Bipolar - Just Get a Little Self-Control

I posted something about bipolar the other day and was shocked to get back two of those "it's not real, they just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get a little self-control responses. God help the people who said that. It's like telling someone with cancer to just grit their teeth and stop having cancer.

That attitude, all too common in the Christian community is just so entirely wrong that I can't find words to express how appalled I am at that attitude. I've worked for 40 years with people with mental illness and other disabilities. I have two immediate family members with bipolar disorder. 

And I'm here to tell you that bipolar is a physical disability. It affects the mind, but it has physical causes. Imagine, if you will that you lost control of your emotions. One minute you are depressed, another you are angry and another you are exhilarated and it has absolutely no relation to what's going on around you, other than that stress can trigger the onset of a new fresh emotional hell. Your mind searches for a reason for your anger, depression or exhilaration. The emotions are entirely a response to chemicals in your physical brain. 

The brain of a person with bipolar or schizophrenia or Asperger's for that matter, inexplicably shoots out neuro-transmitters that trigger often violent emotion, delusions or voices in your head if you're schizophrenic and YOU HAVE LITTLE OR NO CONTROL OVER IT. I have a child in prison because he felt "better" on his meds so he decided to stop taking them and then confessed to a crime he didn't commit because he thought he could save a child by manipulating the legal system and in his deluded state thought he could get away with it. My wife deals with the side effects of medications she has to take to keep from experiencing wildly fluctuating emotions that confuse her mind and impair her judgment.

Carrie Fisher made her struggle with
bipolar very public hoping to help
others escape the stigma of mental illness..

Just because you cannot see a wound or find a tumor on x-rays doesn't mean there's not something wrong. To say that people with bipolar should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps is simply ignorant. Humans do not possess a disconnected "soul". The soul resides in the organic machine that is the brain. When God made man he first made a body from the clay and then breathed life into it. Only then did man become a "living soul". If the machine is messed up, the soul is in trouble. That Psalmist said, "He knows our frame. He remembers that we are dust."*

Most people with mental illness no longer have any bootstraps to pull themselves up with. Some mental conditions CAN be treated with behavior change, abstinence from drugs or alcohol or talking therapy in the same way we can fix a computer by reinstalling the software or moving the magnet away from our hard drive. Medication is a crapshoot at best because what's going wrong in the brain varies from person to person and there are no X-rays, CT Scans, MRIs or PET Scans that can detect anything other than secondary level effects.  

For instance, with kids who have true Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (and there are other disease including bipolar which mimic ADHD), a PET scan reveals lowered levels of glucose in the attention centers of the forebrain. They don't know what causes this and the only treatment they have for it is to administer stimulants which logically should make it worse. It doesn't. Stimulants like Ritalin and Cylert re-energize the brains attention centers and help the person with ADHD to focus and from there to "have a little self-control".

Self-control, talking therapy and "good discipline" only work if the underlying hardware (the human brain) is functioning properly. It's like trying to install new software on a damaged computer. If the organic hardware that is the brain is not working properly, often the best you can do is try medication, therapy and other work-arounds to achieve the best quality of life possible under the circumstances. It's unlikely, however, that you're going to fix it. You can slap a patch on your leaky lifeboat while you are at sea, but don't expect it to be able to take a lot of pounding from the sea.

Even medications are not all that accurate in treating specific conditions because we cannot see inside the living brain to find out what bit of it is not working and we do not have the ability to fix the delicate mechanisms of the brain. The best we can do is cut out tumors, but there aren't any surgeries available to "fix" bipolar. You can only diagnose it by its symptoms. It's kind of like trying to fix your car's engine without opening the hood or taking the engine apart. 

Other attempts to mechanically cure mental illness through surgical means have resulted in some horrific solutions like lobotomies and electro-shock. These do violence to the mind. It's like using a hand grenade to clean out your closet. Such radical solutions may make the person more compliant or less violent, but the mind is irrevocably altered in the process.

With bipolar and other mental illness with a brain defect of some sort as the cause, all you can do is try different medications until you find one or a combination of meds that give the person some relief.  For example, if your computer has a defect on the motherboard, the software won't work properly however much you want it to. If you have a defect in the brain, no amount of gritting your teeth or efforts at "self-control" will work effectively to make it go away. The best we can do is create some sort of chemical workaround or some intense therapy that works around the problem. The defect doesn't go away, though. It remains there lurking in the background for the rest of a person's life. It's why addicts say they are never cured. They're only "in recovery". Addiction, however it's caused, makes physical changes to the brain that you will have to deal with the rest of your life. The brain is too complex for mere humans to dig around in it to fix the problems. The best you can do is to try to control the neuro-chemicals through medication and fix the damage through therapy. It's tough to do.

