Born With the Bipolar Complex

You know who you are. For years you struggled with the harrowing symptoms of bipolar disorder. Finally, you found the right medication or combination of medications for you. Slowly your symptoms faded, leaving . . . what?

Now that you have recovered from bipolar disorder, you can tell that you are still not like those who were never born with the disorder. You find yourself able to meet incredible challenges. New talents and skills repeatedly awaken in your personality. You delight every day in the person you have become.

Then you apply for a job. The employer, learning of your diagnosis, dismisses you as flawed and inadequate. Professionals, albeit sincerely attempting to help you, recommend to you job training programs that have no chance of developing any of your many talents or skills. Even your psychiatrist, who has known you intimately for years and knows that your symptoms have all but disappeared, still thinks of you as "mentally ill". You know this partly because he or she remains skeptical and distrustful of what you say.

As long as your recovery is not recognized, it cannot be completed.

You know who you are. But nobody else does.

Recovering bipolars face a very real and very serious problem. After years of struggle with your symptoms, your self-concepts are, naturally, very low. To fully recover, you need to be confident in your developing talents and skills. Yet mental-health professionals lump you together, figuratively at least, with the bipolars who are still struggling with severe mental illness. This is not the professionals' fault. The concept of a recovered bipolar, a bipolar who can function very well, cope with just about anything, and has no significant symptoms, yet who will need medication until death, lies outside the current psychiatric paradigm (way of thinking). It is time that psychiatrists woke up to the fact, supported by a growing body of research, that whatever the genes are that trigger bipolar disorder, they contain positive potentialities as well, potentialities that have been realized in the characters of countless bipolars over the ages. The symptoms of bipolar disorder make up only a small fraction of the entire complex of traits located at the site of the bipolar gene or genes.

Please allow me to name the whole complex of personality traits, symptoms, and potential skills triggered by the bipolar genes the bipolar complex. I want the phrase the bipolar complex to denote both the negative and positive potential symptoms and personality traits with which bipolars are born.

I am adding the phrase the bipolar complex to our language in order to spring people from the trap of seeing all bipolars, no matter where they are on the continuum of recovery, as ill or suffering from a disorder. We all have flaws in our personalities. It is not logical to consider bipolars who retain only trivial symptoms to be more ill than those who have never been diagnosed.

If someone is experiencing frequent hallucinations and is now recovering in a psychiatric hospital, it may be safe to say that he or she "has bipolar disorder" or is "mentally ill".

If someone is sitting in a psychiatrist's office detailing his or her efforts to pay off a college loan and start an internet business, referring to him or her as having bipolar disorder is bound to be counterproductive. Better to refer to this person as having been born with the bipolar complex, complete with all its creative potential, and thus help to hasten his or her recovery.

There is ample evidence supporting the fact that the bipolar complex includes positive traits. Dr. Kay Jamison (1993) studied 47 British artists and writers. She found that over one third of them had sought treatment for affective disorders, disorders which coexisted with their notable creativity. Jamison wrote that "intense creative episodes are, in many instances, indistinguishable from hypomania."

Constance Holden (1987) believes that hypomania "can be highly conducive to artistic productivity" because it gives you a very rich imagination and fantasy life. Kinney and Richards (1986, 1988) also have found high levels of creativity in cyclothymes (essentially, mild or recovered bipolars). Schou (1979) has found high levels of artistic productivity in bipolars.

Bipolars have a great deal of talent and many skills to develop.  It is time to stop punishing them for recovering by continuing to call them "ill" and "disordered".

DEFINITIONS

Bipolar (Affective) Disorder = a painful disorder that has been diagnosed by a psychiatrist.

The Bipolar Complex = a particular, inherited set of positive and negative personality traits and physical (chemical) attributes of which bipolar disorder is a part. Once you have recovered from bipolar disorder, the positive aspects of the bipolar complex remain.

Bipolar = person born with the bipolar complex (many positive and negative personality traits)

"Manic Depressive" (an old term) = person suffering (no, let's say "not recovered yet") from bipolar disorder (Let's not call recovered bipolars manic depressives any more. And let's not use the word "suffering" for people who aren't suffering.)

Jamison, Kay, Ph.D., (1993), Touched With Fire. Free Press.

Holden, Constance, (1987), "Creativity and the Troubled Mind," Psychology Today, April, p. 9.

Schou, M., (1979), Artistic productivity and lithium prophylaxis in manic-depressive illness, British Journal of Psychology, 135: 97-103, Aug.

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