Riding the Bipolar Express on the Psychiatrist Line Being Guided by a Thera-pissed!

“So, he loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusions. By thoughts, I mean specifically, chatter in the skull. Perpetual and compulsive repetition of words, of reckoning and calculating.”

Alan Watts

This following statement, or question, or observation, or even the evidence to illustrate that my mental well-being is well and truly ill, you can call it what you will, absolutely anything you want. It doesn’t alter the fact that it has never been commented on, corrected or given any real attention at all. Basically blankly ignored. To be honest, the ignorance speaks volumes. The question I merely asked was the following…..

“Do you concur that when you are deemed broken by your mental illness, and you receive the psychiatric support and medication you need from health professionals, in order to help you manage your illness, this medication transforms you in to a completely different person? You are being remodelled! Having your brain chemistry altered by drug after drug after drug. You eventually become someone that looks like you, but really, in reality, isn’t you!”

You are being advised and guided by the duly appointed professional and qualified psychiatrist. This professional has learnt from a text book and about 8 years of study and listening to lectures from fellow psychiatrists, who as far as I can see from the talks given that are on YouTube, the majority of solutions to help people with mental illness are the same as the previous year and the year before that, the year before and before and you can catch my drift yeah?

Nothing life changing has happened since John Cade discovered the benefits of lithium nearly 70 years ago. Have you ever questioned why this is? Do we have to accept that bipolar is an incurable illness and that it needs to be contained, and that is best done by medication. Medication that is basically poisoning you, lithium brings its risk of toxicity in your blood and has to monitored regularly. Then there’s the risk of raising your blood pressure, and coupled with potentially causing your heart to lose all sense of rhythm and potentially stop, are a couple of gifts that Quetiapine brings to the party.

Have any of you had any experiences with trying to give your psychiatrist or health professionals feedback or your thoughts on how you feel and how you cope? Reality. You ever asked questions and been greeted with a perplexed smile and an absence of a answer? You think it might be because they don’t know and don’t have a clue? Remember, we are the actual experts in this field. We’re the ones living with it, day in, day out.

Fucking nice one though. You have a name for the pain that is driving me insane. So hopefully now it’s just a matter of time before my body recognises what it is, because we found out it’s name. The labelling and categorising of illness is simply just a process to separate them from ourselves and make them objective. We are in essence trying to split ourselves up, like an amoeba does, to separate things. Remember that this illness is part of you. A component that makes you what you are. Start swimming with the tide, not against it. We need to start believing in what we are actually seeing rather than seeing only the things that we believe.