Tag: psychology
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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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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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Psychiatrists are Crappy Poets
Don’t get me wrong, I love psychiatry. It has given me the language to understand what happens in my mind when I am sick. Diagnosis is a wonderful, wonderful thing, because, once you diagnose something, you can focus on strategies to confront it. That’s what you get from studying the disease you suffer. But psychiatrists…
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Checkup at the Asylum
It’s been five months. The break from reality began the second week of December. Insomnia kicked in first. Then came the tremors. As the winters days turned darker, the moods thickened. A mention of Christmas, the black hole in my existence, put me in a rage. I could howl the roof off the house. Then…