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When I discovered I was bipolar, I suddenly became scared of everything. Things that never crossed my mind started to shudder through my bones and produce endless waterfalls of tears. I was afraid of diagnosis. I was afraid of what it meant. I was afraid of psychiatrists. I was afraid of treatment. I was afraid of not getting treatment. I was afraid of what the treatment would do to me.
Mental illness means being afraid.
Certain fantasies bonded me to my verbally abusive husband like super glue. My heart and mind alternated between "hoping" and "knowing" the dreams were true. I repeated them to myself and other people like mantras, almost as if saying it made it so. The fantasies were created early on and their existence prohibited me from hearing the truth. Here are the top five lies that bound me in "love".
Katherine Stone suffered from postpartum OCD after the birth of her first child. With treatment, she made a full recovery and decided to provide pregnant women and new mothers with support and help for postpartum depression and anxiety through her blog, Postpartum Progress. Today, it's the most widely read blog on perinatal mental illness.
You may have heard of the five "survival roles" often taken on by alcoholic families--Chief Enabler, Hero, Scapegoat, Lost Child, and Mascot. Sharon Wegsheider-Cruse is credited with identifying these roles within families living with chemical dependency in 1976. I learned these roles in high school when I attended a meeting for children of alcoholics to support a friend. Imagine my confusion when, in the course of the meeting, I began to recognize at least a few of the characters within my own family, even though none of us were chemically dependent. (The survival roles have since been applied to the broader scope of "dysfunctional" families.)
A family is a single, cohesive unit (no matter how loudly some members may protest to the contrary). When part of the family doesn't function as it should, the other parts adapt in an effort to retain or regain that function as a unit. Every member contributes in some way. Unfortunately, even the youngest members of a family take on roles when the need is sensed.
The area of diet and mental illness is a contentious one. I suspect that’s for several reasons:
1. Many alternative practitioners make their living telling people what to eat and they want to believe this will help.
2. Individuals want to believe the treatment is simple, drug-free and something they can control.
3. The placebo effect leads to dramatic anecdotes.
Here's what we know about diet and bipolar disorder.
Angela McClanahan discusses the state of life with Bob, and reacts to a recent comment.
When it comes to understanding Dissociative Identity Disorder, most people get too hung up on the concept of the alternate identity. Identity alteration is widely and mistakenly accepted as the essence of what DID is. And so the two most popular theories about the development of Dissociative Identity Disorder revolve around the existence of alters: the Broken Vase Theory, and the Multiple Vase Theory. Neither are satisfactory explanations for how DID develops and ultimately both theories' inaccuracies stem from the same error: the assumption that early childhood identity is cohesive and intact when in fact it is anything but.
At one job, my boss manipulated and controlled her employees. She tried to win over her employees by becoming overly familiar with us and then using the information to manipulate our actions, even play one employee off another. She obviously manipulated my supervisor, Dean, and after becoming his friend, I found she abused him in hidden ways, too. The signs of workplace abuse made it obvious I needed a new job (Dealing With Verbal Abuse At Work).
It's tempting to think that because we read a list of symptoms for a mental illness, we can diagnose ourselves. We might think that taking a self-test online indicates the presence of an illness, or lack thereof. These things, however, are simply not the case.
Productivity Habits for the Bipolar or Depressed Individual (Part 1)
Many people don't make the best use of their time. If possible, avoid meetings that you are a fly on the wall, having little input. Are the projects you are currently working on more important than this meeting? Can you get the minutes or highlights of the meeting? Most business meetings take twice as long to complete than what is required to get through the materials needed. If you are curious on how much a meeting costs, for every $10,000 of salary, each hour is worth typically $5.95; a salary of $50,000 is worth $29.75 times each person in the meeting. Six people with all the same salary of $50,000 makes each hour worth or costs the company $178.50 per hour. This only includes the meeting time; preparation, photocopying and power point presentations are additional.
Where do we go from here? Most of the family thinks just to let her hit bottom and then if she reaches out to help any we can. Some want to just keep paying her bills and just let her sit in the house with no responsibilities. Never been on medication and impossible to get to her when she refuses to talk to ANYONE.
Help.
On the day we agreed to videochat to make things less awkward IRL she woke up with a migraine so we rescheduled to the day after, I made sure to assure her that it was okay and to take her time. Later that day, in the late evening we had a nice chat but suddenly she stopped replying, even though nothing had happened. The day after I texted her good morning and said I hope she was feeling a little better. she wouldn't open my texts.
A couple days after I sent her a longer text saying that even though I had only known her for a short time I care a lot for her and would like to know how she are doing, telling her I'm there for her, assuring her I'm not going anywhere even though things might not be very easy. She wouldn't open it.
A week later I sent a text saying not to feel bad about not answering and that I will be there when she is able to answer again. It's been two weeks since this and she still hasn't opened my texts. She hasn't been active at all.
I don't know what else I can do. I assumed she might have fallen into a depression. I have tried to just not think about it anymore, and I haven't that much but when I do it sort of kills me inside...