A Seemingly Homemade Shirt

It’s the masterpost that no one actually asked for, but I really wanted to make. I’ve found a lot of resources, but they were never in one place. So instead of searching all over the place all the time, I decided to make this.

This also includes resources for schizoaffective disorder, which I’ve never seen a masterpost for! I didn’t include things like “Dealing with a bipolar loved one”, but I might make a separate post for friends/family.

Basic information:

About Bipolar Disorder (DBSA)

Bipolar Disorder (NIMH), Bipolar Disorder (Mayo Clinic)

Overview of Bipolar Disorder (pdf)

Bipolar I (WebMD)

Bipolar II (WebMD)

Cyclothymia (Mayo Clinic),  Cyclothymia (WebMD)

What is rapid cycling? (DBSA)

Schizoaffective Disorder (NAMI), Schizoaffective Disorder (Mayo Clinic)

Diagnosing bipolar disorder NOS (verywell)

The secret life of manic depression (pdf)

BPD vs BD (post by homojabi)

Mania and hypomania:

Mania symptoms (psych central)

What is mania and hypomania? (WebMD)

What is a manic episode? (healthy place)

Coping with mania (healthline)

Dealing with this manic episode (living manic depressive)

Behavioral strategies for preventing mania (pdf)

Cognitive strategies for preventing mania (pdf)

How to prevent a hypomanic episode (pdf)

Hypersexuality information post (OP deleted, so it’s on bipolarnet)

Depressive episodes:

Depression in bipolar disorder (black dog institute)

Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about bipolar depression (bphope)

Cognitive strategies for preventing and managing depression (pdf)

Behavioral strategies for preventing and managing depression (pdf)

Depression laundry tips (depressionresource)

Mixed episodes:

Mixed episode symptoms (psych central)

How to treat mixed mood episodes (bipolar burble)

Bipolar episodes with mixed features (WebMD)

Schizoaffective disorder:

Living with schizoaffective disorder (psych central)

Living with schizoaffective disorder (brain blogger)

What is schizoaffective disorder?, self care, + treatments and support (mind.org)

Psychosis:

Talking to friends about psychosis ( @therapidcyclist )

Surviving halloween with psychosis ( @mentalhealthwarrior )

How to deal with paranoia when you’re alone ( post by skailu )

How to handle hallucinations (post by schizotiger)

Treatment and medication info:

crazymeds (mood stabilizers, anti-psychotics)

Bipolar medication guide (help guide)

Bipolar disorder - What medication is available? (mind.org)

Bipolar disorder - treatment (nhs)

What to do if your parents refuse to let you have access to mental healthcare (posted by abusedkidproblems)

Self care / executive dysfunction:

Dysfunctional’s guide to functioning ( therapidcyclist )

Grounding kits ( @depressionresource )

What to do when showering is too hard (depressionresource)

lowspoonsgourmet and no-more-ramen

articles on college and bipolar disorder (ibpf)

Fact sheet on recognizing and preventing future episodes

Bipolar self care post (unfortunately OP’s theme is nearly impossible to read, so it’s on bipolarnet)

Apps:

Bipol-app, Booster Buddy, Daily Feats, Daylio, Emoods, iMood journal, Mango Health MediSafe, MoodPanda, Pacifica

note: I’ve tried to make sure all of these apps are free!

This ended up being really long already, but feel free to add to this. If your post was featured here and you want me to remove it, let me know! Please let me know if any links are broken.

my adhd ass when someone says something and expects me to be able to comprehend it the first time

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

From what I’ve read and observed, bipolar symptoms exist on a spectrum. Using these charts inspired by @levianta’s graphics about autism, you can visualize the extremity of every symptom you experience. As an example, here is a chart visualizing how i personally experience hypomania:

Finally got around to making an ADHD, Bipolar and Autism Diagram to show the overlapping symptoms.

(Both low self-esteem and inflated self-esteem are listed for Bipolar - this is because it is made up of a depressive and manic stage. When they’re in the depressed state, they have low self-esteem, but have high self-esteem in the manic stage.)

Just saw a spicy hot take in the notes of an ADHD post that was like “adhd isn’t a mood disorder stop making excuses” from a supposed fellow ADHD person and like yes, ADHD is not exclusively a mood disorder. It’s 4 of them hiding under a trench coat with 15 other neurological disorders. And also:

ID, a screen grab from an article that reads: About 70 percent of adults with ADHD report problems with emotional dysregulation, going up to 80 percent in children with ADHD. In clinical terms, these problem areas include:

-Irritability: issues with anger dysregulation – “tantrum” episodes as well as chronic or generally negative feelings in between episodes.

-Lability: frequent, reactive mood changes during the day.

-Recognition: the ability to accurately recognize other people’s feelings. Individuals with ADHD may tend to not notice other people’s emotions until pointed out.

-Affective intensity: felt intensity – how strongly an emotion is experienced. People with ADHD tend to feel emotions very intensely.

-Emotional dysregulation: global difficulty adapting emotional intensity or state to situation.

/end ID. (Source)

Like not to be wildly and irrationally peeved about this, but bully for you if you don’t experience this as part of your ADHD, but over 70% of us do and saying we’re making excuses or not trying hard enough is the exact same shit neurotypicals say to invalidate us, and causes us real harm. Please don’t do the same thing. Trauma inflicted by neurotypicals is a huge part of why living with ADHD is so difficult. We don’t need it from within our own community too.

We all experience this shit show disorder differently. It’s a spectrum of one size fits no one, not a cookie cutter mold to fit into.

And yeah, you know what, this shit isn’t an excuse to behave badly, but you know what, knowing emotional dysregulation is a symptom of ADHD helps you to treat it and work on getting a handle on it. Knowing the reason it feels like the world is ending in your chest because something bad happened, and knowing it’s because your gremlin brain is perpetually starved for dopamine so there’s no cushion for the raw emotional feedback currently happening can help you, with practice, to curb the impulsive desire to do something rash or harmful.

I mean, fuck, there’s a reason for why suicide is so prevalent in ADHD, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say that impulsivity and severe emotional dysregulation is a part of that.

Knowing that the feeling will end and isn’t an accurate reflection of the situation, overwhelmingly painful as it is in the moment, can help. It does help. So denying this aspect as part of ADHD? Not helpful, and you need to take some time to sit with your thoughts and see why you want to distance yourself so much from this to the point of invalidating others.

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

Every person need to be taught disability history

Not the “oh Einstein was probably autistic” or the sanitized Helen Keller story. but this history disabled people have made and has been made for us.

Teach them about Carrie Buck, who was sterilized against her will, sued in 1927, and lost because “Three generations of imbeciles [were] enough.”

Teach them about Judith Heumann and her associates, who in 1977, held the longest sit in a government building for the enactment of 504 protection passed three years earlier.

Teach them about all the Baby Does, newborns in 1980s who were born disabled and who doctors left to die without treatment, who’s deaths lead to the passing of The Baby Doe amendment to the child abuse law in 1984.

Teach them about the deaf students at Gallaudet University, a liberal arts school for the deaf, who in 1988, protested the appointment of yet another hearing president and successfully elected I. King Jordan as their first deaf president.

Teach them about Jim Sinclair, who at the 1993 international Autism Conference stood and said “don’t mourn for us. We are alive. We are real. And we’re here waiting for you.”

Teach about the disability activists who laid down in front of buses for accessible transit in 1978, crawled up the steps of congress in 1990 for the ADA, and fight against police brutality, poverty, restricted access to medical care, and abuse today.

Teach about us.

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? 

YOU are Bipolar!