Debilitating symptoms of Tourette Syndrome may also fuel creative energy

...crows Times Online. It be cool, but bemusing 'tis as time(s) marches (merches?) on there is less and less of the known world not colonised by mental illness. Dysfunction, disorder, whatever.

This really makes me laugh: "Recent speculation has focused on Mozart as a possible Tourette sufferer, based mainly on scatalogical references in letters and music. However, some experts suggest it may have been more the exuberance of youth than a clinical condition." Yeah, and the funny thing is(n't) that at the moment overly exuberant youth are often being diagnosed and medicated for being overly exuberant.

Bipolar Expeditions: "Bipolarity is the universal natural definition, dominating all the physical evolvements..."

North Pole, South Pole, Bi Pole.

...2 Bipolarity is the universal natural definition, dominating all the physical evolvements
Everything is bipolar, and owing to the interaction of the bipolarity contradiction, creates the life-likeness of existing and evolving motion.
From quantum wave-particle duality, quantum transition absorbed energy and delivered energy, particle and antiparticle, real particle and virtual particle, anion and cationic, matter and antimatter, matter and dark matter, positive energy and negative energy, action and reaction, attraction and repellence, accumulation and dissipation, division and synthesis, fission and fusion, chaos and harmony, order and disorder, dark and light, red shift and blue shift, expansion and collapse ,etc, and even female and male of living nature, chromosome X and Y, etc, which including the physical relationship of bipolarity existing and evolving motion, we should realize: no matter for microcosmic quantum field or macrocosmic large-scale structure, universe has defined the universal law and dialectical principle of physical existing and evolving motion bipolarity.
Finding out the sources, quark is the least unite declassified by humankind so far. Quark has six types, formed to three pairs mutually: the first pair is “up” quark and “down” quark (their lepton families corresponding objects are electron and neutrino), the second pair is strange quark and charm quark (their lepton families corresponding objects are µ meson and neutrino), and the heaviest pair is top quark and bottle quark (their lepton families corresponding objects are τ particle and neutrino). The quark and antiquark can be combined by pair to so-called meson format. The quark defines bipolarity corresponding.
Two elementary particle families composing the whole atom substance are quark and lepton, bipolarity corresponding combination of quark families and lepton families define elementary particle.
The least part of element, namely the unit taking part in chemical reaction－atom, is constituted by a tiny positive nuclear and a group of negative electrons surrounding. Positive electricity and negative electricity’s bipolarity define the atom.

Polar molecule and nonpolar molecule’s bipolarity constitute molecule’s electric structure.

The elementary particle deduces substance, energy and fundamental force of the universe with wave-particle duality bipolar attribute, living bipolarity dialectical motion of microcosmic quantum field and macrocosmic large-scale structure.
With the explorations of several generation physicists, many bipolar relationships of the elementary particle, substance, energy and force have been discovered and concluded. We can present the bipolar relationship figure as follows:



Bipolarity is the universal natural definition, dominating all the physical evolvement, the whole of universe is the construction of opposite and unity of elementary particle bipole. All the physical bipolar relationship can be summarized as positive pole and negative pole, all the evolvement motion have the “pole change” tendency and direct or inverse relationship, which may extend toward positive polar dimension or negative polar dimension; If the polar boundary (pole change key point) is exceeded during bipolarity approaching process (“approaching process”—developing along the direction of one dimension. Positive pole approaching process is developing along the positive pole dimension; negative pole approaching process is developing along the negative pole dimension), the poles changing to each other will occur, the positive pole changing to negative pole or negative pole changing to positive pole (Positive poles are such as: positive, Yang, advance, rising, light, solid, combining, etc; negative poles are such as: negative/minus, Yin, back, falling, dark, void, separating, etc.). All the existing and evolvement motion keep to the universal law and dialectical principle of direct or inverse development of the unity of opposites of contradiction.

On Being a "Survivor"

While I was swimming this morning - exercise=recovery yada yada - I reflected upon the term "survivor". Before its current vogue in a different context I associated this word, as a child of post-Holocaust Jews - with hobbling out of Dachau alive, or being rescued from some Japanese POW camp with bamboo still growing under my fingernails or, say, beating cancer.

Now, of course, there are new kinds of survivors. You can be a survivor of almost anything. For example, I am a survivor of 25 years of Eastenders ;) The word does have new meanings and associations and they're not all devalued. What caught my handsome reflection, though? I thought: Many survive many things that cause, induce or increase their mental illness. But as far as I know all I have survived is myself. I am at the centre of my psychodrama. Nobody, as far as I know - and Woody Allenesque upbringing notwithstanding - has done much of importance to me...except me.

Kerry is bipolar. She believed she was an alien. Kerry, dear, if you are bipolar then you are an alien! Do you have any idea how many people that are "mentally ill" believe at some point that they are aliens? Think about it. Who wants to come from this planet anyways???

