Manic Tuesday!!!!

People with bipolar disorder have a suicide risk ranging between 19% and 24%. Of all mental illnesses, bipolar disorder is associated with the highest risk of suicide, higher even than depression. Somewhere around 31% of bipolar patients kill themselves every year.

For those of you who need a few terms defined:Bipolar disorder is what we now call the disease once known as Manic-Depression. Those of us with bipolar II enjoy depression and hypomania rather than depression and out and out mania, as is experienced by those with bipolar I. The OED defines hypomania thusly "A minor form of mania, often part of the manic-depressive cycle, characterized by elation and a feeling of well-being together with quickness of thought." Mania is defined as "...one of the aspects of bipolar (manic-depressive) mood disorder, characterized particularly by euphoria, grandiose thought, rapid speech expressing loosely connected thoughts (flight of ideas), decreased need for sleep, increased physical activity, and sometimes delusions or hallucinations." Those are fine definitions, but they don't much assist the layman in comprehending the difference. So let me see if I can be more instructive.

This is hypomania: You wake up in the morning; make four lunches, preparing three individual sandwiches (one peanut butter, no jelly. One turkey with mayo, one turkey without mayo but with tomato, blotted dry so it doesn't make the bread soggy) and a thermos of soup. Each lunch gets a drink, two snacks, and a piece of fruit. You wake, dress, and feed four children, reminding everyone to take vitamins, and Omega III. You sign permission slips, and load up carpool. Then you go to the gym, do email, make plane reservations for family vacation, copy-edit essay, put finishing touches on novel, revise short story for submission to anthology, drop off meal for family with new baby at preschool, and order new bathing suits for everybody because, suddenly, despite the fact that it is February you decide that everyone needs new bathing suits and that if a single day passes without each and every member of the family having a new bathing suit the well-being of the family will collapse. Then you reorganize the kitchen hell drawer, go online and order nine superpacks of size 4 diapers (and swim diapers for the baby, too, because, after all, what's a bathing suit for a baby without a swim diaper underneath it?). Then you pick up the children from school. You never, never, do anything without talking on the phone at the same time. Most of these phone conversations should involve volunteering for things you don't actually want to do but feel you should. That is a day in the life of the average hypomanic.

The above is from http://bad-mother.blogspot.com/.

Stumbled across it the other night and it made for nice reading.

Had a hypomania session yesterday.Knew I was in the zone and knew it was not a good idea but nothing i could do to stop it.So threw boxes and screamed at staff for hour and then went home and cooked up iftaar in 30 min.Chops brocoli cauliflower samoosa's and some chicken thingy.Lovely meal.Then had first smoke of the day and it brought me down.Had i known it would have done that would have lit up much earlier.Have made mental note that one blonde smoked after having been fasting for the whole day is a great downer.Plus none chemical so no side effects. Wonder wat to call the cancer!!!!!

Today's fast going to be rough.Woke up with 10 mins on the clock.Roomys have become playstation addicts and hence we all have been stumbling to wake up for serhi.Had the luxuary of having the worse bowl of oats ever this morn.Nuked to neverneverland.Nasty.

Have to admit if I say so myself we three kings have been doing pretty well so far.People expect three guys staying on their own to suffer and stagnate but we have been having a blast.Good foods great times and even greater laughs.

Ironic that I would land up living with two guys from back home who I had never spoken to or even acknowledged in the whole time we lived there.

This world is always full of surprises.

Going to earn my keep now.

Ciao