There's a reason Robin Williams played mentally ill people so well....
The landscape of mental illness was all too familiar to him.

The #1 side effect of uncontrolled bipolar is suicide. Bipolar isn't a made-up excuse for bad behavior. It's a real disorder. It can be traced genetically through multiple generations of families and you better pray to God you don't have the genetic marker for it yourself, because one day a physical or emotional trauma may trigger full blown bipolar disorder. Left untreated or left for the person to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, bipolar may drive you to the point that one day you find yourself sitting in a porta-jon on a California beach with a shotgun in your mouth like a former preacher/evangelist and good friend of mine did. He did not survive. My wife's uncle did not survive his final bout with bipolar. He went to bed, rolled over to face the wall and starved to death in that position. Her niece's life is a wreck because of her bipolar. We've been to the ER and mental hospitals five times with my wife's bipolar. She's not a bad person. She's just overwhelmed by it from time to time. 

A lot of famous people have successfully coped with bipolar and some not so successfully. A lot of them have lost or ruined their lives as the disease progressed. Earnest Hemingway killed himself. Mel Gibson's disastrous bipolar psychotic breaks are famous and nearly ruined his career. Robin Williams killed himself. People like Winston Churchill, Ben Stiller, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Richard Dreyfuss, and Jim Carrey have all struggled with bipolar. You can also add Vivien Leigh of "Gone With the Wind" fame, Carrie Fisher, whose youthful drug abuse has been tied directly to attempts by the actress to self-medicate her then undiagnosed bipolar, Jean Claude Van Damme, Linda Hamilton, Vincent Van Gogh, TV journalist Jane Pauley, Marilyn Monroe and Patty Duke all have struggled with bipolar disorder. The disease is often fatal if untreated and unmonitored.

So before you tell someone else that's sick to pick up their bed and walk, please make sure you are Jesus! And remember, Jesus first healed the demoniac's mind BEFORE he healed his soul.

© 2017 by Tom King
 *Psalms 103:14 

Robin Williams Was A Hero

Robin in The Fisher King

The death of brilliant comedian, Robin Williams has shocked and saddened the nation this week. Everyone's asking how could a man, so rich, so talented and so well-loved end his own life like that. He seemingly had everything to live for.

The Internet's predictable leap to judgment by the usual set of self-proclaimed experts has got us all sorts of clever answers.

• He wasn't a Christian so he's gone straight to hell - don't be sorry for him.
• He just didn't read the right books.
• See, we told you wealth doesn't bring happiness.
• He was a liberal douchebag
• He chose to kill himself because he was a coward.

There are lots more, but this stuff sickens me and I don't want to repeat any more of it.

Suicide may indeed be a person's choice. I think of Saul who did not wish to die at the hands of the Philistines and others who took suicide as a way out of what they saw as an insoluble problem.

But the idea that suicide is always a clear personal choice is not true at all. There is evidence a-plenty that Robin Williams suffered from bipolar disorder or something closely akin to it. Bipolar is a cruel disease in which an underlying severe neurological condition causes maladaptive psychological responses. What that means is that at times your perception of the world becomes utterly distorted and things make perfect sense to you that make no sense at all to anyone else.

I have two family members who have made multiple suicide attempts over the past few years. They failed, not for lack of trying but  because family members were watching, praying and intervening when they lost contact with reality. In one case, I am certain angels intervened. Neither wanted to die, not really. It's just their perception was so distorted that it seemed the least selfish thing they could do. Later, when they weren't in the middle of a psychotic break, they could see that what they believed with all their hearts at the time was not true.

Many artists suffer from mental disorders. Many of them incorporate their illness into their art. Earnest Hemingway, Vincent Van Gogh, Mel Gibson, Catherine Zeta-Jones, John Nash, Brooke Shields, Carrie Fischer, Emma Thompson, Herschel Walker, Michael Phelps, Howard Hughes, Paula Deen, Elton John, Craig Ferguson, Margot Kidder, Sinead O'Conner and Kurt Cobain are just a few of the famous people who battled with neurologically-based mental disorders and often lost their lives to it.

Much of Robin Williams comedy was the result of his successful sublimation of his wild swings from mania to depression and back to mania. He worked it all into his comedy routines. It's little wonder he did so well playing lunatics as in The Fisher King and One Hour Photo. He'd been there, done that and bought the T-shirt franchise.  His portrayal of men on the brink of madness were heart-breakingly real for a reason. He'd been there. He was probably there at the time he played them.

