and you write about your cure

Mark, I’m not sure how many times I have to say this… I am not cured, I have no cure, there are no cures. I’ve never said or written that I was cured.

There are, by my definition, treatments. The one I use involves therapy, this blog and medications. It works for me. Jane uses meditation, others use “natural” non-pharmaceutical methods. Jane says she’s ten years removed from serious effects, I believe her. Gianna writes about how the medications she has taken have had horrible effects on her body, I believe her. I write the medications have worked for me and you say I’m a troll — and you know exactly how insulting that word is.

I respect their decisions on how best to treat themselves. They’ve both identified problems in their life, things which prevent them from being healthy, and worked very hard to find a solution. But I do not respect people who constantly tell me I’m wrong.

Psychiatry(specifically the Pharma chemical Co.) is exploiting the (natural) human condition.

Mark, there’s no need for you to explain to me your feelings on psychiatric care, or even on my recovery. You make your views very clear on your own blog, and there’s very little chance any conversation between the two of us will ever result in anything other than you repeating the same statements over and over again.

However, to your points about this specific post, and my responses to comments left here…

…but with this topic you know its going to get ugly and personal.

The “topic” of this post is something you’ve been writing about for years. You have an entire blog dedicated to the ‘evils of psychiatric care’, to the dangers of the “pharma” industry as you understand them, where you don’t use words like “could” and “may”, you use “do” and “will”. I’ve published a post questioning some of the standard anti-pharma / psychiatry arguments and you’re calling me a troll.

You could have stated I don’t/I do believe in abortion.

That’s just it Mark, I’m not saying abortion is right or wrong, or that I’m pro or anti, I’m writing “we need as many options as we can get”. I’ve never written or said my way was the only way. Or that medications must be used. Only that once we find a treatment which works for us we have to stick with it until we’ve been better long enough that trying something new will not be dangerous.

We need ‘Planned Parenthood’; adoption options; chastity rings; born-again virginity; the pill; the morning after pill; better sex ed at home and schools; ‘Focus On The Family’; clean, easily accessible and affordable clinics; emmenagogues… and, yes, we need better laws protecting us from doctors who would do us harm, and to ensure all of the options we have are safe.

Just to clarify… my only complaint with the responses left on this post have been with the extreme length of one response, a comment aimed at belittling someone who is recovering and you calling me a troll. Twice.

I haven’t attacked anyone for leaving their personal thoughts here, or for having thoughts different than mine. And I have never gone to your blog to question your recovery, nor have I ever written a post here attacking you or anyone else.

I wasn’t looking for an argument when I published this post Mark, and so far I haven’t been in one. I also will not be drawn into one. The reason I published this post was I believe each and everything I wrote was true and accurate.

I use the word troll in the context of fishing. One hangs a fishing rod with lure off the end of the boat and “trolls” around the lake looking to catch something.
You could have stated I don’t/I do believe in abortion. I do/I don’t believe in the Pope. I do/I don’t believe in the President.
This looks to me like the guy in monty python looking for an arguement.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3HaRFBSq9k
A good arguement is fine and dandy by me, but with this topic you know its going to get ugly and personal.
You write that the bad guys falsely claim to have a cure, and you write about your cure .

Psychiatry(specifically the Pharma chemical Co.) is exploiting the (natural) human condition.

Depression used to be the sin of sloth. It is not new.
http://www.danteinferno.info/7-deadly-sins.html

ADD in children used to be bad behaviour. Parents would feel guilty for physically punishing their child into obeadiance. Enter magic chemicals for a brain chemical imbalance. No guilt for the parent in this method of control. Though it then reduces a child into a chemical equation, like a machine with a defective gear.

Interal emotional living problems used to handled by our religious faith, now its a brain chemical imbalance.

We are all on our own life journeys. Anything that helps us to continually produce works
is good. It’s up to our own God or gods to judge us and our work.

Fact: the legal psych chemicals make billions a year.
The billions made, are used to justify the easy answer of a magic pill.

Circular reasoning works, because circular reasoning works…because

If you and Dame have issues, or want to get into a fight, go nuts as long as the aggression is kept respectful. The same goes for any comments directed at “you people”. Feel free, however, to swear at me all you want.

However, this “With your attitude I highly doubt you will never be where I am or heal yourself like I have. I feel pity for you.” kind of attack should be considered totally out of bounds. So no more of it.

I’ve tried to respond to what I believed were your main points. If you feel like I’ve missed any, or would like a response to anything specific, please let me know.

1.

“…by pretending I did not have depression I demanded my case be reviewed.”

“…they will not see the symptoms I had memorized from the DSM. I did it without any drugs whatsoever. I did it at 15 years old. I fooled a judge, a social worker, counselors, doctors anyone I wanted to fool.”

