What's with all these bi-polar people?

[Youngblood]

Having bipolar disorder is akin to having diabetes or cancer, or any one of a number of human ailments. One that can often be treated and controlled. It should not be understood any differently. Yet there are terrible stigmas, and mainly bred by ignorance. No one will ever condemn a cancer patient for being sick. They didn't choose to be, right? Same goes for diabetes. You get sick, there are treatments, sometimes they work, other times they don't.

Let's look at cancer. There are different types of treatment to choose from, and no one will look at that person as some dreg of society if they choose something different then the norm. Just a person faced with the most difficult of situations. And whatever call they do make, you can be sure that call will affect the lives of those around them. This is the nature of bipolar disorder. But yet, people really view them as weak or flawed, almost no matter the outcome. It's sad really.

The problem with the treatment of mental illness is, and particularly bipolar, the side affects of the treatment make it difficult for many of the people taking the drugs to stay on them. Imagine you are an artist or scientist, and you have a wall of inspiration in front of you draw from. That at times there is a portal there, that opens up and burns bright giving you energy, inspiration, understanding of the world around you, heightened senses of the world and feelings so powerful they are hard to rationalize not experiencing them. w/e the cost.

For example, if you were say a God believing person, and you truly believed you were close to touching the face of God and understanding everything only ever speculated on, proving his existance to humanity for once and all...could you really choose not to? If you were an atheist with an interest in science and space, and felt you were about to unravel the universes deepest secrets could you really choose not to, because of some spinoff effects of outcome, or causality to others? THE MOTHERFUCKING SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE FOR ONCE AND FOR ALL!! When you get to those points the costs become irrelevant. And these are the types of things that mania and delusion bring on. Extremely powerful feelings, things most of us will never know.

And then there is the cost. When the portal closes, when that burning bright light begins to fade, to close and becomes but a pinhole, a trickle of it's former all knowing all being self, through medication or simple chemical changes in the brain. And all that is left is the reality it was all but a dream. It wasn't real. And the cost is all that is left. That terrible cost, that is usually to those around you.

You've just went from master of your known universe, to the villain of your reality. That's a big and bitter pill to swallow.

And why so many of them will not swallow their pills for long.

And they didn't ask for it. To have to make these choices. Fate just jumped in and said YOU, this is your existance. No different most often then the cancer patient, the person with diabetes.