On mania, and how it "suddenly" "turns you" into a bag of dicks

[azurelunatic]

So, um.

I'm not a mental health professional. I am an observant human being, and I have at least two friends (that I know of, who have told me about it) who have bipolar disorder and who have experienced manic phases.

The following is a sampling of things that either they mentioned or I observed:

Not getting enough sleep because sleep was unimportant compared to the other things there were to do, like:
Reading all the fic.
Cleaning all the things.
Buying random crap.
Ordering random crap online.
Starting amazingly ambitious craft projects with tons of energy and enthusiasm, having bought all the supplies needed and very likely then some.
Sincerely blowing through/fucking up budgeting because of all of the random crap purchased.
Being generally irritable.
Getting in arguments with family and friends that they might have otherwise de-escalated.
Ranting at length and with some heat about topics like bad writing, poor technical and office skills, corruption in the workplace, and the state of the economy.

Not on this list: hurling racially based or gender-based abuse at people on Twitter and other online platforms.

Why?

Well, I imagine it's because manic phases seem to amplify people's existing traits and interests up to potentially harmful levels, even if the trait or interest was harmless or unexceptionable. Their existing habits never included bullying women of color who were internet strangers. Therefore, when they had manic episodes, they didn't suddenly start.

As far as I can tell, today's dickbag dude is, in ordinary life, a dickbag. Mania renders him a dickbag turned up to 11.

Comments

[atalantapendrag]

So much WORD.

[batrachian]

Dick + mania = bag of dicks.

By simple maths, then, bag of dicks - mania = still a dick.

[sithjawa]

That's a really useful analysis of the effect brain eernt has on people's ability to not be dickbags, that I have never heard before, and makes a lot of sense. My brain is applying that type of analysis to the "aspergers made me do it" thing, with results that make sense to me.

[azurelunatic]

I am untidy, unlikely to ask for help, and unlikely to talk to people who stress me out. When I'm depressed, these all amplify. Badly.

[cleverthylacine]

I basically do every single one of those things. Pretty much all the time.

Which makes sense, considering that the only way they can tell the difference between what I have and bipolar is the drugs it responds to. That and the fact that I don't actually have two poles at all (except when I have clearly hormonally linked psychotic paranoid depressions that I haven't had since I stopped taking birth control pills and got fixed).

And yet I amazingly manage not to call people names like that all the time. Because I am crazy, not a bigoted jackass. :)

[cadenzamuse]

I checked this with my bipolar loved one, and zhe agreed. Because: DUH.

[amberfox]

Indeed yes. You would not believe some of the things I've bought.

[vass]

I remember one time this girl in the student lounge at uni coming up to a group of us and asking really politely and apologetically if we were talking about her. Not to accuse us, just that she had schizophrenia and it caused paranoia and she wanted a reality check. We told her we weren't, and she thanked us and went back to reading her book, and we went back to talking about Babylon 5. I'd never met her before or since, but I bet she was a quiet, apologetic, polite person before the schizophrenia, too.

[azurelunatic]

Oh ugh, paranoia sucks.

[green]

I don't know what to say other than kudos or +1 (or IAWTC or whatever the kids are using these days)

[jamoche]

Can't help but think of Mr tl;dr on cocoa-dev, too, with his world-changing iPad app that'll double Apple's profits. Arrogance and tl;dr, yes, abusive dickbag no.

[azurelunatic]

Yeah.

(For others: there's a guy on a mailing list who seems to have simultaneously fallen on some hard times, gone off his meds ((he has a published article about his diagnosis and the importance of his meds from some years back)), and gone into multiple frothing grandiose walls-of-text on a mailing list about how he needs, NEEDS, to get his app into the Apple store because it is SERIOUSLY the best thing since sliced bread, and a week or two is too long of a wait, both for him in his situation and for Apple because they don't know what they're missing. The app is a not particularly inspiring or iOS-looking version of Conway's Game of Life. No matter his back-end skills, the screenshots of his front-end look severely Linux 1998. His major crime seems to be wasting the time of a mailing list, which is obnoxious but not abusive.)

[siderea]

I am a mental health professional, and I'm deeply uncomfortable with this post.

Your list of symptoms? Entirely within the modest ambit of hypomania. You can have a full on manic episode which consists of nothing more, if it last long enough.

But you know what else isn't on your list?

Slicing off parts of your body.
Believing that gravity no longer applies to you and throwing yourself off a building.
Believing that you can stop a freight train with your bare hands.
Hearing God talking to you, telling you he has some errands he wants you to run.
Believing that the Government is listening to your thoughts.
Seeing people who aren't there.
Hearing voices telling you to push people in front of trains.
Believing that everyone you meet is a potential extraterrestrial.
Believing that everyone you love has been swapped out by an exact replica.
Seeing tunnels in people's eyes.
Believing that while you slept, you murdered thousands of people.

Additionally, there is something called a Mixed Episode, which is particularly notable for often being characterized by very high levels of anger and aggression, combined with extra low judgment.

You have proffered a hypothesis, that if a person with Bipolar is racially aggressive during a mood episode, it's evidence that they're racially hostile all the time. It's an interesting hypothesis, but your data set (N=2) does not come close to being comprehensive enough to falsify it. In a world in which both Tourette's and Schizophrenia exist, I place no bets: I, for one, am not about to claim a proposed psychological phenomenon is impossible simply because I haven't seen it yet.

The fact of the matter is there are a bunch of mental illnesses which do -- which can -- cause people to behave in very aggressive ways and to believe things they do not otherwise believe.

And even worse, there are mental illnesses which are definitionally pretty much identical to being an asshole. [locked post]

I appreciate this screws up your attempt to justify holding someone morally responsible for being a dick. But (1) myself, I think you can just consider him a dick, anyway, and (2) I have to insist here: erasing some mentally ill people, pretending that they don't exist and their conditions don't exist, because they very inconveniently make it hard to reason about morality? That's privilege, that's colonialism, and that's uncool.

[azurelunatic]

Thank you for sharing your professional experience and thoughts.