Bipolar disorder is manic depression. Comparing it to schizophrenia is like saying the common cold and HIV are the same thing since both have viral origins.
If your family member were institutionalized she would be taking her meds. The pattern is always the same. They take the meds, get to feeling better, realize the meds cause a certain level of intoxicated feeling, and then they stop taking the meds. Then they go bonkers and the pattern starts all over again.
I’m sorry your family member has an incurable, chronic illness. Being institutionalized is far better than being the next Navy Yard shooter, the next person choked to death by other passengers on an airplane, or the next erratic driver in DC.
Not all schizophrenics run around killing people.
Bipolar disorder is manic depression. Comparing it to schizophrenia is like saying the common cold and HIV are the same thing since both have viral origins.
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I appreciate your attempt to school me on something I dealt with daily for the last 15 years of my mother’s life. She passed last year.
In your haste to correct me, you entirely missed the most salient point of all, to wit, when mentally ill folks (be they bipolar or schizophrenic) go off their meds, their behavior becomes erratic, psychosis can kick in and then we have a fine mess.
And because I know how difficult it is to read entire articles before commenting, I’ll just repost this paragraph:
“Authorities who searched the apartment in Stamford, Connecticut, found one medication to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and another that is an antidepressant, according to the source.”
Seems she might have suffered from mulitiple mental health disorders.
I have a close relative with bipolar disorder, classic symptoms, EXCEPT he also has frequent bouts of driving all over the state running from government satellites that are shooting burning beams at him “because of what I know.”
And he has a gun with him.
Yes, we do our dead-level best to keep him contained. At the moment, he is safely tucked away, medicated, and content.
The point is that mental illness is a broad spectrum. A patient can have symptoms of one type and a diagnosis of another. One treatment does not fit all.