Somewhere Around 60% Of Bipolarians are Unemployed, And Bipolar Disorder Is The Sixth Leading Cause

It would be so funny if autistic people started describing allistic experience the same pathologised way doctors describe autism

if you’re a mentally ill adult, especially if you’re psychotic or have bipolar, i highly recommend you look into getting a psychiatric advance directive. basically they’re a form you can fill out where you can specify what kind of treatment you want and don’t want in the case that you ever get legally declared incompetent. normally, getting declared incompetent means that psychiatrists take away your right to make decisions about your mental health care. for example, they can force you to take medications you don’t want or institutionalize you longterm without your consent. also the state appoints someone they choose to legally “consent” in your place.

what a psychiatric advance directive does is put limits on what the psychiatrists assigned to you can do. you can appoint your own person to be your legal representative, someone you trust who knows you and cares about you. you can also specify what hospitals you don’t want to be sent to or what doctors you don’t want to see or medications you don’t want to take or whether or not you consent to electroconvulsive treatment. you can also say what you do want, like i put down that they decided to institutionalize me, i wanted it to be at a specific psych ward i’d already been to and had a not terrible time at. and now, if i ever get declared incompetent, psychiatrists are legally not allowed to put me back on the meds that gave me a seizure. 

nobody wants to be legally declared incompetent. it’s really scary to think about, but it does happen, especially to people with psychosis or bipolar disorder. it’s better to have legal safeguards in place ahead of time and not need them than to get declared incompetent and not have an advance directive

I have trouble taking care of my teeth because everything that involves doing that is a sensory nightmare. I decide to do some research to see if there's anything I can do about this. The results?

"How to make your autistic child brush their teeth"

"Autistic Children and Sensory issues relating to tooth brushing"

"How to get your little shit to brush his fucking teeth"

Like, yeah Google, thanks, that really helps. And like, even if I was a child, some of the advice seemed... unhelpful. Like, doing a dance and singing a song while brushing your teeth? Even for a kid, I don't think that would help distract from a sensory experience as intense as brushing your teeth. Like, the extremely intense and unpleasant flavor, the intense feeling of the brush against your teeth scraping across it, even mouthwash has such an intense and disgusting flavor that I have difficulty keeping it in my mouth for more than a few seconds. I wish there was SOMETHING that could be done.

I found this table describing two different ways bipolar disorder can present, classic and atypical. It’s interesting because while we talk more about the classic presentation, the atypical presentation is actually more common (it was discovered second, hence the name) 

The most interesting thing to me personally is while many with bipolar disorder will fully recover between episodes, many won’t–they will experience subsyndromal symptoms. which is why i, and possibly many of you too, find myself in a sort of depression lite™️ even when im not in a full-on episode. 

Here’s a video that goes over the chart and explains the difference between the two and a little bit of the history behind their discovery. 

I haven’t seen anyone talk about this on tumblr, so I thought I’d bring it up. It‘s not diagnostic material, but psychologists do use these terms when deciding what medication will (probably) best treat your specific case, with the classic presentation responding better to lithium and atypical responding better to anticonvulsants and atypical antipsychotics 

isn’t that neat? 

i feel like a fake bipolarian bc it feels like my episodes DO match that cartoony "mood shifts in a couple of seconds" instead of gradually shifting over the course of weeks. it feels like i have no stability i'm either depressed or hypomanic.

It's completely normal to question your diagnosis--I did for many many months following mine. The most important piece of advice i can give you is to speak to your doctor if you feel like you've been misdiagnosed. I can't diagnose you, all I can do is tell you my personal experience.

in my experience, though, there could be explanations for how you feel while still being a "real" bipolarian!

"my episodes DO match that cartoony "mood shifts in a couple of seconds" instead of gradually shifting over the course of weeks."

this is called emotional lability. one explanation is, actually, hypomania. it's not a symptom spoken about frequently, but hypomania can cause intense and frequent mood swings, including intense sadness that mimics the hopelessness we see in depression. it is one of the reasons hypomanic people are often misdiagnosed with bpd. 

another explanation is mixed episodes, not just feeling both at the same time, but switching from one to the other over the course of days or within a day. I think there's a misconception that mixed episodes aren't very common. talking to other bipolar people, i think they are pretty common, and this will lead me into this next point,

"it feels like i have no stability i'm either depressed or hypomanic."

this is normal in bipolar disorder! These are called sub-syndromal symptoms. between episodes, some bipolarians experience symptoms regardless of not being in a full-blown episode, and it can feel like you're never really stable.

That being said, if you experience frequent mixed states and sub-syndromal symptoms, two traits common in atypical bipolar disorder, its completely possible to feel the way you feel!

Again, I cannot tell if you are Really bipolar through an ask on the internet, and if you feel that you have been misdiagnosed, please speak with your doctor! They will know more than a blogger on tumblr dot com. But as far as I Know, these are normal bipolarian experiences. 

I hope this helps, I hope you figure it out soon, and I hope you’re well! <3 

listen to me. thoughts do not have moral weight. a thought will never hurt anyone. the actions you take because of a thought can hurt yourself or other people, but the thought itself is powerless and there is no such thing as thought crime.

"but i have thoughts about being violent towards people! towards children! surely that makes me dangerous!" are you being violent? for real? with your actions? if not, then you are not actually hurting anyone

"but i have thoughts that are offensive and hurtful! they're bigoted, or they're horribly rude, or they're invalidating to others! i'm a horrible person." and what are you doing with those thoughts, exactly? are you taking bigoted actions, or saying those rude things, or taking steps to actually invalidate people? no? well then. no one is getting hurt. and in the meantime, if it really bothers you, doing things like helping unlearn your biases (both against minorities and just, like, against furries and theatre kids and shit) might help some of those thoughts go away, but sometimes you just get shitty thoughts.

"but i have horrific thoughts about sex!" are you hurting people. are you forcing people to do things they don't consent to. or are you just playing the upsetting possibility in your mind over and over again, and acting like that's even remotely the same thing?

thought. crime. is. not. real. OCD. is. hell. (and anything else that may cause intrusive thoughts.) but it does not define you. your thoughts will always, always come secondary to your actions. you're gonna be fine.

Reminder: Spring is coming so take the time now to update your mania crisis plan

Though the jokes that "since gay pride month is over, july is now gay wrath month" are funny and all, it's important to remember that July is ACTUALLY Disability Pride Month and ya'll should really be focused on boosting disabled voices and issues this month! For instance, the fact that marriage equality doesn't actually truly exist in the United States for disabled people, or the fact that disabled people are forced to live in poverty or lose their disability benefits, or the fact that 1 in 5 people with chronic pain end up sufferring from alcoholism or other addictions, or how accessibility is still a daily battle for all of us, or how there are active hate groups on places like reddit who try to "call out" those they see as "faking" their disabilities.

This July, boost disabled voices. Talk about the issues that our community faces. Call out ableism.