I’m totally at a loss for words when I try to discuss this article, Critics: Don’t tie driver’s licence renewal to psychiatric history. Oh, there’s nothing wrong with the article itself. The topic, however, horrifies me. There is something really, really wrong with the Registry of Motor Vehicles in Nova Scotia.

Service Nova Scotia now requires people renewing their licences to indicate on an application form if they’ve had a “psychiatric or psychological condition.”

People who indicate yes — even if it was something such as a bout of depression — are asked to provide more specific details and then must have a doctor complete a medical, sharing what’s usually confidential information with the government.

“The contents of the medical report will be reviewed by department staff and may be referred to a committee of medical specialists who make recommendations on clients’ medical fitness to safely drive,” the province has advised affected people in writing.

The application form also asks those renewing their licences if they have had lung, heart, eye or neurological diseases, a stroke or dementia.

Doctors sometimes charge a fee for the medical and failure to comply with the request could result in drivers losing their licences.

Why, why, why would anyone ever think this is a good idea?

Paul Arsenault, the provincial registrar of motor vehicles, defended the practice, saying that his department needs to know that information for the sake of public safety.

“If somebody’s severely depressed, they probably shouldn’t be on the road,” he said.

Hiya. Manic-depressive here. Severe depression, mania, psychosis, the whole works. I’ve never had a car accident. I’m not saying that nobody ever caused an accident because they were manic and driving too fast, or that no asshole has ever committed suicide by crashing their car, but that’s got nothing to do with me. My psychiatric condition isn’t any of the provincial government’s business, and I certainly don’t see why anybody who needs to get their license renewed should have to tell the government if they’ve had a brief bout of anxiety or depression in the past.

Carol Tooton, executive director of the Nova Scotia division of the Canadian Mental Health Association… wondered why the province would require such sensitive medical information that has little to do with somebody’s ability to operate a vehicle.

“I’ve never heard of this before. It certainly doesn’t help to eliminate the stigma around someone who may have a mental illness.”

See, I’m not the only person who thinks this is screwed up.

Stephen Ayers, the executive director of the Schizophrenia Society of Nova Scotia, said he was uneasy about the requirement and found it intrusive.

“This is concerning, obviously. It’s required by law for a physician or psychiatrist to notify (the Registry of) Motor Vehicles of a medical condition a person has that would impair their ability to drive.”

David Simpson, with the Mental Health Police Records Check Coalition, an Ontario rights advocacy organization, said the practice smacks of discrimination.

“What you always have to be worried about in situations like this is if there is some sort of systemic bias in place or covert discrimination, that they believe because you have a mental illness you’re going to use your vehicle as a weapon to injure people or injure yourself.”

I would definitely not indicate yes on this form and then pay $50 to get a doctor to complete a medical.

Since that article is a week old, how about you also check out one from today’s issue of the same paper? I mentioned Howard Hyde’s death last year, and here’s the latest news:

The Nova Scotia government will appoint a fatality inquiry into the death of Howard Hyde, who died after being Tasered by Halifax police in November.

Justice Minister Cecil Clarke announced the inquiry today on the heels of a report from the province’s chief medical examiner that found that Mr. Hyde died of excited delirium, not of being zapped with a Taser.

Yeah, because you hear about so many people dying of excited delirium while they’re not in police custody, right?

When I was a bit younger, I used to have really bad PMS. It was probably bad enough to be diagnosed as PMDD, but if anybody ever did diagnose me as such, they didn’t tell me. Every time I attempted suicide, I think it was just before or during my period. The worst thing about it was that my period was also extremely irregular, so I never even knew when the PMS was coming. Although there was a good side to that, too — I’d suddenly become intensely suicidal, but when my period would come, I’d be so relieved to know that there was a concrete reason for my mood, I wasn’t “going crazy” again, and I’d be feeling better in a few days. That’s an amazing sense of relief to have.

