Who cares what label is on it. Bipolar or manic depressive, we’re sick. And we SO enjoy being treated like we should just pull up our panties and ride it out. I’ll try that on the next person I know with cancer, or Lupus.

And I LOVE the side effects from the drugs I have to take after nearly taking my life for the nth time, for no good reason. Geez, I should be able to suck that up, right?

Would you tell a paranoid schizophrenic to stop taking their pills? That their problems are all in their heads? Doubtful.

I’ll take my crutch, since it prevents me from following through on the desire to hurt people. You keep on keeping on.

“Manic-depressive isn’t the name of a disorder anymore. They now call it bipolar.”

When you’re Manic Depressive, you can make all the rules you want about what you want people to call you. I actually AM Manic Depressive, and prefer that term over ‘bipolar,’ a word I find non-descriptive and vague.

There’s a cartoon joke on our refrigerator captioned “One Step Therapy”: a psychiatrist slapping his patient and yelling “Snap out of it!” I keep it there as a reminder of my previous attitude when I didn’t understand as much as I do now…

No need to insult my intelligence and my experiences….I choose not to medicate.

You mean by calling you brain-damaged, passive, an addict, unwilling to face reality? I’ll have to remember that. You should try it, too. Interestingly, nobody here has attacked your chosen method of treatment. Nobody has said half the crap about you for treating your problems with veganism etc. that you and Gregory have said about us. The problem isn’t whether or not you medicate. The problem is your attitude toward those of us who do.

I don’t actually agree that “suffering is the human condition.” I’m thrilled about medical advances that alleviate suffering: good anesthesia, antibiotics, vaccines, treatments for diabetes, asthma, PTSD, lupus. I don’t see anything valuable in suffering qua suffering.

I keep asking, and neither you nor Gregory seem to want to answer. If suffering is the human condition, why is it only mental illness that you all seem to feel so strongly about? When faced with my asthma, do you also think it best for me to shrug my shoulders and say “well, suffering is the human condition?” What about my friend, who takes meds for her rheumatoid arthritis?

Anti-depressants aren’t get-out-of-suffering free cards. My hip still hurts when it rains. I still grieve for the people I love who are dead. The difference is, I no longer suffer needlessly. And I tell you what, if someone came along and gave me a safe med with no side effects to treat my hip pain? I’d snap that shit up, because I live in a fourth-floor walk-up, and that pain does me no good whatsoever. It doesn’t give me a message of any kind, aside from “Hey, EG, you’re getting old.”

*coff!* *choke!* *hack!* *koff!*

Excuse me? Excuse me?

Basta. All done with you. You came in here in bad faith. Just “throwing that out there.”