Therapists & The Word “Bipolar”

Posted on February 17, 2009 in Bipolar Disorder Journals & Notebooks Medical Ethics Writing/Darkness

There’s a stigma for you: therapists who try to separate me out from the disease. What do they know of living in it? “I don’t want you calling yourself the illness” Lorraine would say to me over and over again. I know I am not the illness, but it is no worse to call myself bipolar than to call myself a diabetic. I know that I am more and besides it is infernally clumsy to call myself “a person with [[bipolar disorder]]”. Clumsy in the extreme. Therapists have no sense of the compactness necessary to write. They should be made to talk about being a sufferer of bipolar disorder on Twitter and watch their character limits waste away as they do.

My disease is inside my skull lodged deep inside the crevices of the brain where the neurons and the ganglions play. That makes it part and parcel of me. We don’t fret when diabetes sufferers call themselves diabetics or those with asthma call themselves asthmatic. Bipolar is a neat word, a convenient shortening of “bipolar disorder” indicating a difference between the disease and the sufferer. They want something else? Bipolaric? Could work.

The root of their dislike is that it leaves them out. There are the patients and there are the therapists. The patients like to get together, talk about the times their paranoia got the better of them or the hallucinations they’ve seen. The “war stories” leave the therapists out. So they try to drag us back into the mainstream by forbidding to us what distinguishes us. They see that as their job: to make us forget the past so they can control our futures.

I don’t want to go back to the kaleidoscope days — which is why I take my meds — but it is good to know that I have overcome all that, to know that against the odds I have survived. I suffer from bipolar disorder. I am bipolar. I stand smart and proud.

This is an exercise from [amazonify]1587613190::text::::Writing Through the Darkness: Easing Your Depression with Paper and Pen[/amazonify]