Dealing With Shrinks/Dealing With Hospitals

So we're about to give you a whole bunch of suggestions that will help you get better informed about the places you might need to turn for help if things get really out of hand.

What do you do with your life now?

Part of being diagnosed bipolar is realizing you have to make serious changes to keep from ending up in the same holes over and over again. You have to start taking care of yourself and making your health a priority, even if the people around you have less fragile systems and can sustain a more punishing lifestyle.

In the these pages we've tried to put together some of the complex and jagged pieces of our experiences to give you a sense from the inside of what it's like to live with this thing they call bipolar disorder.

You can see it all from the highway: enormous monocrops of identical corn plants that reach for miles bordered by an endless sea of strip malls, parking lots, and tract housing. You can see it on our kitchen counters and in our classrooms: the same can of soda on the table in Cairo and Kentucky, the same definitions of "˜progress' and "˜freedom' in textbooks around the world. Monoculture "” the practice of replicating a single plant, product or idea over a huge area "” is about the most unstable, unsustainable, unimaginative form of organization that exists...

I began working at a residential treatment facility in 2000. Immediately I started developing a form of group therapy for our unit with several of my co-workers based on the principles of Positive Peer Culture (P.P.C.)....I believe that the concept of participatory democracy can be applied to psychological treatment and mental health in order to introduce a more humanistic model than the present one.

Fountain House was probably one the first, most important, and positive things that happened to me, even though it didn't quite seem that way at the time. But it was hard to be objective about anything then"”I was working on an almost entirely intellectual hope"”the most important function of which seems to have been reserving judgment, being receptive, and then trying things on blind faith.

Part of taking care of yourself is learning to recognize the signs that indicate youʼre heading into dangerous territory. When Sascha got let out of the last halfway house, he was sent into the world with a list of warning symptoms to watch out for and a list of "coping skills" to help deal with them. While we think this is a good idea, we donʼt think they did the best job identifying symptoms or suggesting creative ways to handle them. So weʼre going to share their list first, and then give you a list we brainstormed based on our observations of ourselves over the years. We encourage you to make your own and share it with the people in your life.

Here's a story of impossible questions and tentative answers from Gumby, an Icarus Project member and mother trying to help her son ward off the crash and start putting the pieces back together afterwards.

Practical advice on how those of us living with emotional extremes can take stock of our patterns and communicate our needs and warning signs to our support people, as well as how our friends and families can help us take care of ourselves and engage with the difficult questions we face like "should I go off psych drugs?" or "why am I so fragile?"

It was through an experience of synchronicity that I found my people"”our loose-knit, decentralized movement of "crazy" artists, spiritual revolutionaries, and activists that defies easy categorization. At the suggestion of my therapist, who wanted me to go back on meds, I went to the bookstore to find Peter Kramer's Listening to Prozac. That book was not on the shelf; instead, I found Peter Breggin's Talking Back to Prozac...

Caty writes about finding the Freedom Center, Western Massachussetts' "only group run by and for people labeled with severe "˜mental illnesses'" which calls for "compassion, human rights, self-determination, and holistic alternatives" and much more. The Freedom Center's support groups and local actions have made a huge impact on lives of people in their community; find out more about this amazing resource.