Five long years have passed and I have come to know bipolar disorder and the mania experience quite well. Though not my friend … it has not really been my enemy for a very long time.

Through the years, I have noticed more and more television commercials and print ads for medications of all types including mental disturbances. And as I review my own writings, I am reminded that we are fortunate to live in such historic times. Manic-depression in the 1900s’ meant that if you were stricken, you were institutionalized with murderers and the like. It was madness and mayhem as women were often abused by the very “caregivers” that were to care for them. Patients were starved, or killed, they were considered worse than thieves … they were the cast-offs of society. Science in those days included performing procedures like lobotomies on the mentally ill, it was another aspect of the horrific medical misjudgment and mismanagement of the day. Today researchers bring to consumers break-through science and as they discover the intricacies of the human brain they move revolutionarily forward. Read the rest of this entry »