“…even though they continued to occur inside myself. So there is one great myth debunked right there.”

I’m still confused on this point. You had the symptoms, you fooled people into believing you had the symptoms under control even though they weren’t, you spent years living with those symptoms until you finally discovered extreme levels of meditation as a means to control and suppress them until now, decades later, all you have to do is small meditative adjustments if you feel the symptoms returning. But you still believe it’s not a disease.

2.

“As time goes by I find myself reading all those books I have about meditation and yoga and chinese medicine. I find a paradigm that views sickness as a form of energy balance.”

fMRI studies done over the past couple of years have shown extreme meditation can “change the workings of the brain and allow people to achieve different levels of awareness.”

Washington Post: The Buddhist practitioners in the experiment had undergone training in the Tibetan Nyingmapa and Kagyupa traditions of meditation for an estimated 10,000 to 50,000 hours, over time periods of 15 to 40 years. As a control, 10 student volunteers with no previous meditation experience were also tested after one week of training.

[T]he results unambiguously showed that meditation activated the trained minds of the monks in significantly different ways from those of the volunteers. Most important, the electrodes picked up much greater activation of fast-moving and unusually powerful gamma waves in the monks, and found that the movement of the waves through the brain was far better organized and coordinated than in the students.

But, as I said the first time you came over here, “fMRI scans have already shown, for example, that when ‘bipolar brains with Lithium’ were compared to ‘bipolar brains without Lithium’ “the volume of grey matter in the brains of those on lithium was as much as 15 percent higher in areas that are critical for attention and controlling emotions.””

3.

“Not one advance in understanding how bipolar is caused or how to cure it.”

One of the points I make is there are no cures. Yet. But there have been many studies published about why and how people get manic depression. I’ll quote from two of the ones in my blogroll:

August, 2008:

An international team of scientists examined the genomes of 10,596 people mainly from Britain and the United States, including 4,387 with bipolar disorder, also sometimes known as manic-depression.

The researchers found those with bipolar disorder more likely to have certain variants of the ANK3 and CACNA1C genes. Proteins made by the two genes help govern the flow of sodium and calcium ions into and out of neurons in the brain, influencing the activity of these nerve cells.

September, 2008:

Children of older fathers run an increased risk of suffering from bipolar disorder, a study by researchers at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet has found.

Researchers at the university identified 13,428 patients in Sweden with bipolar disorder in registers dating from the 1970s to 2001. Each patient was compared with a random sample of five “healthy controls” of the same age and sex.

After adjusting for the age of the mother, the researchers found that children whose fathers were over 29 years old at the time of the their birth ran a higher risk of being diagnosed as bipolar, a disorder previously referred to as manic depression.

Neither one is proof of anything, but it is evidence. And, again, since the age of popping off someone’s skull to see what’s happening inside has only just ended, it’s a very good start.

4.

“Some of you folks have meandered through life on one cocktail or another of thought and emotion manipulating drugs and you have no knowledge of the real you underneath it all.

“I am using the ‘bipolar paradigm’ because it’s in place and it’s useful in communicating with the rest of you. I may not believe in bipolar but that does not take away from the fact that I was diagnosed with that label for a very good reason.

You generalize far too much Jane. And most of your assumptions about “you bipolars” are wrong. I think you’re using your own experiences as a guide for how we’re being treated, and I think you’re frustrated at how we’re letting ourselves be abused by a system which hurt you.

4b.

“If I really wanted to be bipolar hardass I would tell most of you (Gabriel excepted) that you have all been misdiagnosed.”

I’m not sure why I’d be an exception, but careful using that “misdiagnosed” word… it could easily be tossed back at you Jane. And that really doesn’t solve, or help, anything.

5.

“What can you really teach people about healing from mental illness? Take a pill?”

Again, meditation works as a way to manipulate your own mind. But the amount of time needed to achieve that control has been shown to be in the range of thousands of hours of intense training and discipline. I have only your word to judge your recovery. Yet, every chance you get you doubt me and the tens of thousands of people who use medications. We are delusional, or ignorant or under some form of hypnosis to believe the medications which didn’t work for you, work for “us”. And yet, whether you can see it or not, thousands of “us” do get substantially better using these medications.

6.

“What matters is results! What matters is that those people who heal themselves with whatever means gain a permanent, lasting benefit.”

It’s not “results” that matter to you, it’s results without medications. Until they find better and more targeted treatments, and even a cure, I will use the tools available to me to treat the symptoms of this disease. And right now that means taking Lithium, Seroquel and Wellbutrin. This may change later on. Again, if you believe meditation has helped you, congratulations on finding something which works. I’d be interested in knowing why you aren’t this vocal about people using medications instead of meditation to treat their diabetes… which is something else I do.

