Got Bipolar 2? Chris Aiken Can Help

If you want to know best practices for treating bipolar, "bipolar not so much," recurrent depression, "more than depression," "something-about-this-depression-treatment-just-isn't-working," read  Chris Aiken.

When I needed a subtitle for my book, I tried really hard to sell my publisher on What if it's more than depression? - a subtle reference to Bipolar Not So Much by Aiken and Jim Phelps, who is another of my mental health go-to resources. I flatter myself that Prozac Monologues is the companion piece, written from the other side of the prescription pad. The publisher had something else in mind, but if you find one book useful, you will like the other.

When my new nurse practitioner talked me into a chart review by the cookie cutter psychiatrist employed by the practice, the recommendation came back, Abilify and Zoloft. I said, No thanks, and sent her an article by Aiken. I hope it helps my NP get over her Free-Range Bipolar on Aisle 2 (i.e., non-medicated) panic before my next appointment. Aiken reports that Social Rhythms Therapy (my lifeline for years) can be as effective as medication, without the sedating effects that would have ended my writing career. Not to mention most other reasons to get up in the morning. Or even capacity to get up in the morning.

Preventing Suicide Among Gun Owners

Can we reconcile a most basic suicide prevention strategy, means restriction with the 2nd Amendment? Gun owners and public health people have to find a way to talk about this. In Oregon, the conversation has begun.

Gun owners in rural have a sense of responsibility and honor. It's a thing. Part of that responsibility is to protect one's family, one's livestock, and oneself. So let us begin by acknowledging that some gun owners, the ones who live in rural areas where suicide rates are growing the fastest, need guns for protection. But they have to do the protecting themselves. The government, on account of distance and distrust, cannot do the job. And then let us acknowledge that one of the things they need to protect their families (and maybe themselves) from is suicide.

Compare states to states.  Compare regions to regions.  Compare states within regions to other states within the same region.  Compare people of the same age group, in any age group, men to men and women to women.  Compare unemployed people to unemployed people, working folk to working folk.  Compare city dwellers to city dwellers, country folk to country folk.

Compare people with depression to other people with depression; people who are suicidal to other people who are suicidal; people who have a plan to other people who have a plan; people who have a past suicidal attempt to other people who have a past suicidal attempt, for God's sake!

More Guns = More Suicides.

Get it? Rural areas have more suicides largely because they have more guns.

Warning Signs and Suicide Hot Lines Won't Fix This

A psychiatrist remembered his first days on his ER rotation. He dealt with a woman who had tried to kill herself. She was homeless, had been taking meth so she wouldn't sleep ever since she had been raped on the street. The supervisor asked what the young doc intended to do. "Prescribe antidepressants?"

They both knew how stupid that sounded.

In the 80s and 90s, they thought they had this suicide thing figured out. As the number of prescriptions for Prozac rose, the suicide rate was falling. It was widely claimed by people who flunked logic that this was epidemiological evidence that Prozac prevented suicide. Just get more people into treatment. This kind of error is common enough to have its own name: post hoc ergo propter hoc. Or maybe there was some economic incentive behind that sloppy thinking...

Passive Suicidal Ideation and Suicide Prevention Awareness Month

Anna Borges speaks truth about suicidal ideation. In the midst of Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, with its lists of warning signs and gearing us up for the crisis, Anna brings to light the sometimes everyday-ness of suicidal ideation.

I am not always very attached to being alive, she wrote in at article for The Outline, an online magazine. It's not about being in crisis, not about having a "plan," not about needing an intervention. It's more like an indifference to life that sometimes surges into something more serious and then falls back. Like the waves of an ocean.

At 27, I’ve settled into a comfortable coexistence with my suicidality. We’ve made peace, or at least a temporary accord negotiated by therapy and medication. It’s still hard sometimes, but not as hard as you might think. What makes it harder is being unable to talk about it freely: the weightiness of the confession, the impossibility of explaining that it both is and isn’t as serious as it sounds. I don’t always want to be alive. Yes, I mean it. No, you shouldn’t be afraid for me. No, I’m not in danger of killing myself right now. Yes, I really mean it.

The Blues Aren’t Blue For Me - For Suicide Prevention Awareness Month

For Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, guest Margalea Warner tells a story of healing after an attempt and what happened #AfterIDidntKillMyself.

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When I emerged from the gray cloud of near death, the color I woke to was blue. It was an artificial blue, kin to a chlorinated pool water or blue Jell-o or Smurfs. It was a long tube with ridges that seemed to be coming from my face. I couldn't use my mind well enough to know it was a respirator tube. I stared at this blue with bewildered wonder. 

I did not remember what caused the gray. I did not remember walking away from my job at ten in the morning without asking for time off. I did not remember going through my closet and throwing all my clothing in the dumpster until I had very little left to wear.

