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.
Seems like maybe the doctors were not sure where her illness fell in terms of a firm diagnosis so were seeing which meds she responded to the best.
Sorry for the loss of your mother.
So how many mental health disorders does a person need to have, how many medications must they be prescribed, and how many times do they need to be off their medications and fly wild before you believe they should be committed to some sort of intensive observation and control?
Do you feel we should wait until they shoot up a lecture hall, shoot up a theater, or move into the woods and start mailing bombs?
Take me to school.