USA Today makes it seem like maybe bipolar isn't the famous Hollywood ailment that it appears to be. This article makes it seem admirable to get treatment and the bare-assed truth is that all too many of us don't have any option, if we want any kind of meaningful or profitable or steady career. Too many of us get dragged into the joint kicking and scratching, and maybe even biting the nearest exposed attendant, until suitably tranquillized and cooled off.
Roughly ten percent of the population suffers from some form of this problem, whether bipolar, unipolar, or only depressed or only manic episodes, and it isn't easy to deal with it, because there's a hell of a lot of prejudice out there that doesn't do a damned thing for us while we're trying to straighten up and fly right. I think it's commendable that Catherine Zeta Jones is voluntarily seeking treatment - a treatment that's a lot easier to take these days than back when - but she shouldn't be portrayed as any kind of heroine when there's thousands of us out there fighting a generally uphill battle to control this genetic deficiency we have inherited from some ancestor. It's a genetic thing, and we have it because our genes aren't able to do what they should to instruct our system to accept a full range of chemicals, usually trace elements, that are required to keep everything balanced. It's all a matter of science and chemistry, and personal choices have very little to do with it - except to get our asses into a treatment center when we feel that we're obviously losing it. The medications do work, but there's no cure, because we can't re-engineer our genetic codes to fix what's damaged or missing from the DNA. And that's the bird's-eye view of manic depression or bipolar as it's now called. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.
(Continued later...)
The mood-swings associated with bipolar are a response to the changes in the properties of the body's electro-chemistry, notably the blood plasma electrolytes, which react much like the electrolyte of a wet-cell battery with respect to conditions of low, normal, and high voltage. The low voltage condition is associated with depression, and lack of energy, and also usually associated with an accumulation of excess fluid (water) in the system. The high voltage condition is associated with the manic phase, during which reactions are faster,
speech is often accelerated, energy is high, and we usually don't want to "come down" from it. Think of a wet-cell battery like the battery in your car when it is undercharged and low on voltage, or when it is overcharged, and has more than its normal voltage, and perhaps less than its normal amounts of fluid. It's a quite similar situation. To maintain a so-called normal level of voltage of the system, it requires that everything be maintained in a balanced condition. But with damaged or missing genes in our DNA, the system is not being given a complete set of directions from these genes and therefore is not accepting all of the elements necessary for maintaining that balanced normal condition - so it goes up and down or from low to high, because the "voltage regulator" isn't doing its job.
That regulation can be accomplished by medication ( and it is) but the medication has to be taken in significant quantities on a careful schedule, because the body's system, not realizing it needs those elements, is doing everything it can to eliminate them as fast as those arrive, and the 'remedy' consists of force-feeding the system its missing elements in such quantity that not all of those can be discarded before some of it takes effect to impose more regulation on the previously unregulated aspects of the variables involved. And you won't learn that from your expensive 'shrink' who will only say "Take your meds - you don't need to know how it works." Ah, but I do! It's my ass, Baby, and I want to know what's wrong and how to fix it. And that's the story.....
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