Category: Mood Cycling
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Ending Bipolar Disorder Stigma with Facts
Guest Post by NewLifeOutlook about Bipolar Disorder Bipolar disorder is a mental health condition that has gained notoriety over recent years. Many people recognize the name and may even know someone living with the illness. Typically, increased awareness of a mental disorder adds more clarity and understanding about the condition and reduces the stigma surrounding…
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I Spoke in Public!
Thank you, Lianne Sauvage, for inviting me to share my mental health journey at Belmont High School’s Mental Health Assembly! For my speech, I adapted content from My Bipolar Thoughts, my memoir work-in-progress. The speech was scheduled for 25 minutes! I plan to refine these speaking notes and use them again for future speaking engagements:…
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Hypomania, Praise, and Self-Talk
Photo thanks to Gustavo Espíndola The praise came. Kitt loved to please. The more praise she received, the better she felt. The more she achieved, the higher she soared, until she couldn’t. Her body couldn’t keep up. She broke down, couldn’t get out of bed, and beat herself up for falling, for failing. Talking to…
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Walking the Line
Living with bipolar is like walking on a tightrope, trying to maintain my balance, fearful of each step I take. As a young adult, I didn’t understand what triggered my highs and lows. I saw depression as a problem, but I didn’t fully understand the role of workaholism, overachievement, and perfectionism, even as I crashed…
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Writing to Discipline My Thoughts
This morning I attended an OC Writers’ write-in. I haven’t attended a writers’ group in a long time. Been isolating myself and focusing on my son rather than my writing, rather than myself. Today, I left him home in bed, then left the meeting early to get him to class on time. When I got…
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Diagnosing Bipolar II #DavidLeite #NotesOnABanana
Quoted excellent psychiatric diagnostic interview for bipolar II from Chapter 33 of David Leite’s Notes on a Banana – a Memoir of Food, Love, and Manic Depression.
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Am I Still a Mental Health Blogger?
What defines being a blogger, specifically a mental health blogger? Must I write regularly or frequently? Must I always write about mental health? What if that is not my focus ALL the time? What if I’m so busy that living with bipolar disorder is not in the forefront of my mind? What if I’m overwhelmed…
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Meaning and Mental Illness
I wrote this post for Lisa Bortolotti’s project Imperfect Cognitions: Blog on delusional beliefs, distorted memories, confabulatory explanations, and implicit biases. The blog was founded by Lisa Bortolotti in May 2013, after receiving the happy news that she had been awarded an AHRC Fellowship for a project entitled “The Epistemic Innocence of Imperfect Cognitions“. The…
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Insomnia – My Mind Will Not Rest
Insomnia and hypomania as I dealt with family health crisis – mother’s stroke and father’s dementia