Positive Health Online

In Professor Aaron Beck’s Forward to Professor Richard Bentall’s book Madness Explained, who teaches at Liverpool University, he states that “Incomprehensible symptoms of the mentally ill, are actually extensions of what many of us experience every day,” adding, “There’s a new way of thinking about psychiatric disorders is emerging.”

I have been bipolar for over 30 years, and would like to give you my description of it, which views this disorder in a different perspective:

Depression: when you’re waiting not to do things.
Happiness: when can’t wait to do things.

I thought of this saying when I realized that when I was depressed, I stopped myself from doing things- I put obstacles in my way.

On the Student Room website, a patient identified with this:

“I love the way you have put that. It’s so simple but true. None of the doctors I have had to talk to have been able to come up with anything like that.”

A lot of acquaintances who have experienced depression, in one form or another, have urged me to publicise my feelings. By putting forward the nature of this ailment, as I see it, I’m hoping that people might realise how this has come about and also reduce stigma.

More and more people sympathize with such sufferers and even a greater number of patients have been willing to speak out about their emotional state. There’s been a lot of evidence that discrimination of the mentally ill has been reduced in the last decade.

Mental health websites claim that it’s not weak to be so inflicted. I have wanted to believe this, but I don’t really agree. I don’t think patients are actually weak, but that the odds in life, are stacked against them.

Previously, I have experienced being persecuted, realizing that some delusions, had been imagined by me, but at the same time, sometimes my unacceptable behaviour, made people react the way they did. I believe that there’s a fine dividing line.

Recently, I’ve been made aware of the term,“ Identified Patient”, also in Wikipedia:

“In a clinical setting to describe the person in a dysfunctional family who has been unconsciously selected to act out the family’s inner conflicts as a diversion.”