7.

“Until you do, your drugs will forever mask who you really are underneath. You spend every day underneath the influence escaping your internal reality.”

Of course I totally disagree. The disease masked who I am. The medications control the symptoms of the disease allowing me to figure out how to deal with the clinical depressions, and to be the person I was supposed to be…

8.

“I have the requisite family history for a solid case of genetic bipolar and I still don’t believe in it. Why? Because I am no longer suicidally depressed. No longer plagued by racing thoughts and killing rage.

“Even if someday Dr Jamison’s dream comes true and they show the world exactly what genes cause bipolar, I am still not going to believe in it. Why?

“Simple. Genetic expression can change.”

I actually reported on The Genome Project back when their first findings came out in 2000. When the “completed” report was released in 2003 the idea was, and remains, it would take decades and even generations for any substantial cures or treatments to develop from their findings.

It’s only very recently researchers have been able to find genetic markers and causes for some cancers. And it makes sense for them to be the first to do so considering the hundreds of billions of dollars pumped into cancer research worldwide.

Imaging technology capable of seeing the brain function in real time has been available for barely a decade. One of the great wonders of the 2000 tech crash was the incredible fibre optic networks left behind which now joins university’s to public and private research laboratories around the world.

Pre-fMRI and pre-Genome Project we had to rely on our own descriptions of our symptoms in order to be treated. But the pre-rubber glove era of mental health is ending.

Do genes commit us to certain actions, or to having certain diseases? Possibly. But having a cancer gene does not mean I will have cancer. Is manic depression hereditary? There’s a lot of research saying yes. But, like almost everything else, it’s not a guarantee.

9.

“What then have you really healed? What have you recovered from? I think it’s dishonest to call yourself healed and recovered. I think you are bullshitting yourself. I don’t think that’s anything to be proud of or to write a book about.”

This is from something I wrote in August:

I’m in my fourth year of recovery and I haven’t had a major episode in pretty much a year. But I’ve had a few small ones since then. I am not recovered. I will never be recovered. There are no cures on the horizon, but there are better treatments and diagnostic tools coming.

So just to clarify, I’ve never once called myself either “healed” or “recovered”. To anyone, anywhere. I am in recovery. I am healing. Just like a recovering addict, everything happens one day at a time. All I, or any of us, can do is prepare ourselves during the good days so we can be strong during the bad ones.

Gabriel,

I was dxd with bipolar 1 as a teen. I did not believe it then. I did not disagree that I had depression. What they called mania I saw as my personal power. (much like Icarus does) An ability. An inner fire.

Later I had a chance to study psychology in depth as a teenager. I was in lockdown. I had plenty of time on my hands. I borrowed the DSM III as well as college level psychology books and studied every symptom and looked for them in my self. Then gradually, using the meditation techniques I had learned in karate and yoga I began to monitor my inner world for those symptoms.

In time I began to sense when my fingers would start twitching or my knee would start jump around. I began to understand that I could intercept these impulses if I lay in wait for them like a predator. I learned how to slow down my racing thoughts and that vastly helped slow down my rambling, incoherent speech. It stopped the flight of ideas.

After a few weeks of mastering control over my mania and by pretending I did not have depression I demanded my case be reviewed. I won my release from psychiatric group homes by learning to control the outer signs of manic depression even though they continued to occur inside myself.

So there is one great myth debunked right there. I controlled and concealed the existence of both the depression and the mania from numerous professionals in a supervised living environment. I still had the problems. Only now I can pass an exam, an interview, an assessment with any mental health professional and they will not see the symptoms I had memorized from the DSM. I did it without any drugs whatsoever. I did it at 15 years old. I fooled a judge, a social worker, counselors, doctors anyone I wanted to fool.

Yet the ‘condition’ of manic depression continued. I stopped thinking about it for years. Depression was my burden, mania was nothing! It was no disease. It was who and what I was inside. So I gave it no more thought and continued on.

For years I just carried on. As I entered my adult years and I was no longer institutionalized I realized I no longer had to exert all this constant control over myself. Now if I wanted I could fight back.

When I went to work and a customer gave me shit I would tell them off or threaten to kick their ass and get fired on my second day of work. All those years of repressed and tightly controlled rage began to come loose. More and more I began to do just whatever I felt like now that I finally could actually do what I wanted.

Of course you do that a few times when you are on your own and you come up short on money real quick. Then you don’t pay the rent. Then comes the 30 day notice. Now you are angry and depressed.