I lost a good friend ten years ago to the ravages of bipolar. He was a brilliant preacher and Godly man and incredibly creative. Toward the end of his life his brain betrayed him. He began having blackouts, panic attacks and psychotic breaks and at the last and he became so isolated that no one was there when the madness overwhelmed him and he put a shotgun in his mouth and blew out his brains.

The truth is that Robin Williams death may have been inevitable - a consequence of his bipolar. What may be the real miracle is that he managed to hold off his own death for so long in the face of the unrelenting effort by his own brain to kill itself and stop the pain.

The number one outcome/side-effect of bipolar disorder is suicide. Those who love a person with bipolar need only miss the signs just once to lose their loved one. I know. I care for someone with bipolar. Most days are good, but once in a while it all goes to hell in a hand-basket and if I wasn't here, I could lose the person most dear to me in all the world.

Robin may have lost the fight in the end, but given the severity of the disease that eventually claimed him, his long and courageous fight against it deserves to be lauded for what it was - heroic. Like the defenders of the Alamo, Robin Williams held out as long as he could. You don't berate a soldier who died at his post.

So, Robin, go with God my friend. He sees the sparrow fall and notes its resting place. I suspect one day Robin will stand before the throne of Grace, look up into the face of God and say, "There you are." And God will say, "I have found you my child, come home with me."

© 2014 by Tom King

Creating an Artist's Village for Folk with Bipolar

Co-Housing Project - Not sure where it's located.but it looks like somewhere I'd like to live.

As some of you may know, I'm looking into a new nonprofit startup - a co-housing project for people with bipolar and those who love them.  As I looked at my family's problem - 3 close relatives with severe bipolar and all on the edge of becoming homeless - I decided it was time to start up my sixth nonprofit organization.

I do that a lot.  When I run up against a problem a lot of people are having that's beyond their ability to solve, I get involved in creating a new organization or program or I run around looking for money to expand something someone is already trying to do.

This particular one hits close to home.  For those of you with a loved one who has bipolar and is in crisis, you know what it's like. Every day you go off to work, you wonder if you'll come home and find your spouse or child still alive or not.  Apparently I'm not the only one.

I got a note today from a guy who's wife thinks about suicide all the time. He loves her, so of course he can't leave her alone and unattended.  He's trying to make a living working at home and struggling. If you've tried it you know how hard it can be to get any real work done. There's always something. 

He's not the first I've heard from.  The families and caregivers of people with bipolar don't know what to do. Most "safe" places take them away from their families so that they feel betrayed and alone. Trying to keep them home without any close supports can be almost impossible. A lot of husbands or wives have had to resort to working from home for the safety of their loved ones.  If they can get disability for them, it's still very hard to make ends meet because the caregiver is hard pressed to find gainful employment without having to risk their loved one's life.

I came up with this idea the way I came up with all the other hare-brained ideas I've got myself involved with.  God only knows if it will work.  I call it the Rainy Day People Cooperative. The idea is to band together as caregivers and people with bipolar disorder to create a a community that works like we need it to.  Low stress, aid and comfort, backup, emergency plans and resources would be things we should build in to it.  It's not apartments.  With bipolar, you need lots of insulation and some airspace between yourself and your neighbors.  Bipolar can get a little loud.  The atmosphere in the community would be restful, calm and relaxing; designed to reduce stress and anxiety.  People in the community would understand how bipolar works and be able to take the odd outburst in stride.  The individual cottages would allow folk to interact with others as much as they were comfortable and retreat into a cozy cocoon when the anxiety becomes too much.  We could harness the creative energy often associated with people who have bipolar and put it to use to benefit the community and the individuals within it. 

Think of it as a retirement/resort/artist community designed to meet the needs of people who climb emotional peaks and slide down valleys as a way of life. Co-housing projects like this can be built anywhere. Most of the residents won't be going off to the office.  Residents can share community hi-speed cable and Internet, create a community website, take classes, do group therapy, gardening, hobbies and host special events.

Isn't it time those of us who have to live with this stuff decided to take control of our own lives. Shouldn't we live somewhere that works for us and isn't built just to make the developer a quick buck.  If we can put this project together it could be a sustainable, soul healing endeavor.  Drop me a note if you'd like to help us figure out how to do this.  My e-mail is twayneking@gmail.com .  Let's do this.

Tom King