3/08/2007

About those "bipolar" insults...

Could people please stop that?

It's just that bipolar disorder (also known as "Manic Depression") in no sense of the word justifies it being used as a descriptive term for this whole wave of moc tokenising weirdos.

Manic depression (also known as bipolar disorder) is a condition where the sufferers experience swings between clinically depressive and manic episodes - however, usually a bipolar person goes through these swings in time periods measured in months (the clinical diagnoses says that a person has bipolar disorder if they go through the swings over the period of a year, as well as presenting all the other symptoms of course, which i'd go into but I've forgotten them) not minutes or days.

So it is not just a clinical term for being a complete and utter emotionally unstable and unpredictable nut case in other words.

Please stop using the term as if it did.

10 comments:

bint alshamsa said...

Amen. Ditto. I second that motion.

Rootietoot said...

Thank you. I stay quiet about it, but as a bonafide bipolar, sometimes it stings when folks do that. If they knew what it was *really* like, they wouldn't be so flip.

Veronica said...

Jesus Christ on a stick.

It wasn't an insult.

She was insulted, yes. But, I said she was bi-piolar because I thought she'd talked about it before. I was mistaken; I'm not sure who I mixed her up with. I apologized for it. She ignored the explanation and apology. It's all in very plain text.

R. Mildred said...

It wasn't you veronica (I hadn't actually seen that far up the thread before so I didn't know why caroline was going on about CM being bipolar), despite CM's whining about it, but you deleted teh comments that got my ire up by the looks of things, I remember some of the preceding and subsequent comments.

Veronica said...

Cool. I'm just disgusted with all things CM at the moment. Sorry for the harsh language.

ben said...

amen. as i said there, folks who don't have mental illness express privilege by overreacting to "accusations" of mental illness or by making them.

Anonymous said...

haha, agreed. i also wish people would stop saying things like, "I'm totally OCD" when they just mean obsessive compulsive. OCD is the acronym for the disorder, not a descriptive for the behavior, people ...

Suni said...

There is such a thing as ultra-rapid cycling. Have you read anything about it yet?

R. Mildred said...

Well there's cylcothymia, which is kinda lumped into the bipolar spectrum, in proper Bipolar syndrome sufferers, quick cycling is again measured in terms of the switch overs happening several times a year, whereas cylcothymia leads to episodes that last for hours or days before they switch over again.

It's also more about light depressive/light manic switch overs rather htan heavy depressive/heavy manic episodes.

Anonymous said...

I havent been diagnosed yet, but the dr. did say that I could most likely have Cyclothymia, and also that rapid cycling is possibly there too... if any one has somethin like this how do you keep it a secret yet have those people understand that it wasnt really you actin like that