Then magically one day I discovered pot. The only drug that every really quieted down the voices in my head. It was heaven. I got up in the morning smoked a joint and went to work. Suddenly I am lot easier to get along with. Suddenly I don’t even have to try to control my anger. It’s just not there. I have found nature’s own anti anxiety, anti depressant and anti psychotic.

But guess what? There is a learning curve to getting use to life on drugs. You are learning the dosing on your own. Things begin to happen when you spend every waking moment high as fuck.

You get into a fender bender. You get pulled over by the cops. You forget things like paying a bill. You will just get around to it. You can’t pay the parking ticket or the utility bill because if you did, you would not have enough money to re up your supply on Friday. At this point in the game, the idea of becoming straight is terrifying. You know you will get short with everyone. The mind churns and the inner voices tell you to kill. There is no way you can straighten up, no way.

Then eventually you are making decisions like, whether to fix your front brakes or get another bag of dope. You are only 18 and you work three different fast food jobs to make money. Before you got on weed you use to take every extra shift for the cash. Now we have pot to come home to. All day long you think about getting out of here as soon as you can so you get high again.

Unfortunately reality crashes in. You lose your job now, not for going off on customers but for showing up late once too many times because you got stoned before you went to work.

Then all of the sudden you do find yourself straight and out of money. You have no job, You have no apartment. You have 3 cigarettes left and about 50 miles worth of gas. Out of desperation you call up your grandparents or your real dad and beg for a couple hundred dollars to start over. To get your car repaired, to pay off those tickets. To get another satchel of buds. To quiet those voices.

You repeat that cycle, about once every three months. You go from temp job to temp job. Eventually the tit dries up. Your family says they can’t keep giving you bail outs every time you need one. You got to learn to grow up. My life consists at the point of being high or not being high. When I was not high I was facing the real me. Inside I realized that after two years of being an adult I am just as much of a fuck up now as I was when I was a kid.

Every time I had to straighten up, all my problems are there, just waiting for me. I have the overwhelming urge to kill somebody or myself. I come to the conclusion that the only jobs I am suited for are the kinds of jobs were you work real hard out of sight. I find jobs where I work graveyards and can show up stoned and do my job. When I straighten up at work I only have a few hours to go in this warehouse or factory before I can go home. Very little human interaction.

Gradually, I learn to live life as a drug addict. I know that I can not get straight for long or something bad is going to happen. I end up keeping this job for some time. I am finally supporting myself. Gradually I try to ramp down my meds because they’ve begun to stop working at the doses I am at all the time. As this happens, more and more my ‘illness’ returns a little bit at a time. In time I realize that this is about as good my life is ever going to get and that this might just be the best time to kill myself once and for all. While I am the top of my game. I plan every last detail for months. I take myself on a Sunday drive and then try really hard to kill myself. (this is where all you bipolars are supposed to go ‘mixed episode lol’)

This time almost don’t make it. When I wake up with tubes coming of me I think to myself that I am such a loser that I can’t even kill myself.

I use the same tricks to get out of the obligatory 7 day stay in the psych wards once I am stabilized. I lie perfectly. They let me go. The first thing I am thinking is going back and doing right god damit. Fuck pills this time I am going to hang.

My brother and my best friend get me really high and keep putting coffee and cigarettes in my hand. I sit on this giant swing for days just watching the sun go up and go down. I begin to realize that as long as I sat absolutely still and did not interact with anyone, that I did not want to kill anyone. As long as I have my cigarettes and I can sit here and watch the cornstalks blowing in the wind. Life is not so bad.

I gain a vision in my mind. Life was not so horrible if I could just be left the fuck alone in a quiet place day after day. If I could keep this up I might survive. A simple life like that, I can live.

I realize that no one is ever going to support me in living like that. That meant that I would need to get back into society at least long enough to get a job, keep it and earn my right to be left the fuck alone. I know there is one place in the world where I won’t be thrown in jail for smoking my life saving drug. I know I am going to be a stoner and I have to change my life to insulate the collateral damage from that.

So I move to California and abandon my entire life. I give it all up to save everyone from me. I find a job. Moving steel all day in a factory. The hardest work I have ever done in my life. Dangerous too. It pays real well and I am able to afford to live by myself in my own apartment and buy tons of weed.

I walk to work a couple miles every day. No car for me. I can’t handle the responsibility. I keep to myself. I keep my job. As time goes by I find myself reading all those books I have about meditation and yoga and chinese medicine. I find a paradigm that views sickness as a form of energy balance.

All disease is either too much chi, too little chi, or bad, blocked, stagnant chi. I look inside myself and I find too much chi in my mind, that’s why I think so hard so fast. Too little chi in my heart, is why I am so sad all the time. Too much blocked and damaged chi in my body is also effecting me.

