What is Bipolar Disorder?

Bipolar disorder is a highly misused name whose sole purpose is to describe common and shared experiences and behaviors that occur in a significant percentage of the global population. To appropriately receive this name (or as it is often called, “label”) one must have evidence of the presence of one single manic (severe) or hypomanic [...]

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Answering Readers Questions: March 23, 2011

I highly value curiosity and welcome questions that can be generalized to be helpful to a lot of people. Every thing that I write here is my opinion based on two things, my personal experience of living with bipolar disorder and my experience of helping people live with bipolar disorder both professionally and through out [...]

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5 Actions to help someone who has lost touch with reality

When someone has lost touch with reality the words to describe this experience, “psychosis” and “psychotic” often scares people. One automatic response to those words that many people have is “crazy”. Reality is simply created by people agreeing on shared sensory experiences. Psychosis simply refers to someone experiencing things with their five senses that other [...]

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Uncovering reasons why people refuse to acknowledge and support their loved ones living with bipolar disorder

So many people have shared with me the pain that they experience from their loved ones who reject them or refuse to acknowledge that they are living with bipolar disorder. In this blog, I will do my best to expose some of the things that may cause people to reject and deny support to people [...]

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Reasons why people refuse to acknowledge and get help for Bipolar Disorder

Many people find it incredibly difficult to acknowledge and accept that they are living with bipolar disorder….let alone be willing to get help.  They have really good reasons. Here are some perspectives people have shared with me as well as my own experience that I have overcome in order to get to be who I [...]

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5 Ways to help someone who is manic or rapid cycling

Before we get started, I want to help everyone understand why in my writing I use the terms “we” and “us”. The key reason for doing this is because stigmatization, judgment and the fear people have of people living with bipolar disorder can be very isolating and create a great deal of self-shame and self-fear. [...]

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Part 2: Tearing Down Stima to Understand Diagnoses with Compassion – Behavior Perspective

In Part Two of this exploration of compassionately understanding diagnoses we will explore the perspective of behavior and changes in needs and interests. Behavior & Changes in Needs & Interests Bipolar Disorder – when experiencing mania Decreased need for sleep In my opinion this is the number one detector that a person is experiencing mania. [...]

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Tearing Down Stigma To Understand Diagnoses With Compassion

In this blog I hope to create a better understanding and compassion for people living with the diagnoses bipolar disorder, schizoaffective disorder, and borderline personality disorder. Often times society sees people living with bipolar disorder as people to be feared and are seen as dangerous.  Society has no clue as to what schizoaffective disorder is. [...]

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5 Sensitivities That Affect People Living With Bipolar Disorder

Everyone living with bipolar disorder experiences and is affected by bipolar disorder differently. However, we all share specific sensitivities that can cause us to be more symptomatic or less symptomatic. 1. We are all affected by changes in our circadian rhythms. Circadian rhythms are the natural rhythm that occurs in our body that tells us [...]

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“Newly Diagnosed With Bipolar Disorder Club” Topic #1: Complying & Coping With Medication

This blog series is dedicated to everyone Newly Diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder. Welcome to the club!  You have unwillingly joined an elite club in which some of the members are among the most brilliant, creative and talented in history. Unfortunately there is no manual that comes with our bipolar disorder diagnoses when becoming a member [...]

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The Bipolar Brain-Part 2: The Fight For Domination…When the Right hemisphere is winning.

In our last post we explored that mania may be caused by the left hemisphere dominating the brain and specific areas of the brain being flooded with energy in the form of neurotransmitters or chemicals in the brain. Now we will explore how depression may be caused by the right hemisphere dominating the brain. In [...]

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The Bipolar Brain: The Fight For Domination…when the left cerebral hemisphere is winning

One question I often get is, “What’s happening in the brain during a manic and depressive episode?” The truth is that scientists don’t fully know. Scientists are finding common evidence, but the brain is so complex that nothing we know about it can not be considered fact that will apply to everyone. Therefore, I am [...]

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