Some amazing musings on Borderline Personality “disorder” by taking the mask off. Beautiful post. I will comment later.

Later: one comment i did want to make is this: so far as i know, and despite current claims, RW never claimed to suffer from anything other than depression and drug and alcohol addiction. He never to my knowledge claimed to be “bipolar.” Now, if one of his drugs of choice in self-medicating his depression was cocaine, and i am not saying i know this to be a fact, only supposition, then that RW may have been using also Alcohol to reduce the manic frenetic highs of cocaine, not that he naturally experienced highs and lows. 

But now certain website want to place Williams under their bipolar umbrella.

I frankly find it troubling this push to subsume everyone with depression under t he bipolar blanket.

If it produced fewer people suffering from longterm disability and mental illness as a result, then i would cheer it. But in point of fact, research has shown that even in strictly diagnosed Bipolar 1 in which mania, naturally has occurred, treatment with lithium has not in fact served people as well as they claim. In decades before lithium came on the market, before they claimed to be able to “treat” manic-deproession, sufferers largely were rarely seen in the large state hospitals and usually only on a temporary basis. They were not longterm or chronic patients. Usually they got better and if they occasionally suffered downs again, the manic episodes might never be seen again after the initial one. The point being that bipolar susceptibility was not the chronic and terribly disabling illness that it has suddenly become, and i blame the medications for that development. That and the huge expansion of the diagnosis into BipolarII so that everyone with depression, even bereavement, is now labelled bipolar with several devastating consequences.

one is that the person is told they have a chronic, severe incurable mental illness for which they must take meds the rest of their lives, which will end up being a vicious cycle. That mentality produces enormous disability, lifelong. Two is that it ruins lives that might have been productive had the verdict been less dire and the treatment less dire too. Instead of telling someone who is depressed that their occasionally periods of cheer or even anger are appropriate, doctors see them as symptoms of this new entity bipolar II and use new useless drugs on them, including antipsychotics, with terrible side effects and psychological effects that are even worse. I have literally never seen anyone once diagnosed with Bipolar II get better unless they rejected the dx entirely and left the labeling System altogether…how can anyone escape it otherwiThey want you to believe that your moods are an illnesss rather than a healthy way to fight back against depression, as if it is abnormal to feel anything other than sadness! It is, in a word Meshugas of the highest order.