to half hope bipolar goes the same way as homosexuality?

[Mitchy1nge]

when homosexuality came out of the DSM

Mitchy actually you've got my opinion pretty good there BUT i have never said there's nothing we can do to prevent it - whilst you think they're entirely preventable.

When I had to be taken into hospital NOTHING could have prevented it. I had a lovely life, no worries at all, absolutely everything going swimmingly. I knew a lot about mental health and I knew what options I had if something ever happened. Then BAM. For some reason something in my brain triggered and I locked myself in my own bathroom and tried to kill myself. My partner had to kick the door in, and pin me down on the floor because I was trying to hurt him and myself. In fact at one point I knocked myself out from head butting a wall. He rang an ambulance, and they took me in. If I hadn't have been given drugs at that moment in time I would have either killed myself or someone else. I cannot see any way in which that scenario could have been prevented because there were absolutely no triggers, there were no indications that my mind was just going to flip out like that. I've had counselling in the past for things, resolved all that, but this just randomly happened.

The human brain is a complex thing as I'm sure you know and not everything can be prevented or predicted. When it does go to such an extent someone needs to step in and take control of the situation.

Please don't compare compulsory treatment and sectioning to slavery and prostitution though, I think that's actually quite offensive.

I'm comparing the attitude towards these things, not the things themselves, the passive acceptance of something (be it prostitution or detention of the mentally ill) as if it is an inevitability.

It's not an inevitability, it's just something that we have to tackle if it occurs. That's the way I see it.

In the UK we have some of the best preventative techniques for a whole range of diseases, disorders, conditions. We put a lot into health promotion, we do a lot of study in regards to trends, changing behaviours, reducing stigma, allowing people informed decisions etc...

but none of that will help a person who suddenly and inexplicably suffers some form of serious mental breakdown and because of that is either a danger to themselves or others, and isn't fully capable of making decisions for themselves. This is a whole ethical debate and there are strict guidelines in place for these scenarios, to protect either side.

And it's very hard to prevent something we don't fully understand. It's like trying to prevent cancer. Yeah we can give up smoking and we can eat well, but if we've already got a hereditary disposition or some faulty gene then tough luck.

that's just not how it works though is it, the genetic predisposition is a teeny tiny influence that it happens to be politically expedient to emphasise

have gone a long way off whatever my original track was! but prevention and early intervention used to be quite popular slogans that we don't hear much about these days

That's because the funding's been cut drastically for mental health and prevention is less of a focus than the crisis cases. Or at least that is what I heard on the radio last week.

What I was getting at wasn't hereditary dispositions, what I was getting at is despite prevention techniques we still cannot stop these things from happening.

Yeah electric there isn't nearly enough money going into MH services anymore. There isn't enough money across any services anymore. :(

we are probably all in agreement there, that Stuff Is Shit where funding is concerned, at least

If there are social and environmental contributory factors then we should be looking for them (and probably are), but that doesn't change how we deal with someone today who might harm themselves or others. We can't just sit back and wait for full knowledge or a cure.

I know you said your comparison to slavery and prostitution was about attitudes, but it's still a terrible comparison unless you think there's a big conspiracy to drug you.

it's not really a terrible comparison, it says a lot about our attitudes to certain groups in society and what befalls them and how urgently we feel that change and education and progress is necessary

of course in some parts of the world, to this very day, people who experience same sex attraction are locked up and considered a moral danger to society

none of my comparisons are wholly unfounded really

I asked you before what you wanted to change and how you want things to be, but I don't think you replied.

I think I just realised why it might be pointless to try and discuss it with you.

am I an unrewarding conversational companion? Sorry about that!

I would like us to stop glossing over all the things that happen to and around people to make them mentally ill, to look at (for example) why some environments are set up to make some groups so much more likely to experience bipolar mania, and to make sure that people get evidence based treatment (as opposed to whatever drug has been developed in search of a disease) and support to reduce the severity and length and frequency of episodes when they occur. People are detained unnecessarily on occasion, sections are sometimes lifted within days, this shouldn't happen.

'I would like us to stop glossing over all the things that happen to and around people to make them mentally ill'.

Totally agree.

When I was on a psychiatric ward I was with 21 other women. I met about two thirds of those women.

I was the ONLY educated, middle class woman.
I was the only white woman.
I was the only woman who still had custody of her children.
More than half of these women were refugees/asylum seekers. Several from war torn and/or disrupted, dysfunctional societies (Congo, Afghanistan, Haiti to name a few).

Most of these women had had truly shit lives- poverty, abuse, trauma.

Being sectioned and medicated was obviously a response to crises in these womens lives. But I have wondered ever since how the root causes of these women's distress and illness have been tackled? Do the women from war-torn countries get trauma counselling, for example? Does anyone ever say 'yeah, you live alone in a strange country in a hostel and have lost your kids due to drug abuse...your life IS really shit, I van see why you're 'ill'?

Just ponderings, really...

I Can see, sorry

your ponderings are close to mine, not that the people I've met in hospital in very white Suffolk or Essex or Cambs were from those sorts of backgrounds but one woman in particular has always stayed in my mind - we met in St Clements in Ipswich and she lived in Burlington Rd, mostly lovely houses but red light area. This was a little while before those five women were murdered in the space of, what, a month? She was driven a bit mad by kerb crawlers on her way to and from work, it was all she talked about for weeks and it was the first time I'd ever had cause to think about demand reduction (having previously lived in Holland and imagining myself to be all cool and liberal with these things).