny want to slit your throat. Depression makes you believe things that aren’t true. Depression makes you believe that you are lowly, that you are nothing, that you are unlovable, that you are unlikeable, and a host of other things all seemingly designed to tear you to the floor.
And it’s really unfortunate when life events work to confirm, or seemingly confirm, these false beliefs.
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If you feel you may harm yourself, get help now.
I talked about dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) in the last post. Dialectical behavior therapy is designed to work specifically with borderline personality disorder and part of this disorder is often self-harm so DBT uses specific techniques to try to stop self-harm urges and prevent self-harm.
Self-harm is a huge problem for many people. It is typically a sign of borderline personality disorder but it can occur with any disorder (or no diagnosis at all). Self-harm, also known as self-mutilation or self-injury, can be any form of self-abuse including cutting, burning, hitting and statistics often include those with eating disorders as well. Millions of people in the US practice some form of self-harm.
Self-harm is often practiced by teens and is more common in women than in men, but make no mistake about it, many adults self-harm and men do as well. It is a behavior to be taken seriously. Here are some techniques to stop self-harm urges.
Read MoreIn spite of what some people intimate, I do endorse non-drug solutions and one of the best adjunct treatments to medications is psychotherapy. Many types of therapy can work for different people, but one current and research-backed therapy is Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT).
Now, don’t let the big words scare you – this is not a scary therapy. This is simply a therapy that works to use reason to integrate and synthesize to opposite points of view. Meaning, the techniques taught are designed to find a balance in emotion, behavior and acceptance.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy and Borderline Personality DisorderDialectical behavior therapy was designed specifically to treat borderline personality disorder; however, it has shown usefulness in mood disorders and research is currently underway to see if DBT techniques are also useful in other disorders. This therapy represents a huge breakthrough as the first indicated treatment of borderline personality disorder.
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Cyclothymia is neither bipolar depression nor unipolar depression but instead it is an illness that lies somewhere in the middle.
When psychiatric illnesses first started being recognized, some doctors felt that unipolar and bipolar depressions weren’t really the binary options for an illness but really just opposite ends of a spectrum. So then, one would have a spectrum where one could be a 100% bipolar depressive, or 100% unipolar depressive or they could lay somewhere in the middle. However, as illnesses need names and diagnostic criteria and not really vague percentages, bipolar and unipolar depression were defined separately.
Bipolar 2 though, is recognition of this false dichotomy. Bipolar 2 really sits in between unipolar and bipolar depression as more depressed than bipolar 1 but more hypomanic (emotionally dysregulatory) than unipolar depression. (See the difference between bipolar 1 and bipolar 2 disorders.)
And that’s fine as far as it goes. But there is also recognition from a lot of doctors that other states lie even more in the middle, and cyclothymia is one such disorder.
Read MoreHi all. I have a couple of announcements to make and a piece of schizophrenia research to share. Today’s post is about:
I, as a good little webmistress, keep an eye on my web analytics. So yes, I know some things about my audience, and one of the things I know is what people are searching for when they find me. This sometimes influences what I write about, like today: What is the worst mental illness?
That depends on how you judge it. You could judge it by suicide rate, in which case:
You could judge the worst mental illness based on disability rates in which case you would probably get:
Perhaps schizophrenia is the worst as it’s associated with more psychosis (delusions and hallucination). Perhaps major depression is worst because of the number of treatment-resistant cases.
Or perhaps the answer is simply this: The worst mental illness is the one you have.
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