I recently saw Stephen Fry's documentary about manic depression, and while it was fascinating and evocative it really wouldn't do too much to disabuse one of the notion that manic depression is little more than an excuse for rich-white-spoilt-brat syndrome. If it's a real disorder, then how can you tell the difference between bad behavior that should be corrected by self-discipline and bad behavior that needs to be corrected with drugs, talk therapy, vitamins, and/or electro-shock treatments? It seems like it's got to be something more than simply the degree of the misbehavior or how one scores on arbitrarily-numbered tests.
I'm not sure that that is the operative difference. Many illnesses, both traditionally psychological and physiological, can be kept in check by extreme feats of self-discipline, and on the other hand, some drugs, talking cures and basic good health (I'll skip the electroshocks) can all help increase self-control. The core problem, I believe, goes far beyond manic depression: Once we start to introduce a pathology of the psyche, there *is* no clear line between disorders and personality flaws. The real distinction we're trying to make is something along the lines of "is it this person't fault, or is he just sick?" -- but "fault" is not a medical concept, and is therefore not a good complementary term for "sick".
And anyone who says that has obviously never lived with or had someone close to them who sufferes from it. They don't get to see the issues faced by someone who is manic depressive. They don't know just how low those lows go, or how erratic the highs make you. They just judge on what they THINK they know. My sister is manic deppresive, we didn't grow up rich and we sure as hell didn't grow up spoiled....
^^Indeed. In junior high, I knew a girl that was manic depressive. She was well-off but not "rich". She got depressed sometime during our 7th grade year, and nearly killed herself during lunch with soda can.....somehow cut it up and tried to slit her wrists. And then there were the happy times, when she was like.....trying to think of an analogy that suits......let's just say it was like an extremely happy person...on speed.
when my sister would go thru really manic episodes, she'd be on her hands and knees in the bathroom cleaning the floor with a toothbrush. I looked at her one time and was like, are you manic or on crack?
The opening post seriously disturbs me. As Mandi points out with the example of her sister manic depressives are often people with my special upbringing or advantage who become depressed for all kinds of reasons, ranging from disssatisfaction is acheivement, to their place in spciety or the pressures on them. I've been doing my job now for 11 years and in that time I've seen some rough stuff that's gotten people depressed, good people who behaved impeccably even when fighting off long term depression resulting from things like physical abuse or rape. For Prufrock to suggest that it's an excuse for bad behaviour is disgusting.
Depression and manic depression are different things. As Stephen Fry points out, manic depression can be seen as the nicer form, just because along with the deep lows a manic depressive also gets amazing highs.
Manic depression is relatively rarely misdiagnosed and is a real biologically based disease. It responds extremely well to drug treatment, which puts it in contrast to plain old depression, which responds barely better to drugs than to placebos. Manic depression pretty strongly indicates a genuine delusion brought about by body chemistry; depression, on the other hand, is very frequently diagnosed when all that's really at work is a cynical realism.
Well, I have a friend who's been working in a mental health facility for 20 years. While there are certainly some people with problems, she's convinced that at least half the people that go thru her facility just need a good smack upside the head, as it were.
On the other hand there's my neighbor Amy, who was once diagnosed as bipolar and heavily medicated, then later said to be misdiagnosed and switched medication, but thru the whole thing, meds or not, has been nothing but an annoying little twit anyway. My wife swears Amy's only problem is that she's a self-absorbed attention whore.
And personally, I have the occasional bout of depression where I feel useless, incapable of doing anything right, and halfway to finding a tall building to jump off. I just hug my wife, mope around a little and maybe watch TV. Eventually I feel normal again.
My mom has manic depression. She grew up in a lower-middle class family and had been supporting herself since she was 17--so on that we can rule out the whole "spoiled" angle. She has to take expensive medications with side-effects almost as bad as the disease itself, because she'd be in the hospital otherwise. I've never cease to be appalled at the stance that mental illness is just a big con or media-hyped myth. (But there are people who would believe Penn & Teller if they said that gravity doesn't exist, so what can you do?) + Body organs can be malformed at birth and not work right (without outside help). + The brain is an organ. FRIGGIN' DO THE MATH! Why is it so hard for people to grasp this simple concept?
As someone who used to be married to someone with manic depression, yes it's a real disorder. Unfortunately I didn't realize it until after our divorce, but once I read up on it, it fits my ex to a T.
Yeah, and unfortunately Amy's husband didn't learn about it until after he'd married her. She'd managed to act normal during the courtship, until she had him snagged. Then after they were married she quit her job and spent the next few years in bed whining, sucking on his medical insurance.
No, because it only happened when she was really really manic, and a few hours later she'd start going down.
Dan, Dan, Dan.....stephen fry don't know shit. I don't know how any one can call those highs "amazing." How amazing is it to not be able to sit still, or sleep or have a coherant thought that makes sense because you can't get your mind to quit racing..... "amazing" I think not.
I just knew I'd get a lot of "the manic-depressive I know isn't rich/white/spoilt/bratty, therefore it isn't 'rich-white-spoilt-brat syndrome' and it really exists!" answers. There is actually not much evidence that depression and manic depression are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain. These imbalances, if they exist, are not able to be detected by MRI, biopsy, or other measures; that's why unlike other diseases (including some other behavioral disorders) the only burden of proof for the diagnostician lies on those arbitrarily-numbered questionnaire scores and not on any physical evidence. They've observed that when patients take certain psychoactive chemicals the patients' behavior can change for better or for worse and that's about it; psychiatric medicine and neuroscience are still very new fields of science without very many useful theories. The causes of depression and manic depression could be electrical and not chemical in nature and/or origin (perhaps why the elecro-shock therapies sometimes work like a charm), but it's harder to patent, manufacture, and sell electricity in pill form than it is for chemicals. So chemicals form the basis of the currently favored theories. Now, if we assume that we know that manic depression is a true disorder, with as much certainty that we know that tumors and viruses exist, it still doesn't answer the question of how to differentiate between behavior that is the result of manic depression and behavior that is the result of someone perhaps wishing they could get away with calling it manic depression. (Unless we also assume that free will does not exist and all behavioral aberrations are due to mental disorder.) If extremes in behavior are the primary measure, then how can we not chalk up rare and extreme behaviors such as murder or rape to one sort of mental illness or another? Already people react to news saying, "How could he kill his own mother? He must be crazy!"
I was going to answer this until I realized you have no idea what you are talking about, and clearly don't care to. You could do a basic google search and find out more about bipolar disorder (which is it's clinical name) than the garbage you just wrote.
So tell me about these fMRI scans or whatever it is psychiatrists use to determine someone who's really sick from someone who just needs to shape up.
Again, that is not the operative difference. If it's a neurological disorder, it has to relate to some physiological fact in our nervous system. If it is a mode of behaviour, it also has to relate to some physiological fact in our nervous system. Being unable to pinpoint that fact does not sway the argument one way or another, and as before, we find that the difference between a "real" disorder and "only" something they try to get away with is not translatable to empirical medical terms.
I imagine it's like anything else... There are people who are really and truly ill and suffering from these disorders and there are attention whores and hypochondriacs who make a good enough fake of it to away with it. It's like ADD...it's probably very real..just not nearly to the extent it's diagnosed and people are medicated for. I am constantly having Doctors try and throw depression meds at me. Of, course I get fucking depressed....look at my life....but I don't need to be drugged to manage and I won't.