This was a major issue for me until I started taking the birth control pill. I wanted to start taking it a few years before I actually did, but I couldn’t find a doctor who would prescribe it for me. The reason? I was on Topamax, and Topamax can sometimes make oral contraceptives less effective. This only holds true if you’re on 200 mg or more daily, and I think I was on 100 mg at the time, but who’s counting?

How did I eventually get prescribed oral contraceptives? Well, one day I went to a clinic to get the morning after pill (yes, we’d been using protection, but we had a condom breakage issue) and when the doctor was asking me some questions, I told her that this was the third or fourth occasion that I’d taken emergency contraceptives (over a span of three years).

She said, “Polly, Polly, Polly, what are we going to do with you?”

She had never seen me before in her life.

I said, “Well, for starters, somebody could prescribe me the birth control pill!”

And so she did. Yes, she knew that I was taking Topamax and that it could make the Pill less effective. I should point out that the other doctors I’d asked about birth control had all been male.

I never took the morning after pill again. I have never been pregnant. A couple years later, I stopped taking Topamax.

I know that oral contraceptives cause really bad mood swings in some women, but they actually help prevent them for me. It’s also nice having my menstrual cycle regulated, so that I know when a possible time of PMS is coming up. On the other hand, since I now only rarely get depressed and irritable before I get my period, there’s still that element of surprise. If I’ve gone for many months without PMS, I’m not expecting it to happen.

Which is why last week, I spent a couple of days feeling like I wanted to go lie down in traffic, but was cheered up when I realized that I only felt that was because of PMS. Then I got a little too cheered up, because I had an insomnia thing going on, and I got hypomanic. I was so jumpy and hyper that I was seriously afraid that I was going to have to call in sick to work one day because of it. I had a cup of coffee the day before, like an idiot — I try not to drink coffee at all normally, and when I’m hypomanic, coffee is an incredibly bad idea. IT MAKES MY BRAIN FEEL LIKE IT IS JUMPING UP AND DOWN. AND IT MAKES ME FEEL LIKE EVERY NERVE IN MY BODY IS JUMPING UP AND DOWN INSIDE MY SKIN, TOO. And that’s actually a lot of fun, even if my pitiful, inaccurate attempts to describe it make it sound uncomfortable. The uncomfortable part comes because I. Can’t. Keep. Still. and any situation that would require me to stay still is horrible for me. If I’ve got free rein to climb on stuff and do whatever I want, then it’s tons of fun.

You see why this might be a problem when I’m at work, though.

I guess caffeine does this to a lot of people, but if you are not manic-depressive, I don’t think that ONE CUP OF COFFEE can make you feel like this for TWELVE HOURS STRAIGHT before you start to come down a little.

Anyway, I somehow started feeling a lot more subdued, and I was able to go to work, and it was all good.

Um, I have no idea where I was going with this. I’m still a wee bit on the hypomanic side, but not in a bad way. Oh, yeah. I wanted to mention that although I don’t eat as well as I should, for a long time now I’ve been doing really well at trying to make sure my sleep schedule is as regular as possible, because I know how important it is for me to sleep properly if I want to stay well.

Ha ha ha, I’m standing up at the computer again because I’m still not so awesome with the sitting still. Sit down, you.

Anyway, my sleep being messed up through no fault of my own and the subsequent consequences provided me with additional proof that I should definitely stick to a regular sleeping schedule. I’m so much more stable when I do. I know, duh, right? Although the insomnia wasn’t brought on by anything I did, for a few days I didn’t try hard enough to get my schedule back on track, and that only served to remind me that it is dumb not to try to get enough sleep. It is also dumb for me to oversleep, or to sleep at weird times, especially since I have a more-or-less nine-to-five kind of job.

I’m trying harder now, though. For really.

Interesting post at Furious Seasons recently (heh, as if there were not an interesting post there nearly every day!) regarding manic depression as a dangerous gift, as a personality disorder, and as something from which one can completely recover.

