Читать книгу Welcome to the Jungle, Revised Edition - Hilary T. Smith - Страница 10

Dealing with a bipolar diagnosis can be just as hard as the unfettered depressive or manic episodes that led up to it. It's like you've been hit by a truck, only to be told at the scene of the accident that you're going to be hit by several more trucks of steadily increasing size over the course of your life (have fun with that). For a while, it's hard to think about anything else but the fact that you're screwy enough to be considered mentally ill, and especially hard to accept a diagnosis of mental illness if you've always considered yourself a happy, healthy person. The diagnosis looms over your life, and you just want to rewind to a time before it happened. Can anything be the same again? How did they even decide I have bipolar?

Being told you have a serious mental illness is a colossal mind fuck. In fact, some doctors and psychiatrists are now questioning whether it's even a good idea to tell people they have a “serious lifelong mental illness” when they experience something that looks like mania or depression. Why? Because having an authority figure like a doctor inform you that you are “mentally ill” gives you certain expectations (“I'm going to be unstable and need meds my whole life!”) that can actually make it harder for you to recover. The label of bipolar disorder can lead you to reinterpret your life in a certain way, giving special importance to mood while downplaying things like relationships, family dynamics, your ability to find meaning in life (or lack thereof) and various kinds of trauma which can play an equally large role in your ability to cope with life. What does “bipolar” even mean? And what does it really say about who you are? This chapter is about understanding what the people in white coats were thinking when they made the diagnosis. Even if you hate everything to do with jargon and psychiatry and labels like “bipolar,” you should know this stuff so you understand what (and who) you're dealing with.