I have nothing else to lose right? Nothing going on so I find the solution to resolving all chi problems is chi gung. Energy work. It’s fascinating. I buy books and teach myself and I feel better. Then small problems crop up. I find myself getting chi spikes and losses. My body feels weird. My brain seems more racing, I suddenly have flashes of depression.

I decide that it is now time to start learning from someone who knows what they are doing. I seek out and begin to train with one of the best chi gung masters in the world. Who coincidentally happens to live less than 100 miles away. Was it fate or karma that I moved here?

Then I begin to practice this kind of work all the time. In fact, the more I practice the less pot I need to get through the day. My thoughts are quieter. My triggers are less. My anger has simply not shown up for days. I am learning to relax my body without the assistance of drugs. Gradually, bit by bit I am able to get through the day without getting stoned in the morning or at work on lunch. Now I am just smoking a joint when I come home from work like any other blue collar might crack a beer.

But unlike the blue collar I don’t crack a beer and put my feet up and watch tv, no sir. Instead, I smoke my joint and then go outside to the park and begin practicing my tai chi and qi gong. Instead of one hour in the morning my practice is growing into two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening.

I live one day at a time concerned only with practicing my chi gung and meditation at sunrise and sunset. Every single day. Everywhere I go I have my backpack with all my self help books and a bottle of water in it. I live only to try to stay calm and relaxed every waking moment.

One day I realize that years have gone by and I have not been depressed or raging. I have not had any voices or delusions. I realize that this lifestyle is winning. It’s winning against all prognosis. Everyone thought I would be dead by now. Dead or in jail, in rehab or in psychiatric lockdown.

Only I am not in any of those places. In fact, I am very much happy. Happy with myself, my life. I don’t watch too much TV. I don’t read the paper. I go over to my friends house once a week to watch Babylon 5 and the Simpsons and get high.

My friends have begun to notice that I am easier to be around. I am not tense. I am not anxious. I am not hostile. I am not depressed. I am changing. I am changed.

Then one day I realize that if I wanted I get make a great push to get to heart of things. If I wanted, I could begin to focus on my training all the time. As cosmic fate would have it. I am going to get that time because I am about to be laid off. Laid off not fired! I have come along way indeed. When business picks up they will hire me again.

Now, I have all day long to practice. I take my savings and I invest it into paying my few bills for a long time. I don’t have to worry about rent or anything for awhile. Then I begin training full time.

I spent my time training in shifts. Four hours in the morning, four hours in the evening. Nothing can pull me away from the woods and the rivers edge not even the cold or rain and fog. When my body is finally tired from so much physical practice I begin to simply sit. I am able to meditate for hours without distraction. I begin to realize that I have spent an entire day without getting high at all and I am fine.

It’s time for an experiment. So I put my crutch against the wall and start to walk without it. Sure enough after a few days I notice a few tiny disturbances in my peace. I realize that this was a blessing. As long as I was high, even a little, I was not getting a completely accurate real time scan of my inner world. The fact that disturbances were now occurring meant that I had more work to do.

I did not have to do this. No one was twisting my arm. All my friends were stoners. If I quit now I am going to have no support whatsoever. Oh well. My spiritual journey is more important than my social life. It’s more important that I find out who I am then to continue to be lost.

I had not been in trouble with the law since I left my home states. I had no debts now. I had no responsibility or obligation. Remember, I took responsibility for my problems and my coping mechanisms.

You think as a suicidal, occasionally homicidal drug addict that I had any business getting into relationships with people? I had no business whatsoever inflicting my problems on other people. So I had no children, no spouse, nobody that would be effected by my lifestyle.

I could just keep on doing what I was doing. There was nothing wrong with where I was in my life at that point. You could even argue that I was no longer heavily addicted or dependent on marijuana anymore. I now used very little to get by. A joint a day keeps the Pdoc away. Marijuana, for the maintenance treatment of insanity.

I had a unique opportunity to do something most people never even think about. I had the opportunity to get involved with deep spiritual meditation for as long as I wanted.

At the age of 25 that is exactly what I did. I began to practice sitting meditation more than anything else. I would sit for a few hours. Get up, do yoga and tai chi to stretch. Sit back down and meditate some more.

I had an amazing experience. I accidentally found myself during a self directed meditation retreat that lasted two weeks. I fell in love with myself as a spiritual being. There was nothing wrong with me at all.

All my depressions, my rage, the inner voices, the self injury and self hate it was all gone. I saw very clearly how I had become so crazy for so long. I knew right then and there, that I would never hurt myself again. I could not have attained that level of inner silence had my mind been at all fogged up by any drugs of any kind for reasons I have explained elsewhere.

