When you are in a manic phase, skimming the world of what’s real and what’s not, your ill mind will tell you how special you are! Don’t believe it, you are not special because you can do what other people need LSD to do, you are sick, and in this state, you don’t have control of your mind. And that is not special, that is sick and scary.

When you are in a manic phase, your ill mind will tell you you are a genius! Look at all these brilliant ideas you are generating! Any one of them may very well save humanity from extinction and all of them are worthy of a nobel prize! Don’t listen to this! Yes you are getting a lot of ideas, some of them may actually be interesting, but they are only ideas, and require years of work to prove or implement. For example, I had the “brilliant” idea that mental illness was autoimmune in my manic phase in 2008. I wrote books and books about my theory, also weaving yoga ideas and psychoneuroimmunology precepts as well straight immunology. I still have pictures of those books, because I was so paranoid at that late stage of mania, that I thought my husband would steal my (groan) brilliant ideas and steal my nobel prize from me! Taking deep breaths as I write this… So I took pictures of the pages of the books and downloaded them into iphoto, kind of James Bondish… hahaha  Haven’t really looked at all those pages since that manic time, but I’m sure if I did, they will be all over town, making sweeping statements, connecting things that possibly have no connection… hell i should take a look at them jsut for fun. Of course other people have had the same idea, that mental illness is autoimmune, there certainly are autoimmune illnesses associated with mental illness, like rheumatoid arthritis, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and others. There certainly is cell death in the brain thereby enlarging the ventricles, this is seen in schizophrenia and in bipolar d/o. This cell death could be a result of our immune cells killing our neurons… this would require many years of experimentation and documentation, not something you can do in a manic phase. Ok, I’ll grant you, one may get brilliant ideas in mania, yes it can happen, but mostly what you get is flight of ideas, flitting from thought to thought and you also get delusions of grandeur, which make it seem all your thoughts are brilliant. But they’re not. If you are intelligent before mania, you do not become a genius when you are in mania, it just seems like it, haha.

When you are in a severe depression, your ill mind will tell you you’re not worth anything, don’t believe it. You are worth a LOT! Your mind is just sick at the moment and feeling bad, don’t believe anything it says, don’t believe it if it tells you to do away with yourself. Do not! You are valuable, you are beloved, you are loving. Depression or the depressed phase of bipolar is just an illness, this phase tells you lies too. Don’t believe them. Believe what your loved ones are telling you, believe what your doctor is telling you, have faith in your medication. It will work and you will come out of this awful downturn.

Don’t believe anything bipolar disorder tells you. Take your meds and be well.

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