January 2010

  • Top 5 Most Embarrassing Things I've Thought While Manic

    By wildorchid on 1/27/10 4:36pm
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    Stalking Vampire?Stalking Vampire?

     

    A Confession of Sorts: Some of the Most Embarrassing Things I’ve Thought About While in a State of Utter Mania



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  • Facebook and Bipolar Disorder

    By wildorchid on 1/26/10 10:08pm
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    Bipolar DreamsBipolar DreamsI was 22 and lived in a backward suburban town when I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder. Since I had had a family member with BP, I took it rather well and within a week and a half after my week-long hospitalization, I was back doing what everybody in the town my age did- drinking at taverns and sports bars. The first time I went out, I saw a woman who had been in my “facility” at the same time I was- we both looked down at our tables, stayed with our respective friends and kept on drinking and I tried to forget about my own psychosis and her suicide attempt.


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  • Dark Days from the Past

    By wildorchid on 1/19/10 3:07pm
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    Dark Days.....Dark Days.....I went for a walk today when the weather was a bit better, but it didn’t help my mood later on. At the moment, I am feeling frustrated, angry inside, and like I am feeling the effects of SAD, which, trust me, is not altogether uncommon in the Pacific Northwest.


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  • Natural Medication Guide to Bipolar Disorder

    By becksta on 1/18/10 5:02pm
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    Natural Medication Guide to Bipolar DisorderNatural Medication Guide to Bipolar DisorderI’ve been taking medication for Bipolar I most of the time since I was diagnosed, but am always interested in looking into alternatives to a medication-only regime in hopes of lessening my side effects and maybe even lessening the damage to my internal organs. Recently, I read “The Natural Medicine Guide to Bipolar Disorder” by Stephanie Marohan.


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  • Cultural Psychiatry

    By erika on 1/14/10 6:42pm
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    The New York Times has an article which exerpts a bunch of stuff from an upcoming book.  While this is always a dicey proposition (generally if an author's argument takes an entire book to make in the first place, trying to explain the whole thing in a single newspaper article is only going to lead to tears) it is already leading to controversy.


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  • Mental Illnesses Across Borders

    By wildorchid on 1/13/10 6:09pm
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    Should I Have Become a Shaman Instead?Should I Have Become a Shaman Instead?I was hiking with two friends a few years ago as I talked about some of my stranger experiences with Bipolar Disorder.

    “You probably would have been a Shaman” was the response of one. I agreed that that was true to a limited extent, but that he also would have had some special voodoo capabilities as a result of his bad eye-sight. (The idea being that now he has corrected his vision with contacts but in the days of Native Americans might have been developed  an extra or hidden sight into deeper realms.) We laughed a little while about our “hidden talents” and continued our hike.


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  • The World According to Me, a Snippet

    By wildorchid on 1/11/10 3:39pm
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    BeautifulBeautifulHere’s some more of the world according to me.

    Every day I feel different. I look around and my perspective changes; I don’t know why.  Maybe it’s because of the weather, maybe because of the medication I swallow, and maybe as a result of my own semi-twisted imagination looking at the world in a different way.

    The big highs and lows have higher arcs, but the daily differences are more subtle than that and sometimes teach me new things, and sometimes not.

    During my periods of mania, I’ve imagined myself in many adventures- I thought I would convert to Christianity one day, only to realize that I was probably being secretly stalked by an aging Vampire the next. (To clarify, I did discard that theory two days later.)

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  • Are Anti-Depressants Worth It?

    By wildorchid on 1/6/10 5:31pm
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    Depression and Bipolar DisorderDepression and Bipolar DisorderMost of us who are Bipolar are on some strange cocktail of medicine that only a physician can truly understand. The mixtures are so complex and the side-effects are so bad that it is difficult to comprehend what medication does exactly what and even harder to determine which medicines to stay on and which to cut back on. I just read an article in the NYT about the effectiveness of the more popular anti-depressants on the market and you might be surprised about the results.

    The latest news suggests that anti-depressants are more effective in cases of severe depression. This somewhat contradicts earlier studies that suggested that anti-depressants were no more effective than a placebo in a controlled study.


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