I know I am going out on a limb here that someone will likely chop off for me, but I believe that much of what we call bipolar disorder is in fact a personality disorder or constellation of behavioral issues.

I’m not looking to chop off this limb. I view manic depression as a dangerous gift as well, and as something that maybe at least some people can completely recover from. I also understand that Philip is not saying all a person with bipolar disorder has to do to recover is pull themselves up by their bootstraps:

I think bipolar disorder can be a personality disorder–and, nitpickers be warned, I am using the term very broadly–more often than it is a mental illness.

Depression–and here I am not discussing major or clinical depression–is widely known as having a huge personality component.

Mania itself–and here I mean the bad old wild delusions, hallucinations and declarations of Godhead mania–is not a personality disorder. When it’s in full flower, mania is straight-up insanity.

Dysphoric mania is possibly the least fun thing in the world, but there is at least one good thing about it: once you’ve recovered from an episode of psychotic dysphoric mania, it’s really hard to convince yourself that it was a character flaw. You can easily convince yourself that you weren’t depressed, just stupid and lazy, and that you weren’t hypomanic, you were just being a silly, reckless whore… but after having auditory hallucinations for a few weeks straight, once I finally stopped, I realized that something had been really wrong and that this time it wasn’t my fault.

I was aware that most of the time, medication either made me a zombie or made my moods even worse. So sometimes I would stop taking medication, be fine for a few months, and then be much, much worse than before. I learned to do things that sometimes stopped mood episodes, but more often just allowed me to cope with the symptoms I experienced, so that I functioned very well as one of the walking wounded. For quite a long time, I honestly believed that there was no such thing as getting better, there was only becoming a better liar, so that you could hide your pain from others and even from yourself. Or at least I thought that was the only option for me, because I’d read about other people who were asymptomatic for long periods of time, who claimed to experience “growth” and “healing.” I didn’t disbelieve them, but I didn’t think that anything would work for me. I tried CBT, DBT skills, family therapy, couples therapy, group therapy, exercise, meditation, hospitalization, acupuncture, journalling, medication, medication, medication, and other stuff… but the hits just kept coming. I kept getting depressed, I kept getting hypomanic, and I kept getting manic.

Some of those things helped. Some didn’t. (Acupuncture, for instance, was supposed to make me less stressed, but instead it turned me into a stressed person with needles in her ears.) For nearly a decade, though, none of them prevented me from having mood episodes, which I dealt with using a combined method of actual coping skills plus being way, way too hard on myself. I have been essentially non-syndromal for the past year, though, and it seems to be solely because I’m finally on medication that’s working for me.

I am better, and I want this to be an accomplishment. I wish this were something I could take credit for. But it’s not.

The journey to get to this point was so long and arduous that I want the current solution to be complex. (I say “current solution” because although this has been the solution for the past year, I don’t assume it will be the solution that works best for me forever.) It’s not complex, though. It’s not intricate. I-take-two-pills-a-day-and-now-I-am-well. If I am experiencing any side effects, I am not aware of them. I still have emotions. I can cry when really bad things happen, I can take joy in something as simple as seeing furry gray squirrels race across tree branches, and I can write really bad fiction.

Despite how hard I tried to get better, I still can’t take any responsibility for it. It’s true that I learned plenty of things along the way, including just how vast the extent of my own ignorance is (and how ignorant many of my doctors were), but nothing I learned was instrumental in my actual recovery. I tried and tried and tried to save myself, yet I did not.

I wish I’d fixed it. I know I should be careful what I wish for. I’ll say that I wish I’d slain the dragon myself and the next thing you know, the meds will poop out and the dragon will pop back up, all scaly and fire-breathing, saying, “You called? Here I am, bitch. Come and get me.”

But still. I wish I’d fixed it.

I don’t even know why I tried this again so soon, as I wasn’t expecting it to have changed already, but it has. My blog has moved from an R rating to an NC-17 rating. For completely ridiculous reasons, I might add.

