rapidcyclebipolar

Bipolar I disorder is a mental health condition characterised by manic episodes that last at least a week, or by manic symptoms that are so severe that immediate medical care is required. People with bipolar I disorder may also experience depressive or hypomanic episodes, and most people also have periods of neutral mood.

Bipolar II disorder is a major psychiatric disorder that involves a pattern of depressive episodes and hypomanic episodes. Hypomanic episodes are less severe than the manic episodes in bipolar I disorder, but still include out-of-character behavior. People with bipolar II often return to their normal functioning between episodes.

Bipolar I and bipolar II are both long-term conditions that are separate diagnoses, not different forms of the same disorder. The main difference between the two is the severity of their symptoms, particularly the nature of their manic or hypomanic episodes:

* Bipolar I 
People with bipolar I experience full mania, which is a severe, abnormally elevated mood that can lead to erratic behavior and serious disruptions in life. Manic episodes can include psychosis, such as hallucinations or delusions, and may require hospitalisation. People with bipolar I may or may not experience depressive episodes, but depression is present for about 30% of the time.
* Bipolar II 
People with bipolar II experience hypomania, which is a less severe form of mood elevation than mania. Hypomania doesn't involve psychosis. People with bipolar II also experience depressive episodes, which can be longer-lasting and more severe than in bipolar I. Some researchers estimate that people with bipolar II experience depression more than 50% of the time
Rapid cycling bipolar disorder is a pattern of frequent and distinct mood episodes in people with bipolar disorder. It's diagnosed when someone experiences four or more episodes of mania, hypomania, depression, or mixed episodes within a year. These episodes can last for days, weeks, or months, and people may feel stable for a few weeks between them. Rapid cycling can occur at any point in the course of bipolar disorder, and it can come and go over many years depending on how well the illness is treated. For some people, it may be a temporary condition. Rapid cycling can undermine quality of life, making it difficult for people to maintain a schedule or commit to things. This can negatively impact their job performance and make it hard for them to be relied on, both professionally and personally.
#MightyTogether #MentalHealth

Our thoughts and words are conventions. It is dangerous to take conventions too seriously, because a convention is just a social convenience, for example, money. It’s absurd to take money too seriously and confuse it with real wealth. In the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are "coins" for real things. If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you’ll spend your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing things you don’t like doing, which is stupid.

When you get free from certain fixed concepts of the way the world is, you find it is far more subtle, and far more miraculous, than you thought it was. I have realised that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is. If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.

Here is the vicious circle: if you feel separate from your organic life, you feel driven to survive; survival -going on living- thus becomes a duty and also a drag because you are not fully with it; because it does not quite come up to expectations, you continue to hope that it will, to crave for more time, to feel driven all the more to go on.

You see, for all life is an act of faith and an act of gamble. The moment you take a step, you do so on an act of faith because you don’t really know that the floor’s not going to give under your feet. The moment you take a journey, what an act of faith. The moment that you enter into any kind of human undertaking in relationship, what an act of faith.

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone. Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way. Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself. Where there is to be creative action, it is quite beside the point to discuss what we should or should not do in order to be right or good. A mind that is single and sincere is not interested in being good, in conducting relations with other people so as to live up to a rule. Nor, on the other hand, is it interested in being free, in acting perversely just to prove its independence. Its interest is not in itself, but in the people and problems of which it is aware; these are ‘itself.’ It acts, not according to the rules, but according to the circumstances of the moment, and the ‘well’ it wishes to others is not security but liberty.

Your body does not eliminate poisons by knowing their names. To try to control fear or depression or boredom by calling them names is to resort to superstition of trust in curses and invocations. It is so easy to see why this does not work. Once again, we try to know, name, and define fear in order to make it “objective,” that is, separate from “I”. #Schizophrenia #rapidcyclebipolar