Six Months off Medications, and doing fine.

An Interesting look at one man's experience being off his medications for six months.

Seen at Furious Seasons and on the Daily KOS. Snippet:

What's stunning to me is that I remain virtually without symptoms, even of depression--and that's just not supposed to be happening here, especially since I am under massive amounts of stress, personally and professionally. Not according to the medical literature I've read. The course for bipolars who go off-meds is supposed to be highly predictable--they wind up in big trouble and either die or spend time in a psych unit or what have you. And of course they wind up back on meds after wreaking havoc on the Western world. They never get better or do just fine off-meds.

But, then, maybe the unbiased researchers who write the medical literature never talk to or examine people like me. OK, I know they don't.

So what is going on here? Was I a bad diagnosis back in 1989? Did meds somehow cure me while messing me up at the same time? Did therapy cure me? (Um, no since I haven't seen a therapist since the early 1990s.) Did I cure me? Or does bipolar disorder just burn out over time? I am leaning towards the latter two possibilities, but I'm not sure how to explain this except to say that's what seems to be going on.

One of the comments on his state is from a fairly well know psychiatrist who calls BS on BiPolar Disorder to begin with.

"Bipolar disorder isn't actually a disease.

"It's a collection of signs and symptoms lumped together in a diagnostic classification that has no basis or assumption of causation. There is no known neurochemical abnormality associated with "bipolar disorder", and patients with this diagnosis certainly have a plethora of different problems, all lumped together in one convenient/dumb diagnostic classification.

"[...] Your own experience isn't miraculous, it just verifies that much of contemporary psychiatric diagnosis is a bunch of malarkey.

The original author also had in interesting post some months back about a conversation with his shrink. It seems that by definition, nobody is ever cured of a psychiatric disease, because they don't know what is going on with their diseases, and therefore even if a person could be declared cured by any other reasonable standard, they can't say so.