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

* hell (7x)
* kill (4x)
* rape (3x)
* ass (2x)
* hurt (1x)

I have no idea why it is no longer keeping track of the amount of times I’ve used the word “drugs,” since that’s the one word from before that I remember using a bunch more times since then.

In news of things that are not fast, my brother was released from the hospital five or six days ago but no one has yet contacted him regarding follow-up treatment, although of course they were supposed to. I have no idea why this surprises me. It really shouldn’t, at this point.

Since everyone else is doing it, I might as well. Not jumping off a bridge (I think about that often enough by my own damn self), but the meme that CL Psych posted about giving film-like ratings to blogs.

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

* hell (4x)
* drugs (2x)
* rape (1x)

I never knew using the word “hell” was such a big deal. Well, I’m going to use it all I want, and we’re going to live like kings. Damn hell ass kings!

I wonder what I have to do to push it to an NC-17 rating. Talk more about rape flashbacks? Talk even more about meds, since I’ve never even mentioned illegal drugs on this blog (until now), but apparently the word “drugs” in any context is scandalous enough?

Update on my brother: nothing to report, really. He’s still in the hospital. They might let him out this weekend. Or after this weekend. Or something. They’re not telling him a whole lot. He is bored. I would be, too.

I went to Shoppers tonight to get a prescription filled, and while I waited, I read their HealthWATCH pamphlet on Emotional Health. I was flabbergasted by the following excerpt, which I am not making up:

Doctors refer to conditions that affect emotional health as “mood disorders.” They include:

• depression
• anxiety
• stress
• bipolar disorder (manic depression)

Seriously, what the hell? Were people high when they wrote this pamphlet? Since when is stress a mood disorder? Or anxiety, either, but labelling stress a “mood disorder” is particularly stupid, since that would mean that every single person in the entire world has suffered from a mood disorder at one time or another. Sure, stress affects emotional health, but that doesn’t make it a mood disorder. An especially baffling thing about the wacky pamphlet is that there is a section on the Shoppers Drug Mart web site about emotional health, expanding upon what is in the pamphlet, and it doesn’t include a ridiculous statement about stress being a mood disorder, but does include a subsection called More than just stress which contains the line, “Because some signs of depression are similar to those that occur with stress, having some of these signs does not necessarily mean that you have depression.” Which, you know, actually makes sense.

Maybe people realized that whoever was in charge of their Emotional Health stuff was doling out very obvious misinformation and it was a lot simpler to fix the site than to fix the pamphlets?

My younger brother is like the poster boy for borderline personality disorder, but since mental health professionals seem to be looking only for BPD poster girls, none of them had ever considered this diagnosis for him. No, I’m not sure whether I think BPD is a useful construct, but he does fit the criteria to a T (except, as far as I know, the last one, “transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms”).

Last week, I kept mentally writing a blog post in which I would describe all the ways he fit the criteria for BPD, but refer to him as “she” until the end of the post, where I would say that there was one major lie in the post and to switch all the pronouns, I’m actually talking about a guy, not a girl. My brother can be awfully exasperating, but what really bugs me, and what that post would have really been about, is sexism in the mental health profession. About how I, a girl, have been called personality-disordered simply because I used to cut myself or because sometimes I’ve disagreed with doctors’ opinions about something, but someone who very obviously fits eight of the nine criteria for BPD isn’t diagnosed with it because he’s a guy. I’m not really interested in amateur diagnosis of anybody other than myself, but it seemed appalling that behaviour that would get a female slapped with the BPD label was ignored in a male. I never did write that post, because 1) it would have wound up being awfully long and I’m lazy, and 2) it seemed malicious to write a post delineating all of my brother’s very worst qualities when he is one of my favourite people in the world and one of my best friends.

Now there is another reason to never write that post, which is that a doctor has finally considered that he might have BPD. Until the other day, my brother’s official diagnosis was generalized anxiety disorder, but he’s been in the hospital for a couple of days because of suicidality. One doctor is saying bipolar spectrum disorder and another is saying borderline personality disorder.