Kerry Katona's alien belief
Wednesday, 29 April 2009
Kerry Katona revealed she once believed she was an alien during her battle with mental illness.
The reality TV star spoke frankly about her bipolar disorder and struggle with fame as she addressed the Oxford Union yesterday (28.04.09).
Britain's The Sun newspaper reports she said: "I sat on the bed and said, 'Mark, I'm an alien' - and I really thought I was an alien.
"I didn't brush my teeth for a week. It's part of my personality."
Former Atomic Kitten star Kerry was a guest speaker at the debating society of the prestigious Oxford University. She spoke with students in a question and answer format for an hour and said there were no topics which were off limit.
Kerry was accompanied by her husband, Mark Croft, at the event - which was filmed by MTV for a forthcoming reality TV series.
Student Anshul Bakhda, 19, told Sky news afterward: "I thought she was really good. She was very frank and open.
"It was a really refreshing question and answer session. She talked about her history with mental illness, her mum, and the impact of the media on her family."

"I Yam Whad I Yam": Pop-I

Not so long ago someone was saying something to me that involved sources in living for regret-shame-deceit and all that bundle of scum. I snapped, "You have to live!" Look, I've done my share of things I'm not proud of but I'm not 'shamed of them. What might have hurt my kids I care about, and as for the rest it's like combat, we're all on the field, there will be casualties, no free lunches abound.

Recovery, to some extent - and maybe a great extent - is about acceptance and self-acceptance. But I say, it's about defiance, too. In order to have meaning recovery has to include a degree of "I-don't-give-a-****(of yer choice)". It's gotta have guts. Apologies are nice, you should say your sorries and then move on. My attitude is that you have zero obligation to spend your recovery feeling sorry for the people you hurt. They'll take every opportunity, given a chance, to remind you of what a monster you were (and still are, if they can fit that in). Don't spend the life you have saved killing it with undue kindness. Recover, but for life, not some lukewarming of the hearts of the hard-done-by.

Recovery from Myself: The "Journey" I am.

At 42, after many years of difficulty and challenge culminating in a psychotic episode involving religious mania – to be recognised at last by the American DSM psychiatric manual – I self-diagnosed myself with bipolar disorder, confirmed shortly by a psychiatrist. The person I had been until my “breakdown” – more, as is often the case, a “break up” of my mind – no longer existed, replaced by a medicated, treated, new Jeremy. I went from being “moody” to “mentally ill”. Once we are diagnosed we begin to call on our societal, conditioned and borrowed contexts of madness and mental illness and apply them to ourselves, but it takes years to get to grips with how much of a factor this is in holding us back from recovery and reintegration. We stigmatise and redefine ourselves as sick, thereby co-operating with those whose jobs depend on characterising us as such, and contribute to the assumption that we are not “normal”, as though somewhere out there someone definitively is. In a society sick with stress and depression, anxiety and anger, we mentally ill are supposed to be “mad”, but there is little conclusive evidence that mental illness is more than a matter of separation from sanity by degrees, not some dramatic departure. And what happens when, statistically, the “mentally ill”, “disordered”, “dysfunctional” and other mind barbarians breach the gates are constitute more than half the population?

To really recover from mental illness we need to do more than get better and accept ourselves. We need to take everything “in my head” as real, stop stigmatising our symptoms and see them as natural and acceptable, even inevitable. This does not signify a descent into comfortable denial, it means a conscious and deliberate retaking of identity in the face of enormous inner and outer resistance. The place where the lines converge is where “normal” is synonymous with “disordered”, where it is recognised that the sick society is all of us, not just those with a diagnosis.

After seven years as a “service user” – a classic example of lopsided language used in this area: does anybody ever ask how much the service uses and needs the user? – with needs met for the most part caringly, if unconsciously, I see that to really recover I need more than anything else to turn away from conventional thinking and doing, be sensible but sensitive to alternatives in being and doing, and most of all never turn back on the road upon which I am set and which I have fought so hard to travel, and that will return me to myself whole if, despite all the competing and contradictory voices within and without, I can only stay strong, centred and defiant.

My “journey” – jargon, but at least relatively benign and intelligent – has taken me in wider and wider circles; I am not pretending that I have broken free yet of the various prisons constructed out of my illness by and for me. However, I have written two books on the impact on my life of bipolar disorder, one a memoir and the other focused on recovery, I work in the voluntary mental health sector, continue to be highly creative as a writer and musician, and although I experience the routine lulls and reversals of my condition – there I go doing it again! Of life – I am realistic and hopeful at once, seeing that who and what I am is normal, natural and able to be healed, and if that means deconstructing accepted contexts or, as Emerson put it, “disturbing all things sacred”, then so be it.

The experience of being mentally ill can be frightening and alienate you from yourself. The discovery that the pain, disappointment and difficulties of living with a mental illness have to be dealt with not only by drugs and endless talking but by a resolve to acknowledge the reality of your situation and thereby reintegrate it can seem daunting. The illness can deny much to us, but not the creativity and vitality to question, explore and find novel solutions to its problems. Being mentally ill means that there is more than one of me – if I am bipolar, at least two, and if I hear voices perhaps a half dozen or more – and that I am able to harness, hear and help my many selves to know, respect and work with each other. It may sound implausible but it is far from impossible. Hope and healing are words I often disparage. The truth is, though, that they are synonymous and indispensable. And for each of my recovering friends I wish both in plenitude.