Years later I find myself in my 30s. I take one of those little pop up depression screens just for the heck of it. I answer the depression screen honestly. It tells me that I have discovered the secret of happiness and I laugh.

Then for shits and giggle I type in bipolar disorder. A word I had not thought about almost two decades. You guys know what I find. I find YOU. I find PsychCentral, Healthy Place, Bipolar World. Furious Seasons, NAMI. I find all your blogs. I find an entire world about bipolar has grown up while I was having nothing to do with it. I read your blogs and what do I find?

Genetic chemical imbal…blah blah blah. I can’t control it, it’s not my fault, blah blah. I need all these meds, blah blah.

You know what I am thinking?

Bull shit.

I then begin an intensive process on catching up on everything that is possibly known about bipolar. I spend the last two years catching up on bipolar. You know what else I find?

Not one advance in understanding how bipolar is caused or how to cure it. All I find is drugs, drugs, drugs and more drugs. Not just in the last 20 years has there been no understanding or cures for bipolar but there has no advances in curing or understanding it in almost 100 years!

The human genome has been decoded and despite K Redfield Jamison’s fantasies, sure enough, no gene for bipolar, not even a combination. No proof of this chemical imbalance.

When they put me on lithium and antipsychotics they were treating me right out of her playbook on managing bipolar. A treatment that ruined my mind and body. A treatment that gave me a real reason to kill myself.

I read these bipolar blogs and I buy and read a handful of these bipolar memoirs. My mania made me buy a horse. My mania made me have sex with three coworkers. My mania made me steal stuff. My depression made me try to kill myself. My disease, my illness my genes made me do this that and the other thing

You know what I am thinking.

Bull shit.

There is one thing that is true. No matter how badly I wanted to deny it. Without doubt I suffered the worst of the symptoms of bipolar disorder for a very long time. Far worse symptoms than ‘bipolar 2′ or ‘cyclothymia’. The worst of the worst.

However, I find that everything that is supposed to be true about bipolar is not. It’s not a chemical imbalance. It’s not a genetic disease. It’s not incurable.

Unfortunately there is no other paradigm to talk about insanity! The APA has a system in place that allows us to talk about symptoms meaningfully. We have words, labels and phrases which we can use to effectively talk about our subjective experiences of mental illness.

We have words like derailment, delusion, suicide, persistent nonspecific irritability, generalized anxiety, triggers, derealization, flat effect, compulsion and so on. These are useful words.

Bipolar itself? No such thing. The definition that exists on NAMI, no such thing.

Manic depression. Well, that’s a much better word/phrase/term than bipolar. It’s more accurate. We have depression, we have manias. The problem there, is that they are not inherently connected. That’s why you can have a mixed episode. Mania and depression can coexist simultaneously. It’s not always one or the other.

The depression can be cured on it’s own terms. Mania, can be cured on it’s own terms.
My depression was the first thing to go. The mania went a bit later.

It was not just like I beat bipolar with this strategy. I beat schizo affective disorder and PTSD too.

That fact alone makes me a modern mental health miracle. They say it can not be done. They say people like me who have multiple coexisting mental health conditions tend to be worse off over our lifetimes than you lucky folks who only have one label, like maybe cyclothymia. I was told to my face by a psychiatrist that I would be suicidal and psychotic for the rest of my life. She was wrong.

It should not take that much of a leap in cognition to realize where I am going with my stuff. I am using the ‘bipolar paradigm’ because it’s in place and it’s useful in communicating with the rest of you. I may not believe in bipolar but that does not take away from the fact that I was diagnosed with that label for a very good reason.

If I really wanted to be bipolar hardass I would tell most of you (Gabriel excepted) that you have all been misdiagnosed. That the inclusion of child bipolar, bipolar 2 and cyclothymia has made a mockery, a joke out of the seriousness of manic depression. The real manic depression is the kind that I had. The kind that leaves you homeless, jobless, addicted, in jail and trying to kill yourself every other year. You are all so lucky that you found some wonder pill since they did not work for me. Treatment resistant bipolar 1. How’s that for having a hand dealt to you eh?

Only I can’t believe in bipolar because it is not true that it is incurable. I have a sister that tried killing herself ten years after my first attempt. You know what kind of DX she got? You got it, bipolar 1. My own mother has admitted to me over the phone when I was at a psych ward that she had been depressed her entire life. She feared drugs and psychiatry and she prayed to Jesus every time she felt suicidal. That’s how she had survived all these years.

I have the requisite family history for a solid case of genetic bipolar and I still don’t believe in it. Why? Because I am no longer suicidally depressed. No longer plagued by racing thoughts and killing rage. No more voices telling me to kill myself and maybe you too on my way out. I am married for crying out loud. Who would have thought it would happen to me.

