Hilary T.Smith

Total days of pain: lots and lots.
Social approval of bipolar: not obvious.
Overall experience with bipolar diagnosis: kinda really bad.

My dad flew out from Ontario to see how I was doing and make sure I wasn't completely crazy. We blasted through the Chapters bookstore in downtown Vancouver, and he bought me every bipolar-related book on the shelf. We made a stop at the Starbucks. As we were power walking down the street, my dad hailed a taxi midsentence, hopped in, and rushed off to catch his flight back to Ontario. I stood on the sidewalk with a bag of bipolar books in one hand and a half-finished Green Tea Frappucino in the other.
The party was just getting started.

This book is mainly about how to live with bipolar, but it's also about how to think about bipolar. Sure, you can think of bipolar as a chemical imbalance in your brain, but you can also imagine it as a video game, a shamanic journey, a crash course in existentialism, or a plain old pain in the ass.

No matter what the psychiatric community wants to call it, you're still you—whether you have bipolar, hysteria, a wandering womb, or just plain sand madness.

hough the environmental triggers of bipolar disorder are not well understood, one thing many accounts have in common is a period of lifestyle change, stress, or major life events (both positive and negative). Real specific, huh? Try naming a time in your teens and twenties when you're not going through a period of stress, lifestyle change, or major life events!

Paint rabbit faces on your meds so they look like recreational drugs. Wear furry clothing and plastic beads so people think you're a raver.

Hire a look-alike to impersonate you at social events when you're too depressed to go out.

Surround yourself with people who are more extreme than you (drama students, nonrecovering addicts, circus people). In contrast, you will look totally un-bipolar.

Keep a straight face and neutral affect at all times. This will demonstrate how completely stable your mood is.
Whenever you hear something about bipolar disorder on the news, laugh loudly and say, “Ho, ho, ho, I'm so perfectly twitterpated to not be affected by such a foreign and fearsome affliction as that!”

Start a fake blog about your completely normal, nonbipolar life. Include entries such as, “Fun day at the mall!” and “New kitty is cute!”
Get a high-powered career that could never be held by a person with a mental illness. That will show them!