Tag: manic depression
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To My Fellow Bipolar Bloggers
I’ve been reading the blogs of other folks who suffer from bipolar, which is very helpful, because I see that I’m not alone with this buggering illness. We share many of the same symptoms: constant anxiety, chronic dread, delusions, insomnia, paranoia, suicidal tendencies, amazing spurts of creativity, the ability to feel life much more deeply…
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Bipolar Cocktails
I’m on three medications for bipolar now, let’s call them Huey, Dewey, and Louie. They’ve worked for a few years, but I’ve been going through some rough times, so it’s time to change the cocktail. Unlike your plain old, garden-variety, soul-crushing depression, in which you usually can take one pill a day, and use that…
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Mamá Prays for My Mind
My wife Michelle and I became my mother’s caretaker last year. It’s gone relatively well. Mamá’s going on 91, her mind is sharp, she eats like a horse. She scoots through the house with her walker. She’s a fairly pleasant elderly who helps out where she can, washing clothes, picking up dishes, threatening the cat…
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Art and Madness
There are studies on the connection between the artistic impulse and mental illness. The best are books written by Kay Redfield Jamison, especially her “Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament.” In that book, she charts hundreds of writers, from George Gordon Lord Byron to Virginia Woolf, and reveals how the mental illness…
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Insanity: Look Up the Facts Then Face Them
These are some of the books I’ve read to understand better what happens in my bipolar brain. They help me live with the disease, work with it, manage it as best as possible. Again, books, books, books—how do people go through life without them? The information in these tomes isn’t pretty. Here are some tidbits…