Interesting take on Bi-Polar

[Gob]

Smells are smellier. Colours are brighter. Hearing is sharper. And, if you're lucky, your golf game will go through the roof. Welcome to the strange, suprasensory world of bipolar II, where mental illness is a portal into a heightened realm.

''It's truly intriguing,'' says Professor Gordon Parker, founder of the Black Dog Institute. ''It may also be one of the few good stories to come out of this area.''

A psychiatrist and lecturer at UNSW, Parker specialises in mood disorders, such as bipolar, where individuals swing between florid highs and crushing lows. For some time he has observed many of his bipolar patients describing periods of absolute sensory clarity - they can literally hear a pin drop or smell food hours after the source has been removed. Colours and patterns are extraordinarily vivid and they can ''see'' different musical sounds within a piece of music.

''One of my patients is able to smell toast burning 30 seconds before anybody else in the room,'' Professor Parker says. Another man, a prominent rugby league player, told Parker that ''when he is on a high he can see openings in the backline that no-one else can see.''

Professor Parker's research, to be published next month in the American Journal of Psychiatry, provides a glimpse into the parallel world of bipolar disorder, where sufferers report heightened hearing (''Instruments don't flow into each other; I hear each separately''), and vision (''colours and edges are amplified'').

''These patients have usually not told anyone, for fear of being diagnosed as psychotic,'' Professor Parker says.

Such suprasensory enhancement can have benefits. ''When I was 'on', no-one could beat me,'' says golfer and bipolar patient, David Spindler, who was Australian Amateur Champion in the early 1990s. ''When I was manic, I saw the lie of the course, crystal clear; I could see air pockets the ball would travel through, I saw every blade of grass and knew what kind of spin they would put on the ball.''

Spindler later caddied on the PGA tour for Mark O'Meara and Paul Casey, among others. ''I know for a fact that my advice was better when I was on high, my senses were more acute,'' he says.

Bipolar people have long been over-represented in creative fields, says Professor Parker, such as writing, the arts, and stand-up comedy. ''When people go high, their levels of dopamine also go high, and dopamine is the novelty neurotransmitter. It has to do with freeing up connections; it also helps with empathy, and in reading non-verbal interactions more percipiently.''

One patient told Professor Parker of waiting at a bus stop late at night: ''A car passed and I sensed something and told my friend we should run and hide in the bushes Five minutes later the car came back and four men got out with baseball bats, but they failed to spot us. I don't know what I sensed from the car simply driving by.''



Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/strange-but-t ... z33WjhUGfJ

[Gob]

One of my young clients, a very talented flautist who now plays with a respected Aussie symphony orchestra, once told me; "The worse thing about bi-polar is the knowing I will never ever feel as good again as I did when I was manic."

Though he did realise that the amount of debt he had run up while undiagnosed (several tens of thousands of dollars,) was a high price to pay for him and his family.

[BoSoxGal]

This is exactly why people go off their psychiatric meds.

[rubato]

This is exactly why people go off their psychiatric meds.

It is one reason. Back in the '80s I had heard from bipolar students who had started treatment that there is one part of the cycle where 'you feel like a god' and they didn't want to lose that. But the next part of the cycle is a psychotic break from reality followed by horrific depression. For some people, treatment for bipolar is very successful.



A more common reason to go off of meds is that the powerful anti-psychotics have such horrible side effects that having the the mental illness, as awful as it is, seems less painful after a while.


yrs,
rubato

[MajGenl.Meade]

.....................................................Let's go do something! C'mon, c'mon. Hurry up!


I dunno. I just don't feel like getting out of bed today

[Big RR]

A more common reason to go off of meds is that the powerful anti-psychotics have such horrible side effects that having the the mental illness, as awful as it is, seems less painful after a while.

Or at least what they recall of the mental illness is less painful. I had a friend in AA once, and he said the reason the meeting focus so much on testimony and description of how each person hit bottom was to stress to the members (and jar their memories to realize) that no matter how hard sobriety and all the problems might seem, life with alcohol was worse. I think a lot of mentally ill people don't realize the same about life without meds.

[Gob]

A more common reason to go off of meds is that the powerful anti-psychotics have such horrible side effects that having the the mental illness, as awful as it is, seems less painful after a while.


yrs,
rubato

In my experience of working with people on them, I'd rate them thus;

1) I feel well now, I don't need them any more.
2) The man on TV who controls me, he told me not to take them (under-medicated.)
3) I resent having injections every month.
4) They make me fat (Increased appetite and sedation.)
5) Stiffness, tremor (Extra pyramidal side effects.)
6) Contra reactions, (Illness gets worse, or changes direction without being alleviated.)

Most mood stabilisers and anti-psychotics can eithe rbe changed for something which gives lower side effects, or extra meds (Benztrop) can be added into the mix to relieve side effects. The side effect profile of most modern psychiatric meds is quite low now.

[Joe Guy]