Even if I am wrong. Even if someday Dr Jamison’s dream comes true and they show the world exactly what genes cause bipolar, I am still not going to believe in it. Why?

Simple. Genetic expression can change. I am sure you’ve heard about damaging the thyroids of lab rats and making them obese? I am sure most have been through puberty and developed secondary sex characteristics. If you have ever had someone close to you go through pregnancy you’ve seen the effects of gene expression and genetic ‘chemical balancing’. Genes turn on for nine months, and turn off.

Genes are not set in stone period. Maybe, just perhaps, you folks, my sister and my mother are all doing something (or not doing doing something) that is causing your genes to express in a certain way.

Let us set aside all discussion about the ‘chi’ of chinese medicine theories. Maybe, just maybe I have stumbled upon a method that would gradually reverse the gene expression for manic states and depressive states. Maybe my spiritual journey was really a scientific journey. Less a matter of energy and really a matter of biology. Maybe I just learned to control my stress, my lifestyle and my thoughts and that was enough.

Either way in the final analysis I am free of mental illness. It’s not up to me to explain it scientifically. I am not a scientist. I do however have an open challenge to brain researchers to image my brain. I want my dna profiled and my genes checked. I have a sister that takes lithium even as I type this she suffers her mental illness. Not me. I escaped.

I still my own flaws. I am not a perfect person. I am no guru or lama. I am not a spiritual teacher or better than everyone else. However I am free of suffering. I love my life and being alive. As rough as the trip was, I have information about how the mind and body works that most of you don’t have.

Gabriel, I am using the bipolar paradigm because it is useful to me. I title my videos bipolar this and bipolar that deliberately to get people with bipolar to find them and use that information for themselves. That is all there is too it.

Most of you have not ever taken a spiritual quest to find themselves with meditation. Most of you have no idea who you are inside. You have never sat vigil for days on your inner most thoughts and feelings. You don’t have a baseline of who you are.

Dame has selectively taken words I put on Gianna’s blog and my blog and dragged them into this comment section thinking that he has me all figured out. But Dame sees what Dame wants to see because that’s how selective thinking and confirmation bias work.

I am going to take a few more minutes out of my writing schedule to set your head on straight Dame. We all know, that in terms of quoting someone, context is everything. So let me put my statements into proper context since you can’t do it yourself.

When I commented on Gianna’s blog I was criticizing the article which was an attempt to get the idea into people’s minds that healthy folks should be able to access methampethamine legally so they could do more work at school or at home.

Since you are reading Gianna’s blog then you know that the drugging of americans for anything and everything is a subject of concern and discussion over there.

If you are on drugs day after day, year after year and you have never take the time to find out who and what you really are as a person inside then you are lost. The same way that underneath my stoner bliss I still had some issues that were not obvious to me, until I quit smoking pot.

Some of you folks have meandered through life on one cocktail or another of thought and emotion manipulating drugs and you have no knowledge of the real you underneath it all.

Unfortunately my body did not do as well in the recovery as my mind. I continue to pay the price for my lack of vision when I was younger. I suffer lingering damage to my nervous system and body from years of hard labor. Years of being physically abused. Years of punishing myself because I did not care if I lived or died. I suffer damage from car accidents and fights that I have been in as well as stupid stunts I did back in the day.

Every now and then I have storm for lack of a better word. A storm of malfunctions primarily neurological and deep tissue pain. Sometimes if it happens in the middle of the night I may wake up unable to sleep. On the worst of those days I might just might break discipline and pop a codeine down. When the pain diminishes a little I start doing my self therapy routines. I do them for as long as it takes.

I don’t take codeine every single day on the off chance that I might just have a pain episode. It’s a last resort, not a first resort. I don’t like taking codeine for too many days if I can avoid it. I tend to become impervious to the effects of pain killers pretty quickly. If I know I am going to have a pain day, I might just go down to the local cannabis dispensary, show them my prescription and get me a cannabis carrot cake or a brownie. Then I take off and go practice tai chi for the rest of the day and actually work on dealing with the problem.

Generally speaking, I don’t have storm days. Generally speaking, I never use drugs unless that happens. If I am having a pain day, I am obviously not at optimal spiritual wellness. Taking a day or two to cope with neurological pain with either cannabis or opiates does not destabilize my mind. I know who I am.

There is a world of difference to using codeine every great now and then and being on three or four different psychiatric drugs year after year after year. I have already put in the spiritual work and the self psychotherapy and meditation. I don’t think that most of you have. Until you do, your drugs will forever mask who you really are underneath. You spend every day underneath the influence escaping your internal reality.

