First I take the Baggie, the same one I’ve used for at least six years, out of its hiding place in my sock drawer, and put it on my dresser.  Filled to the brim with plastic prescription bottles, they’ve punched wholes through the material greatly limiting its days of functionality.

Like Pigpen’s blanket, the thought of getting rid of it upsets me. That Zip Lock and I have come such a long way together.  The end of a marriage.  A divorce.  A year being single.  An engagement.  Now a broken engagement and I’m alone again.  Maybe the Baggie is actually bad luck?  No.  It couldn’t be.  Not my Baggie.

Next I count out all the pills I need from the various bottles.  I used to use one of those daily dose containers like the elderly, but I was too lazy to keep refilling them at the end of the week.  Then I count the pills to make sure I have the right amount.  Nine in the morning, seven at night.  I also make sure they are in the right denominations.  Two 250mg Effexor, One 100mg Lamictal and so on.

Finally I put them in my cupped hand, go to the bathroom sink, get a mouth full of water and gulp them down.  Then I inspect my hand and the surrounding area to make sure none of them went astray, slipped from my fingers or shot out a nostril.  Now I’m finally free to spend the rest of the day or evening ruminating over whether I took my pills or not and if so were they in the right quantities?

This has been the ritual for the past twenty-four years of my life.  And if I miss a “feeding” I definitely feel it.  Light headedness, trouble focusing, nausea, anxiety…

If you’re Bipolar medication can be a touchy subject.  For me it’s the only thing that stands between a life of relative normalcy and being curled up in a ball on the floor begging to be put to sleep like an animal.  I just can’t stand the depression.   The fragility of my life at times can be very unnerving.  I can’t go anywhere or do anything without my beat up Baggie of psychotropic libations designed to manipulate my dopamine and norfenefrine for the best possible reception.

Some people with Bipolar Disorder have chosen not to go the medication route for a number of reasons.  People don’t want to give up the manic highs.  Others don’t want to gain ten or twenty pounds.  There are even some who feel taking medication is an official confirmation of mental illness and they’d prefer not to wear the blue ribbon.  And in this day and age of only eating raw foods and free range massaged jicama, others do not want to introduce anything man-made into their bodies.  This includes medication that may make them less annoying individuals around mealtime.

I think all reasons for or not taking medication for Bipolar Disorder are justified.  Even if someone is very unstable, as long as they are not hurting themselves or anyone else, they should decide what to put in their bodies.  Especially when it alters their moods.

What does bother me are those with Bipolar Disorder forever searching for their capsule in a pill bottle of bright and shining armor.  They want the ultimate drug that never lets them feel sad and always exist in a perpetual state of “I can’t wipe this grin off my face.”   Maybe they had taken a drug at some point in their lives that briefly made the feel that way.  Or, they once mistook a manic cycle for a drug’s efficacy.  Whatever they felt that one time, they want it back and believe the right drug or combination thereof is out there.  They refuse to stop experimenting until they reclaim the crown of perpetual happiness which is rightfully theirs and inexplicably escaped them.    And, they snuff-out psychiatrists like spent cigarette butts until they find one willing to indulge their personal quest to find the matzoh.

We all know you can never go back home.  And people still looking for the old hood are never going to find the same satisfaction.  But as a fellow Bipolar in complete disorder, I can definitely understand the chase and why some of us can’t stop.   It’s like settling for a Casio when you once wore a Rolex.  They both tell time, but the Rolex made you feel like you weren’t really a prep cook at McDonald’s.

One time a friend came to visit me in San Francisco.  She is Bipolar as well.  I was in her hotel room as she unpacked and pulled out a similar beat up Zip Lock Baggie as I had tucked away in my sock drawer, only filled with her pills.  It made me feel really good and warm inside.  Not because we were both stuck in the same Bipolar boat.  But, because I thought about how many of us must be out there with our beaten up Zip Lock Baggies taking our psychotropic medications day in and day out each with our own little rituals.

We all may not know each other.  If we did we would probably never think to talk about it.  However it’s like coming from the same ancestral heritage.  You know as individuals with Bipolar Disorder we have certain traditions.  Jews wear Yamakas.  Hindus wear Turbans.  And Bipolars have a special bag for their pills.

Thanks to my medication, I am better able to control my hypomania.  I have been diagnosed Bipolar II with rapid cycling.  This means I can go from loving life to wanting to discontinue my membership all within a half hour.   My mental state can flip back and forth all day long like a freshly caught trout lying on the deck of a fishing boat struggling in vain to get back in the water.  Eventually the depression would always win out and I’d be back to planning my demise..

