Bipolar minds and lives

[Diane]

Deric Bownds has a post (http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2007/08/steven-frys-secret-life-of-manic.html) up about a series of you-tube videos, 14 in all, narrated by Stephen Fry. Once I started watching I became riveted, and watched all 14. Each one is about 10 minutes long. Excellent info.

(I confess, as I watched I kept checking myself and my own behaviour to see if I have this condition. I'm glad to say, no - not creative enough, and too much a creature of habit and thrift. Whew. Sometimes it's good to be a boring person, probably..)

[Jon Newman]

Hi Diane,

I'm most of the way through these and thought I'd pause to post an interesting insight. It happened to be relayed by Richard Dreyfuss. He states:

I said to my doctor once, "I have become a person I admire in the last few years." I have wept more. I have said "I'm sorry" more. I have succeeded in endeavors that were impossible and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I could not have done that without this courage. He (the doctor) said, "It's not courage. It's the absence of anxiety."

[Diane]

Yeah, I recall the segment.
Just about everything in culture seems to be in place to help reduce anxiety. But there still seems to be so much of it.

[Nick]

It's me. Thanks for helping me know myself...I think.

[Nick]

"Just about everything in culture seems to be in place to help reduce anxiety. But there still seems to be so much of it."
[I still can't do that fancy quote thing so bear with me until I take the time to figure it out.]

This statement also connects with the dissonance and uncertainty threads. Certainty come from our desire to reduce the anxiety of not knowing or, worse, having to choose among the options. The culture that drives our patients into our hands is full of control, posing, anesthestitizing...our role is to reduce anxiety. The culture of therapy is full of anxious therapists looking for certainty, predictability.

As Barrett's quote on Jason's signature would indicate, courage is what you're willing to express. Easier, I suppose, in the absence of anxiety. I wouldn't know.

Nick

[Jon Newman]

Hi Nick,

If it's at all comforting, I seem to be able to effortlessly convert light, mechanical, chemical, and thermal energy into anxiety. This might help explain, in part, the world surplus of anxiety that Diane speaks of.

[Nick]

Yes, Jon. Strangely comforting. Thanks.

[nari]

Just about everything in culture seems to be in place to help reduce anxiety. But there still seems to be so much of it.

(Nick, just highlight your text and hit the little letter with a dogend on lower right, under the clockwise arrow on the toolbar. Bingo)

The fact that there is so much out there to 'help' people endorses the feeling that they have to have someone to get them better. In my small city of under 380,000 folk, there are 6 pages of counsellors in the yellow pages, let alone the zillions of CAM practitioners.
Does demand always produce supply, or can it be vice versa?

Nari

[Diane]

I know that I either don't have a lot of anxiety, or else maybe I do and I won't ever let myself really feel it. I have dim memories of being chronically anxious, mostly in my twenties. Then I figured out that making firm decisions deliberately fed my illusion of creating "certainty" of a sort, and took me completely out of anxiety's trajectory. The downside was realizing that the price one pays, the deal one cuts for the luxury of taking the option to make decisions in order to quell anxiety, was that I would have to live with whatever decisions I would make, peacefully.

Somehow though, I think the sort of anxiety that the bipolar people feel is more overwhelming, not so easily squelched.

[nari]

Having known quite a few bipolar people, I would say that the anxiety experienced by them is endogenous, rather than extrogenous; therefore much more difficult to manage. They may also lack insight into how they are feeling, ie, they don't recognise it as an anxiety state in the same way as someone who is running from a bear. That's what I have been told, anyway, from the horse's mouth.

I think the average person like Diane and myself can devise a lot of strategies to subdue and rationalise anxiety. I don't think bipolar folk can, as much as they would like to.

Nari

[gerry]

I have been unable to watch the video's in the original link. Just won't open on my computer. I may try at home to see if it will work there.

Had to respond, though, as my wife is diagnosed as bipolar. She experiences some of the anxiety, but that is not always a part of bipolar, and not one of her major symptoms. I would agree that Nari's observations are true with some people. In addition, anxiety my not be proportional to the stimulus. Just as with any group of people, I feel I have to throw in the caveat that it is a very diverse group, and take care with generalizations.

[nari]

Gerry, thanks for your contribution.

As with any condition, no matter what, there are variants on the theme and generalisation is foolish. I only wrote from personal contact with those who have been Dx with BPD - and even that diagnosis can be inaccurate. As with many complex conditions.

Nari

[Diane]

Hi Gerry, I think if you manage to get the link to work, you'll see that as the videos unfold, it is stated that there is a lot of variety, both within the symptoms and the response to treatment.
This link (http://youtube.com/results?search_query=SLOTMD+%28Part+1%29&search=Search) might work better.

Today I remembered a neighbour I had, 20 years ago, in a different place than where I live now. It was a rental apartment block, lots of transition all the time- I had never met her. Didn't know she was bipolar. One night something woke me up - the smell of acrid smoke. I sat up with a jolt. Clouds of smoke were pouring in through my slightly open window. Someone or something downstairs was on fire. I could hear wailing. I could hear an alarm. I jumped up and threw on some clothes, and out in the hallway, others were gathered, also awakened by the smoke. It was about 3 AM. Before long the fire truck had arrived. They went in to the apartment, came out with an all clear.

The woman who lived below me had been setting fire to large pieces of curtain and furniture upholstery in big bowls and pots in some sort of ritual she was conducting. She stopped for the night. But she wasn't finished, nor was she stable. She did this again, before long. Again the fire truck came, again she stopped, again she repeated the behavior.

It was getting awfully wearing worrying about whether the building itself, an old firetrap built in 1907 with electricity added later, in cables outside the walls, would go up with the rest of us in it. This time we called the police too. The scene was like in a movie, her naked and wielding a knife, having to be overpowered, tied to a stretcher, screeching, taken away to a psych ward somewhere to be "stabilized".

There was wonderful peace in the building for a few months. We learned that she had stabilized, that she'd been discharged to a halfway house. A short while after that we learned she had committed suicide. She hated lithium, which was all there was to offer at the time. Someone else who lived in the building knew her a little - she was described as a brilliant person, had studied at Sorbonne (I don't know what exactly), but kept going off her meds because she loved the times when she was brilliant and creative. Unfortunately she couldn't cope with the other pole of the condition. Too bad.

I know others these days who are bipolar and completely ordinary, on meds, seemingly content with them, feel more like themselves on them than the unfortunate woman from 20 years ago. Cheers to the brain researchers, psychologists, psychiatrists, medical system and drug companies for at least some things that make life more bearable for certain people.. and for those who live in apartments adjacent to them.