If you can’t see the difference between taking codeine for a day or two out of the year versus a lifetime of mind altering polypharmacy, there is nothing I can do for you.

“in one of your vids, you go so far as to imply that people struggling with bipolar don’t take responsibility for their behaviors — that they fill a script, and that’s their extent of accountability. you also encourage people to get off their meds, that people aren’t ‘real’ if they’re on any form of medication(s “

That is correct.

Like I said, a world of difference between taking a pain killer for a couple of days and being on say…an anti psychotic for months and months without letup. I know because I have done both.

I will tell you what not taking responsibility is. It’s going on a date and explaining to your prospect that your moods are out of your control because of your bipolar. That’s irresponsible. What you should do, is take a break from life, get your mind under your control and then try dating.

I took ten years off from relationships because I knew I had no right at all to visit my problems on somebody else. To expect someone to just put up with my bullshit because that’s just the way god made me. I refused to blame my genes on my problems. I checked out of society and healed myself. That is taking responsibility.

Now I am in a loving relationship. One that has lasted for years. No middle of the night episodes were I am raving mad and psychotic or talking about suicide. No more sitting in the dark dressed all in black chain smoking marlboros while listening to The Cure and Nine Inch Nails feeling sorry for myself for the hand I was dealt. I am no longer too useless, too tired and too depressed to look for work or shower or clean the house.

Were it not for my spouse I would not have all this spare time to write, make videos, chat it up on blogs or work on my book. I would either be working in a factory or teaching martial arts. When my book is done I will being teaching meditation seminars and retreats and teach people that are interested how cure their mental and emotional problems. I am doing something positive with my life and my experiences. I have made the best of the hand I was dealt and I don’t feel sorry for myself anymore.

To be frank Gabriel, your healing and recovery is the story of drug compliance. If you go off your ‘healing’ meds your problems are right where you left them. Like an unfinished phone call on the other line. If you got stranded on an island without meds how long before either mania or depression shows back up do you think? A couple days? A week or two?

What then have you really healed? What have you recovered from? I think it’s dishonest to call yourself healed and recovered. I think you are bullshitting yourself. I don’t think that’s anything to be proud of or to write a book about.

What can you really teach people about healing from mental illness? Take a pill? How is that any different from all the other bipolar memoirs floating around out there about person X who was having a rough go of things until they learned to comply with meds?

If you got stranded on a desert island with me you might just be a different person when we got rescued. Given all the time in the world and proper instruction you might just be able to do what I did.

All you have for me Dame, is ad homs and straw men. With your attitude I highly doubt you will never be where I am or heal yourself like I have. I feel pity for you.

As for pro or anti psychiatry. Middle ground exists. It’s not a binary choice of black and white. I have said all that I intend to on that subject already.

You folks need to think really critically about claims and cures for these things.

If someone did cure themselves of bipolar with pig feed so what? If someone washes in Lourdes and is healed of bipolar great! If someone buys an affirmations CD and listens to it every day and cures themselves of bipolar swell! If someone healed themselves of bipolar with acupuncture and crystals I think that’s nifty.

You have to think about the nature of a thing that can be cured with faith healing, pig food or crystals and special diets.

There is no bonus points for being medicated. If you are facing a lifetime of illness, what have you got to lose than to try pig food, veganism, praying to God, aromatherapy or self hypnosis?

What matters is results! What matters is that those people who heal themselves with whatever means gain a permanent, lasting benefit. Frankly I would be more impressed if someone gained a lasting cure for bipolar by being blessed with the water of Lourdes. That would be awesome.

From what I hear about the pig food people they go back to acute symptoms when they stop. To me that’s just a healthier alternative supplement than psych pills.

I don’t even have to meditate every single day or do yoga every day anymore if I don’t want to. What I did changed the fundamental nature of my being. Of my mind. I no longer needed to rely on the crutch of daily meditation and yoga either. What I did worked and worked better than any bipolar cure I have ever heard of. I have a normal life now. That’s all I really ever wanted.

I said that going into psychiatric care was one of the worst decisions of my life. Taking five years of my life to meditate until I found myself and inner happiness was the best decision of my life. It sure as hell beats a life of medication side effects and disability.

How many of you can look yourselves in the eye in the mirror and honestly say you love yourself, your life and being alive? How many of you bipolars can look me in the eye and tell me the same thing. You can not gain self love, self respect, self control or self actualization from a pill. It just does not work that way.

On a final note, when I posted the other day the comment form smashed a bunch of my sentences together and I did not like that very much. I’ve tried double spacing everything to avoid that this time. I won’t know if it worked until I hit the ‘post’ button.