"I Support People With POCD As Long As They Seek Help And Don't Act On Their Urges" People With POCD

Updated ADHD Pride Flag!

Dark brown - Rejection Sensitivity Yellow - Hyperactivity Orange - ADHD Awareness Red -  Hyperfixations/Hyperfocus Dark Red - Difficulty Focusing White - Procrastination

If anyone knows any ADHD Symbols please tell me so I can update this flag to be better!

you might have seen this bipolar flag around and i really liked the concept but i thought i’d take a spin at it and recolor/redesign 

whats the ice cream bar approach ?

So, @bipolarings has a post talking about this a little already, but I'm always happy to be given an excuse to blather about brains :D

The ice cream bar/sundae bar metaphor was originally created to describe the autism spectrum, but it works really well for other things too, including bipolar disorder. I'mma adapt it a lil bit here, in fact, to make it work even better. Yay me.

The principle is this: instead of trying to divide up bipolar disorder into I/II/NOS/etc, or classify it as 'severe' or 'mild', picture it as a sundae bar.

Now, every day, you make yourself a sundae. You can take as many toppings as you 'want' and as much of each topping as you 'want'.

There are some toppings that go well together, so, for instance, if you take a lot of euphoria there's a good chance you'll also get some hypersexuality, some delusions of grandiosity, some creative drive, some ambition, some psychomotor agitation. And that would be called a 'manic episode'. You could get somewhat less of each, maybe leave off the delusions of grandiosity, and people might call it a 'hypomanic episode'. Even less and people might call it 'euthymia'.

But the thing is, you don't have to get it that way, and you can take any amount of each! So you might get low mood but a lot of psychomotor agitation, irritability, and disregard of consequences. Or you could get a huge amount of emotional numbness but combine it with the stuff other people like to put with euphoria. Or you could get just a bit of low mood but spice it up with hallucinations and delusions (other). Or you could get a lot of delusions of grandiosity but only a tiny amount of euphoria.

And what you get one day doesn't determine what you get the next. You could spend years getting nothing but the 'hypomania combo' and the 'depression family-size' and then one day decide to dump the entire bowl of euphoria in your cup and top it with so many delusions it starts to spill over the sides. Or maybe you've only ever gotten small, carefully curated sundaes with a healthy amount of two or three toppings but today you just tell the server 'fuck me up' and get some of absolutely everything.

Without all the metaphor:

While certain sets of symptoms commonly appear together, and are then labeled 'mania', 'hypomania', 'depression', or 'euthymia', symptoms don't have to appear in those particular combinations. (Also the DSM isn't necessarily even right about what combinations are common.)

You could also have different proportions of symptoms than someone else does. (And that doesn't necessarily make your disorder or theirs automatically more 'severe'.)

Even if you do only get common combinations of symptoms, that says nothing about how 'severe' it is. If you get an enormous amount of emotional numbness, lack of motivation, executive dysfunction, suicidality, paranoid delusions, and disregard of consequences, continuously for 98% of your adult life; and someone else gets one (1) single 3 day long episode with a medium-sized serving of delusions of grandiosity, hallucinations, and disregard of consequences; they'll probably be diagnosed with Bipolar I and you with Bipolar II, but your life is probably being affected a lot more.

What symptoms you get can also change, which can include changing from what a psychiatrist might call 'Bipolar I' to 'Bipolar II', or 'BP-II' to 'BP-NOS', or whatever. You haven't magically gotten a new disorder. You just got a different sundae today. You're still eating at the same sundae bar.

From what I’ve read and observed, bipolar symptoms exist on a spectrum. Using these charts inspired by @levianta’s graphics about autism, you can visualize the extremity of every symptom you experience. As an example, here is a chart visualizing how i personally experience hypomania:

this is so petty but i hate how bipolar is treated like one of the big scary disorders but never talked about as one. people on here will talk about ending the demonization of ‘scary disorders’ like personally disorders and schizophrenia and did but not include bipolar despite being seen and treated by the general public as a ‘scary’ disorder. I had a mental health advocate tell me bipolar doesn’t count because it’s a mood disorder and therefor treated the same as gad and depression and i just. have you met a bipolar? listened to our symptoms? have you listened to doctors talk about us? our abuse rates? our suicide and alcoholism rates? the distain the public has for us? just include us in your positivity and advocacy please. im not asking for much

my adhd ass when someone says something and expects me to be able to comprehend it the first time

I see this a lot in leftist circles but mental illness, trauma and abuse will exist with or without capitalism, your “mental illness is a social phenomenon” might be true for your depression and your anxiety but I beg all of you to think about psychotic people, systems and people with personality disorders when you make posts like that. It might be true that we wouldn’t be labeled as mentally ill but we would still need resources to help us cope, there’s still something we would need help coping with and you should focus on making that help available and accessible and free of bigotry for all of us instead of living in a “no mentally ill people” pseudo progressive eugenicist dream.

if you’re a mentally ill adult, especially if you’re psychotic or have bipolar, i highly recommend you look into getting a psychiatric advance directive. basically they’re a form you can fill out where you can specify what kind of treatment you want and don’t want in the case that you ever get legally declared incompetent. normally, getting declared incompetent means that psychiatrists take away your right to make decisions about your mental health care. for example, they can force you to take medications you don’t want or institutionalize you longterm without your consent. also the state appoints someone they choose to legally “consent” in your place.

what a psychiatric advance directive does is put limits on what the psychiatrists assigned to you can do. you can appoint your own person to be your legal representative, someone you trust who knows you and cares about you. you can also specify what hospitals you don’t want to be sent to or what doctors you don’t want to see or medications you don’t want to take or whether or not you consent to electroconvulsive treatment. you can also say what you do want, like i put down that they decided to institutionalize me, i wanted it to be at a specific psych ward i’d already been to and had a not terrible time at. and now, if i ever get declared incompetent, psychiatrists are legally not allowed to put me back on the meds that gave me a seizure. 

nobody wants to be legally declared incompetent. it’s really scary to think about, but it does happen, especially to people with psychosis or bipolar disorder. it’s better to have legal safeguards in place ahead of time and not need them than to get declared incompetent and not have an advance directive

friendly reminder that bipolar ii isnt the “easy,” “soft,” or “lesser” bipolar disorder. just because we dont experience full-on mania doesn’t mean our experiences are somehow invalid. 

hypomania has the power to ruin relationships. 

depression has the power to ruin lives. 

we end up hospitalized for depression. 

we’re more likely to rapid cycle and contrary to popular belief, our depression can cause psychosis 

our suffering is real and cant be discounted solely because we experience a lesser form of mania. 

YOU are Bipolar!