If you follow me here, or particularly elsewhere, you might have noticed there are some very vocal people who hate me. Mental illness is contentious, and some people take it to a personal level. That’s people for you. Sometimes I talk about these people. I call them “the nasties.” But today is not about them. Today is about celebrating all the wonderful, amazing people who support me, Breaking Bipolar and the mental health community in general.

I write at HealthyPlace about the problems associated with living with bipolar disorder, and let’s face it, there are many. I also talk about the problems with the treatment of bipolar disorder, and yes, there are many of those too. But just because I recognize issues, discuss genuine, painful emotion and make loud an inner voice that among most people is strangled, doesn’t mean my treatment has been a failure. Just because I’m not “all better,” that doesn’t mean treatment doesn’t work.

Earlier this month, I wrote about how to stay on psych medication. I gave tips and tricks to help you stay on track. In today's video, I show you my own twist on psych medication reminders.

Normally I try to grab the reader's attention in the first few lines of the piece so that you'll want to read the rest. Something snappy, touching or pithy. Normally I try to make sure it's an interesting subject. Usually I try to provide some sort of universal appeal to the piece or at least a good quip. But today, quite frankly, I'm talking about me.

I had a VNS implanted about three years ago. The surgery involved two incisions, one under the left arm and one on the left lower front of my neck. My neurosurgeon promised a scar between 1-3 inches but it’s probably closer to four. Of course, I would much rather he get the surgery right and have a bigger scar than the other way around. Someone messes up your vagus nerve and you know about it, pretty much forever.

The hypomanic mind isn’t like a single life happening all at once, it’s like every life happening all at once in a tiny, tinny, echoing room. Hypomania is like having ball-bearings bouncing around inside my skull faster and harder and fast and hard and faster and harder. Hitting each other, making divots on the inside of my skull, becoming interior decorators. Fragmented, distracted thoughts. Sentence fragments. Problem grammar.  No capital letters. No punctuation.

I am one of the people who hate to see their doctor. If it were up to me, I would never go. (OK, it is up to me, but it doesn't feel like it.) It's not that I have a bad doctor, or a mean doctor, it's just that nothing good ever happens there; so why would I go?

Adventures in Bipolar Diagnosis continued from part one... Lamictal was indeed a miracle for me. It allowed me to finish my bachelor’s degree, get a job in my field, and even become a skydiver. In retrospect, it was an amazing time to be me, to be in remission. Everything was good, until it wasn’t. I felt myself slipping about two years into the Lamictal treatment. For no known reason, the medication simply stopped working. This is a common problem with psychotropic meds and something else no one likes to mention.

In late 1998, I knew that something was wrong with me. My life was going well; I was in university, on my way to a computer science degree, in the co-op program and had completed an eight-month job in Calgary. I had been contented and grateful since leaving my mother’s house and moving to a new town. I was more happy than I had been in years. But little by little, I found myself increasingly sad and life became peppered with bouts of meaningless, spontaneously crying. I was unreasonably moved by the foretold unfolding of TV plots and commercials. In November 1998, I found myself in a pitch-black room, unable to get out of bed for an entire day. I was in the south of Spain, a ten minute walk from white sandy beaches and half-naked women. That was the moment I truly realized I was broken: I was in heaven and yet crushed with sadness.

This week I did an interview for the HealthyPlace Mental Health TV show. We discussed what it is to have bipolar disorder, the impact, what works and what doesn't.