#bipolar

I never found out until I went into treatment that I was bipolar. ↗

— Demi Lovato

#found #i #into #never #out

Everything is, the way it is, for a reason. Or it isn't. Or neither. Or both. It's so hard to tell. It's so hard to tell you're a mile away by the Luke in your eye. ↗

— Alistair McHarg

#humor #manic-depresion #recovery #word-association #humor

I’m not bipolar, I’ve just had a bipolar life foisted upon me. ↗

— Daniel O'Malley

#humor #sarcasm #scifi #humor

In Serbia a lot of people hate me because they want to westernize, not understanding that the western world is bipolar, with very good things and very bad things. ↗

— Emir Kusturica

#because #bipolar #good #good things #hate

Sometimes labeling is only useful, like with OCD. Once you're labeled you can be treated. On other occasions labeling leads to tyranny, like with childhood bipolar disorder in the U.S. ↗

— Jon Ronson

#childhood #disorder #labeled #labeling #leads

I've been accustomed to mysteries, holy and otherwise, since I was a child. Some of us care for orphans, amass fortunes, raise protests or Nielsen ratings; some of us take communion or whiskey or poison. Some of us take lithium and antidepressants, and most everyone believes these pills are fundamentally wrong, a crutch, a sign of moral weakness, the surrender of art and individuality. Bullshit. Such thinking guarantees tradgedy for the bipolar. Without medicine, 20 percent of us, one in five, will commit suicide. Six-gun Russian roulette gives better odds. Denouncing these medicines makes as much sense as denouncing the immorality of motor oil. Without them, sooner or later the bipolar brain will go bang. I know plenty of potheads who sermonize against the pharmaceutical companies; I know plenty of born-again yoga instructors, plenty of missionaries who tell me I'm wrong about lithium. They don't have a clue. ↗

— David Lovelace

#lithium #manic-depression #medication #pills #suicide

Love is not enough. It takes courage to grab my father's demon, my own, or - God help me - my child's and strap it down and stop its mad jig; to sit in a row of white rooms filled with pills and clubbed dreamers and shout: stop smiling, shut up; shut up and stop laughing; you're sitting in hell. Stop preaching; stop weeping. You are a manic-depressive, always. your life is larger than most, unimaginable. You're blessed; just admit it and take the damn pill. ↗

— David Lovelace

#love #manic-depression #medication #mental-disorders #courage

Suddenly I wanted to get better. Mania wasn't fun anymore. It wasn't creative or visionary. It was mean parody at best, a cheap chemical trick. I needed to stop and get better. I'd take whatever they gave me, I pledged silently. I'd take Trilafon or Thorazine or whatever. I just wanted to sleep. ↗

— David Lovelace

#mania #manic-depression #medication #family

I now know for certain that my mind and emotions, my fix on the real and my family's well-being, depend on just a few grams of salt. But treatment's the easy part. Without honesty, without a true family reckoning, that salt's next to worthless. ↗

— David Lovelace

#family #lithium #manic-depression #medication #mental-illness

In our family "whim-wham" is code, a defanged reference to any number of moods and psychological disorders, be they depressive, manic, or schizoaffective. Back in the 1970s and '80s - when they were all straight depression - we called them "dark nights of the soul." St. John of the Cross's phrase ennobled our sickness, spiritualized it. We cut God out of it after the manic breaks started in 1986, the year my dad, brother, and I were all committed. Call it manic depression or by its new, polite name, bipolr disorder. Whichever you wish. We stick to our folklore and call it the whim-whams. ↗

— David Lovelace

#depression #manic-depression #mental-illness #family