Ah, the human brain. It’s a wondrous thing. It calculates, it categorizes, it makes connections and it remembers the square root of 144. I’m constantly awed by its power. But one of the annoying things that can happen to a brain is that somehow, a song gets stuck in it. Somehow, even though its great power and ability, the catchy hook of the latest pop song gets stuck inside some errant neurons and plays over and over. And this causes a lot more trouble in my bipolar brain than it does for others.

I wish someone had asked me before naming a class of drugs “antipsychotics.” I mean, I understand that to psychiatrists it might not be a big deal, but to the medication-taking public out here, let me just say that the stigma around medication is about 10-fold when you say you’re on something called an “antipsychotic.” Tell someone that you’re on “antipsychotics” sometime and watch them back away slowly. I’m not kidding. It’s like they think an axe is about to magically materialize and you’re about to use it to chop off their head.*

It should surprise no one that I consider mental healthcare an essential service for people. Now, I live in Canada and this means that I can get the care I need without paying for it, but people in the United States are not so lucky. I have to constantly hear about people who can’t get the care they need because of the limits placed on them by insurance companies. And this is wrong. Mental healthcare is as essential as any other kind of healthcare. If you have a broken leg, you expect treatment, and if you have a broken brain, you should expect the same thing.

One of the problems with psychotherapy (and, keep in mind, I like psychotherapy) is that psychotherapists try to look for a cause for every emotion. And this seems reasonable. Or at least it does, to a person without a mental illness.

I’m a mental health writer and I have a mental illness, so, of course, I write about my mental illness. I write about my symptoms and the affect they have on my life. I write about their treatments and their success or lack thereof. I write about what it’s like to have bipolar disorder. And boy do people feel fine about judging me for it. Commonly people will say that I don’t have bipolar disorder (being, I’m sure, expert diagnosticians) or say that I’m an idiot (and whatnot) for trying the treatments I have. It’s gotten so bad, in fact, that some things I don’t like to talk about at all. People like to attack me for electroconvulsive therapy and vagus nerve stimulator use specifically. And I don’t like to talk about self-harm, because inevitably people yell about that. But I learned something earlier this week – not everyone judges people with a mental illness.

For many years, the psychiatric community has known that therapy plus medication is more effective than either mental illness treatment alone. It all depends on the specific therapy, medication and person, but that’s, generally, the rule. But the question is, if you’re being a good patient and you’re working your therapy and taking your psychiatric medications as you should, how do you know which one is causing positive results?

One of the things that is so debilitating about a chronic, long-term mental illness is that it is so relentless. Day in and day out you face the challenges it brings. On your birthday, it’s there. On Christmas, it’s there. On Arbor Day, it’s there. And no matter how you’re feeling and what’s happening in your life, you have to deal with it. Mental illness isn’t the kind of thing that you can push “pause” on. Mental illness doesn’t wait for later. Mental illness is like a 2-year-old. It wants you now, now, now, now and if it can’t have you, then heck hath no fury like a two-year-old ignored. But I swear, I could be a better crazy person if I could just get a break once in a while. If I could just get all the nuttiness in my head to shut up for a while I swear I could get on with things like work, and taxes and cleaning and the gym. But the nuttiness in my head will not be quelled and this, I think, is one of the hardest things about mental illness.

We all have good things happen in our lives. It might be marriage, a child, a new job or a stunning new hair color. All these things are good, but all these things are also changes. Good changes, but changes nonetheless. And as someone once said, “change is bad.”

I’ve been writing about bipolar disorder and mental illness for nine years. Nine long years of pain and depression and episodes and hyperreality and desperation and description and explanation and exploration. And people still don’t get it. Even if you look at the past year – over 200 articles, there still seems to be nothing but a chasm between the mentally ill and so many of the mentally well. And I think this is because language is insufficient to express emotional pain and turmoil. We have good words for describing physical pain: radiating, hot, throbbing, sharp, achy and so on. But when it comes to emotional pain we’re “sad.” The same word applies when you drop your ice cream cone on the ground as when you’re so depressed that you can’t get out of bed. It’s not surprising that people don’t get what we’re talking about.

If you haven’t been turning in to Homeland, you’ve been missing out on a new bipolar icon. Homeland stars Carrie Mathison, played by Claire Danes, a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) office who, unbeknownst to her employer, has bipolar disorder. Homeland is no average show. Homeland won Best Show, Best Writing, Best Actor and Best Actress Emmys. You can catch Homeland on Showtime in the US and Super Channel in Canada. Of course, the reason I tuned is was to see how this show handles mental illness. And they do not too bad a job.