From deep inside my mind I did remember a room of flickering shadows where I was on trial for witchcraft or for being a bad daughter. I remembered the voices saying that I must be executed. I had to be my own executioner. I remember narrator voice saying, “The prisoner is walking into Reliable Drug.  She is walking through Health and Beauty. She is walking through First Aid.  She is picking up a bottle of rubbing alcohol.  She needs the Reliable Drug brand. It will be a reliable drug. She needs it now. No time to think about it.”

But what happened next? I couldn’t remember if I obeyed the voices. I wish I could remember if I challenged their distorted thinking. All this forgetting makes perfect sense when you consider the gray that followed it. Fortunately or unfortunately, my mind’s computer made a back up copy in the cloud and replayed it over and over years later.

Flip the Script on Suicide Prevention Week

National Suicide Prevention Week starts next week (September 8-14) and I am trying to gear up for it. I can’t remember which I am supposed to watch for, the risk factors or the warning signs. I guess somebody will tell me again.

Not to be snarky – I do appreciate this annual effort to get people to pay attention. You’d think so, given my personal stake in preventing suicide, as in, my own. But I have to confess, these campaigns leave me feeling a bit disconnected from myself. How ironic is that?

I figured it out. The problem is that I pay any attention at all to suicide prevention campaigns. But they are not addressed to me. They are addressed to professionals, friends, and loved ones. They are about me and others who are at risk.

But here’s the thing. Professionals, friends, and loved ones are bit players in the suicide prevention business. The ones who do the heavy lifting are the ones in danger ourselves. So we read the literature, always looking for another trick to try, only to discover that we are eavesdropping on somebody else’s conversation.

Honestly, we don’t need to know the warning signs. Honestly, when we are in late stages of planning, we read those lists to make sure we don’t slip up and give the game away.

The Heavy Lifters for Suicide Prevention

Bipolar, Not So Much - A Review

Recurrent depression, treatment-resistant depression, depression with mixed features, cyclothymic disorder -- if your file at the doctor's office is coded for any of these, my heart goes out to you. Chances are you have taken a number of turns around the antidepressant not-so-merry-go-round. I call it "The Chemistry Experiment," and you are the test tube.

Chris Aiken and James Phelps have written the book for you. Bipolar, Not So Much: Understanding Your Mood Swings and Depression introduces the reader to the Bipolar Spectrum. No, they are not talking about the movie version of bipolar, throwing furniture out the window, driving the car into the river... They mean the vast ground between that and your basic depression. They mean depression - with something more.

The authors use a conversational style, speaking directly to the reader and skipping the jargon. They begin by explaining the spectrum. They don't ask the question the way the DSM frames it, Does this person have bipolar? Rather, their question is, How much bipolar does this person have?

Like this:

You won't find the spectrum in the DSM, the manual of diagnoses. The DSM’s symptom silos are designed to put you in one slot or another. The silos came into existence in the 1960s. The spectrum approach is much preferred by the acknowledged experts in bipolar, starting with Goodwin and Jamison who also prefer the name manic depression. But in the recent revision,there was huge resistance to making the change back to the earlier understanding of the disorder. Symptom lists with their precise cut off points seem so tidy and are easier to code. So they remain in the DSM-5, and people like Aiken and Phelps write books to try to inform people who don't know anything more about bipolar than the damn lists. But I digress...

Aiken and Phelps take the approach that you will get the best recovery if you know what is actually going on. So first they thoroughly ground the reader in the spectrum concept, and include the diagnostic and predictive instruments that all the docs can access, but usually don't take the time to use. Damn, I am digressing again...

Next they spend a lot of time on lifestyle changes and other nonpharmocological treatment measures. The thing is, the meds were all developed and work best for the folk on the far ends of that spectrum. Which you already know if you are somewhere in the middle, because they don’t work so well for you, which is how you became a Chemistry Experiment. 

Actually, even if you are clearly unipolar or clearly bipolar 1, Aiken and Phelps have good advice for you regarding sleep, diet, exercise, supplements, and the rest. You’re just going to do better if you don’t ask the meds to do all the work. Mood disorders are more complicated than that mythological chemical imbalance. 

The book's third section is a thorough listing and discussion of all the meds. They have their favorites which may be different from your doctor’s, because they don’t talk to drug reps nor read the ads. They read (and do) the research. Are you getting the sense that I have an agenda here?

Bipolar, Not So Much is the essential resource for for anybody who has depression and maybe something more. It is backed up by Phelp's excellent website PsychEducation.org. It is a humane book by humane doctors who listen and learn from their patients. What a concept, huh? Their dedication page tells the tale:

To our patients. You showed us what life is like in the mood spectrum, and we hope we got it right, or at least close, in this book.

flair from Facebook.com

book cover from Amazon.com

bipolar spectrum graphic from PsychEducation.com.