As for how he is doing in there, it varies. He went voluntarily, but then when he said he wanted to leave and it was stupid and he should have just killed himself instead of going to the hospital, of course they changed his status to involuntary. For a while he was really mad that he’s stuck there because he wants to go online and see if his girlfriend is terribly worried about him, as he wants her to be. He was doing a countdown online to the day he planned to kill himself and dramatically telling his friends that it would be his “last day on Earth.” His girlfriend has a good summer job on the other side of the country and he is upset about that because he would prefer that she come home to her apartment and work at the part time waitress job that she had before she found the better job. He thinks that her wanting to make money to pay the rent for her apartment, where he sometimes lives with her for free as he has no job, means that she doesn’t really love him. My mother said today, though, that he is feeling less angry about being in the hospital now because he thinks he should stay until he feels safe.

Feelings can shift so rapidly in the hospital sometimes, can’t they? Most of the time, it’s very boring, so when anything at all happens, sometime it seems monumental and you can overreact.

This is not an anti-BPD post. My brother behaves like a stereotypical, worst-case-scenario borderline, and of course I’m going to vent about that. I realize that most people diagnosed with BPD aren’t actually like him, and I’m hopeful that whatever the hell is wrong with him, whether it’s BPD or something else or BPD and something else, he will soon get some appropriate help and will feel better and not be such a pain in the ass. Even if he is bipolar without BPD, I’m glad that somebody has finally noticed that something other than GAD is going on.

thememoryartist recently made an excellent post, A new proposal for the DSM, which “outlines and categorizes the features of Mental Health Professional Personality Disorders.” It’s funny because it’s true. Which also, of course, makes it sad. I’ve seen plenty of mental health professionals whose behaviours and attitudes are outlined very well by those criteria.

In a comment, Gianna mentioned that the post might be educational for mental health professionals. I’ve met some MHPs who would appreciate it very much… but they’re not the ones who tend to exhibit any of the listed behaviours. I think the ones who actually exhibit the “symptoms” would see that piece of writing as an example of a patient being narcissistic and overly hostile, and would never recognize themselves in the criteria.

There are also a lot of interesting comments on this post about PTSD misdiagnosed as BPD.

I am doing okay physically with the Zoloft and Epival withdrawal. I didn’t even have any of the brief dizzy spells yesterday. I was, however, staring at a word on a computer screen when I saw it suddenly jump several inches to the left, even though this did not really happen. I am hoping that this is just a regular hazard of the twenty-first century, as opposed to a withdrawal thing.

As I mentioned in a comment on my last post, medication withdrawal has made me kind of stupid lately, though. I can’t remember anything, my attention span is even worse than usual, and… um, I already forgot what I was going to write in the last part of this sentence. Oh, yeah, I’m constantly almost late for stuff. Since none of this has been interfering with my work performance, it’s not really all that important. It just bugs me.

Tomorrow I get to see my GP and I hope I’ll get my prescriptions. I have to pay forty freaking dollars for the cab ride there and back, because there’s a shortage of family doctors here, no bus service to the neighbouring town where my doctor is, and I don’t have a car.

Everybody has already read about this study and its claims that there is something called “subthreshold bipolar disorder,” and as far as most of us can tell, SBD equates to “simply being human, but big pharma thinks you need antipsychotics for it anyway.” I’m lazy, though, so I haven’t commented upon it until now.

CL Psych posts about the incredibly loose criteria for SBD and the media’s claims that there is “appropriate” medication for it in Subthreshold Bipolar: The Giant Sucking Sound and Subthreshold Bipolar: Media Blitz and Lilly.

Philip Dawdy has also written several posts about subthreshold bipolar disorder, including Name The New Bipolar Disorder, in which he urges people to come up with a better name for SBD. I haven’t come up with anything yet, or rather, I haven’t come up with anything that no one else hadn’t thought of and posted already!

