If this is the new face of mental illness...

... then I need a closet, STAT!


Seriously, though, why is it that whenever someone does something crazy, it gets equated with mental illness?

Why is it so difficult to accept that some people are just NUTS and it has nothing to do with an illness or process in their brain? Sometimes it's completely behavioral and all the antidepressants, mood stabilizers, anti psychotics and anticonvulsives in the world aren't going to fix that.

People magazine thinks that Britney is bipolar... So that would mean she's been manic for what, 8, 10 years now? Sorry, guys. Affective disorders, like manic depression, are cyclical and have periods of normalcy between episodes. One of your people on the editorial board should have gotten a psychiatry degree, or at least a copy of DSM IV!

How about this for a try? Maybe she's just a narcissistic personality type on drugs.

I hate to have to be present for those ridiculous conversations about this murderer or that evil soulless criminal ~ They must be sick! And by sick, we're not talking about a particularly bad case of the chicken pox, although a very far gone case of syphilis could cause some pretty insane behaviors.

But to suggest that serial killers, drug lords and pedophiles fall into the same category as the mentally ill is ignorant, hateful and promotes the stigma that keeps so many amazing talented and accomplished individuals with mental illnesses from ever letting on.

Society needs to learn the difference between sick and sick. They need to understand that diseases of the brain are no different than diseases of the heart or lungs or kidneys except that because the brain is so intricately involved in so much of EVERYTHING we do, when it breaks down, we simply drop with it.

Kay Redfield Jamison, (who I shudder to think I am mentioning in the same blog post as Britney Spears) both the coauthor of the medical text on bipolar disorder and a Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School, is also one of the sick. In speaking of her own experiences, she has sad of manic depression, "It is not a gentle or easy disease." And it is not. 15% mortality rate. No cure. For those whom the treatment works, the side effects can be horrid. And the disease still returns in its own due time, completely unconcerned with your schedule or current intentions. It tears through your life with hurricane force winds destroying everything in it's path and leaving you buried beneath, clawing your way out to see what remains among the rubble.

I have several times been privy to the conversation about how selfish suicide is: the many variations of how much more we have in America than other places; the backward logic of how it could make anything better; the narcissism that could drive it. I ignore these conversations. I am not about to admit that I have spent years of my life plotting its demise.

So let me pose my question here instead: Imagine how much pain you need to be in and how hopeless you need to feel and how long you need to be trapped in that place for suicide to become the most rational action you could take...