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Page 2
Many famous people have or are suspected to have had bipolar disorder, including van Gogh, Winston Churchill, Hemingway and a surprising number of poets, musicians, and actors. Many have also died by suicide, which claims 15% of the people with bipolar disorder. There is a classical composer by the name of Schumann who appears to have had bipolar disorder in a time period long before medication. He had short periods of incredible creativity, interspersed with long periods of total inactivity with repeated suicide attempts. He eventually died by suicide.
People with bipolar disorder are often very proud of who they are, and they are very offended when you suggest that they have a disease, that their self confidence is based on a disease. People with bipolar disorder are treated with antipsychotics when in extreme mania, and it is their reaction to that medication that has probably twisted the consumer survivor movement to the point of idiocy. With far less disability then what people with schizophrenia experience, they have become very vocal anti psychiatry, anti medication political activists. They call themselves consumer survivors and they mean survivors of the psychiatrist oppressors. They will not mention what their diagnosis is, because they do not have a disease. A diagnosis is just an oppressive label, an instrument of torture, like medication. It has been the people with schizophrenia who have suffered the most from this political activism; the people who really need treatment to have any quality of life at all. You can find them homeless on the streets of any major city, in dirty old clothes, shaking their fist at the sky and talking to the wind, totally lost in psychosis. Why don't we help them? Because treatment is seen as an abrogation of human rights. In my accumulated history I went ten years without treatment, homeless on and off, and I stayed at single men's shelters, the emergency shelters across Canada. I also spent a night in the Don Jail in Toronto, which was nicer then most of the shelters I had stayed at. I can't understand why we care more for our criminals then we do our homeless, especially the homeless who have lost their housing, their human relationships, and their health, to a mental illness, usually schizophrenia.
The copyright of the article Schizophrenia vs Bipolar Disorder - Page 2 in Schizophrenia is owned by Ian Chovil. Permission to republish Schizophrenia vs Bipolar Disorder - Page 2 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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