I am vastly confused by the stats from the article in the Archives of General Psychiatry. No, they’re not too complex for me to understand; they’re too stupid for me to understand. Only a 2.4% prevalence of Americans who, twice in their lives, meet half of the criteria for hypomania? I would expect it to be more like 99% than the 4.5% it winds up as in this study once you add the 2.4% to the 1% prevalence for bipolar I and the 1.1% for bipolar II.

I am more of a fan of the bipolar spectrum than some people in the blogosphere are, but this subthreshold nonsense is taking things way, way too far. Honestly, sometimes I like the things that Akiskal has to say, and he’s one of the authors of this study. Some doctors overdiagnose bipolar disorder, and most people who diagnose it overmedicate their patients. But there are still plenty of health care professionals who don’t recognize bipolar disorder. Sometimes, it’s not their fault — they don’t see the patient when he or she is hypomanic, and even if they do ask him or her about past symptoms of hypomania, the patient, in the middle of a depression, is pretty much unable to remember ever feeling okay, let alone hypomanic, and doesn’t — can’t — answer accurately.

Then sometimes there are shrinks who think you’re not manic-depressive if you haven’t, like, married someone you’ve just met and then bought five cars. Doctors who think mania equals euphoria and if you’re having a dysphoric mania, you’re just an asshole. Who think that mixed states or rapid cycling must always be borderline personality disorder instead, and even, believe it or not, doctors who are always going to assume that if you’re psychotic, you’re schizophrenic.

Yes, this “subthreshold” stuff is ridiculous, but within limits, I like the idea of the bipolar spectrum because it makes people aware of things that actually are bipolar symptoms but aren’t necessarily the most classic ones. It’s when you start pathologizing mild things that occur infrequently that it gets to be harmful.

No, I don’t know where the line should be drawn. But I’d say somewhere way before “subthreshold bipolar disorder” as defined in that journal article, anyway.

Ruth at Off-Label wrote a post titled A stigma wrapped in a history inside another stigma - that will probably never make it onto a t-shirt, about the stigma of the borderline personality disorder label within the c/s/x movement, and since my worrying about being an attention whore helped trigger it, I thought I’d talk about it. On and on and on about it. My post might not make much sense if you don’t read hers first, so you should read hers first. Some of this I first posted as a comment on her blog, but when I realized how long it was getting, I decided I’d take it over here:

Oh, don’t worry. It’s already made it onto a T-shirt. If I believed I had BPD, I would be perfectly willing to wear that shirt to any place that I would be willing to wear my “BIPOLAR PRINCESS” shirt.

I don’t think I have BPD, but I am well aware that I have some BPD traits, namely that I have mood swings, I used to cut myself, I am sometimes impulsive, and occasionally psychotic and dissociative. Although I think these are better explained by my diagnoses of bipolar disorder and PTSD, I’m open to the idea that maybe I could have BPD, or am possibly a recovered borderline still exhibiting some traits, or that DBT skills might help me regardless of diagnosis. I’ve got two volumes of Linehan and a copy of Get Me Out of Here by Rachel Reiland sitting in a pile of books on my floor, that’s how seriously I take these ideas.

I often wonder if BPD is a useful diagnosis at all… but I’ve met people both in real life and online who were diagnosed with BPD, who agreed with this diagnosis, and who are wonderful people. Because they feel that BPD is a useful construct for explaining some of their feelings and behaviours, and because some of them have received treatment for BPD that they feel has been effective, I don’t feel qualified in saying it must be purely complex PTSD, or it must be purely a different form of bipolar disorder, or it must be ONLY a label docs slap on women they don’t like. Since I don’t identify myself as having BPD, who am I to invalidate the experiences of people who do identify as such?

I couldn’t say whether the stigma of being an attention whore is greater than the stigma of being bipolar in the general population, but there’s definitely a stigma in the c/s/x community against borderline personality disorder. I don’t think, however, that this is usually because those of us in the c/s/x community actually look down upon people who have been diagnosed with BPD or who we perceive to be attention whores (note the “or” there: I’m not saying that these people are one and the same). In some cases, I’d say this is true, but honestly, I think most of us, including myself, are terrified of ourselves being misdiagnosed, or even correctly diagnosed, with BPD because we know that most mental health “professionals” will see it as a license to treat us like crap.

Last year I had the particular misfortune of being seen by doctors who didn’t seem to think it was possible to suffer from personality disorders and Axis I disorders at the same time. I’ve got no problem with someone dx’ing me borderline as long as they also are willing to treat my other issues, because there are some things that are big problems for me, mainly bipolar disorder and PTSD. The first half of 2006 was so traumatic for me that so far in this blog, I’ve just skirted around every mention of it. Well, it’s partly how traumatic it was, and partly because I know I’ll have to write some long, detailed posts about it, and I’ll have to set aside time for that.

Really, I don’t think most of us who are mentally interesting are prejudiced against people with BPD, we just desperately want to avoid the diagnosis ourselves, and with good reason, since the diagnosis virtually guarantees we’ll be insulted and mistreated by some of the “professionals” who are supposed to help us. This has the unfortunate side effect of making people with BPD feel like pariahs, since we so badly want to avoid either having BPD or being told that we do. I guess we should stop crowing about how glad we are that we haven’t been diagnosed with BPD if we don’t want to make other people feel like crap. Although I don’t really mean “we” there — I’m young, female, and a former self-injurer; of course there were some speculations that I have BPD.

And okay, if I ever decide that I agree with that suggestion and I am borderline, I will wear one of those T-shirts. No, I’m not kidding.

I might be less tolerant than I should of people whom I believe to be willfully manipulative, but I have thought that about very few people I know, and none of them carried a borderline diagnosis. I guess there are some borderlines who do fit the stereotype of being purposely manipulative, but I think most are just coping in the best ways they know how and other people misinterpret their actions. People who do have contempt for anybody with a BPD diagnosis — well, they shouldn’t. It’s disgusting to look down upon people with a different psychiatric label from yours, and it doesn’t help anybody.

Honestly, the part of my shirt I was so worried about? “PRINCESS.” Because if you’re going to go to the trouble of making a shirt that says you’re mentally ill, is it right to be so damn frivolous about it? It would be nice to make a shirt with a slogan that is serious and stigma-busting and actually wear it in public and actually teach people something. But I haven’t thought of one yet, and “BIPOLAR PRINCESS” amused me. (I couldn’t afford to buy enough packages of letters for “MANIC DEPRESSION HAS ITS UPS AND DOWNS.” That has six s’s and there were only two to a package.) The word “PRINCESS” just by itself could seem snobby and spoiled, which I’m not. Don’t get me wrong — I still don’t know if I’d ever wear a shirt that says “BIPOLAR” in public, but my “attention whore” comment referred more to the “PRINCESS” part. I don’t think it’s attention-whore-y when people make LJ icons that say “BIPOLAR PRINCESS,” so I don’t know if I worried about this because it was something I did offline, or just because it was me.

I also have very different standards for myself than I do for other people. I am very shy and usually try to avoid being the centre of attention. In the past, I have been accused of attention-seeking behaviour when I was doing nothing of the sort, and it really upset me. I also hate asking for help from anyone, even though I know that my frequent refusal to do so is just another weakness.

The really odd thing is that as I am sitting here typing this, I am wearing a T-shirt that says “WHAT WOULD FREUD DO?” on it. (It was a gift from a friend. I swear I don’t have a whole stack of psych-related T-shirts, just these two. No, wait, three. I’ve got one from a university psych department pub crawl.) I can guarantee you that most things Sigmund Freud would do, I would not do… but I wore this T-shirt in public today with absolutely no qualms about it.