But thanks to the advances in psychiatric diagnosis and medications, my lifelong struggle with Bipolar II hypomania has been reduced to a level I can control and I have not recently been scraping the red hot floor of the pit of depression.  In fact, I have amazed myself on how stable I have become in the face of some very serious adversity.  I thank modern science for saving my life.  And I can tell you at least fifty stories similar to mine.

I was looking at Twitter yesterday to make sure my book Buzzkill was not tweeted about again (why break the silence), and I see there is a tweeter professing that anti-depressants and other psychiatric drugs in that genre actually make you high, as in inebriated.  He goes on to purport a person on psychotropics can not make decisions because of their altered mental state.  I am paraphrasing.

Natasha Tracy did a great job calling out this shlomo and addressing his comments in her blog yesterday.  However, this uneducated moronic rhetoric from a self-appointed protector of society makes me crazier than I already am. It’s my bipolar duty to fully skewer this “Mr. Twitter” as Tracy has dubbed him.  And, this is for anybody else who is on the “bipolar doesn’t exist and anti-depressants are evil train” which is now probably winding through birther country looking to blow the cover off something else they know nothing about.

First of all,  psychotropic drugs can not possibly be “fun drugs.”  They don’t contain any kind of narcotic or agents to alter your senses.   If they did people would be chopping up Effexor and snorting it like Oxycontin.   Furthermore, each person requires a specific dose of anti-depressant medication based on their body chemistry, and the same drugs do not work on everyone.  Ineffectiveness means not only don’t they work, but they probably make you feel more depressed.  Worst of all, if a drug or combination thereof does work, you will probably have delightful side effects which may include sexual dysfunction, weight gain, dry mouth, shaky hands and short term memory loss, to name a few.  This is why anti-depressants have no street value either.

So please Mr. Twitter, explain to me what is fun about anti-depressants and alike?  I don’t see kids at Rave’s dropping Lamictals.  I don’t see kids stealing their dad’s Cymbaltas to catch a buzz.  Have you ever heard of a doctor over-prescribing Risperdal at 200-300 a month like some doctors do with Soma, Valium and Oxycontin?  And who would take a drug that may make you feel worse or feel better but ruin your sex life?  Believe me, you have to be extremely depressed to go down the medication route and it’s anything but fun.

Secondly, these drugs are based in science.  They work to regulate the levels of dopamine and norepinephrine in your brain.  When not in balance they create depression and or mania.   Some guy running a garage meth lab in Newark New Jersey didn’t accidentally figure this out trying to make a pound of smack.  Nor did some brainiac at Harvard School of Medicine accidentally mix two chemicals together and have a hunch they may be good for depression.  And when they were formulating Geodon, a little cocaine didn’t fall off the shelf and accidentally get mixed in with it so now everyone is under the misconception it helps with depression.

Third, anti-depressants do work.  Personally, they enabled me to have a reasonably normal life.  I wrote about my experiences in Buzzkill, “My Disorderly Struggle with Bipolar Disorder.”  And there are at least a hundred other books out there with bipolar people telling their amazing stories.  Moreover, one in five people in the general population are dealing with some sort of mental illness.  This makes for an overwhelming cadre of individuals who have been helped by these drugs.  Since Mr. Twitter has never experienced Bipolar Disease, who is he to comment on how the medications make you feel and their efficacy?

If Mr. Twitt tries to hide behind “everybody has a right to an opinion,” I’ll be the first to say “no they don’t.”  Stupid people do not have a right to an opinion.  Only people who have real knowledge on a subject have a right to an opinion.  Otherwise they are just babbling fools.  And I’m pretty sure this guy is the latter.

Finally, how can this social moron possibly make a statement like “people on anti-depressants should not be able to make decisions?”  Is it better that we make them in the throes of suicide?  Do the pills make us so deliriously happy that we might start dry-humping our neighbors?  I’ve yet to see a bipolar person on medication so impaired they make the life-threatening decision of accidentally ordering a regular Coke when they meant to order a Diet Coke with their lunch.    These medications are designed to restore your mental state to one of normalcy.  Does this mean when a person takes an aspirin they should not be able to make decisions?  Because, an aspirin will make you about as loaded as an anti-depressant.  Nothing this person says makes any sense.

I ask you, why does Mr. Twitt, and others like him, have such a vendetta against people with Bipolar Disease?  Why is it an area of such major concern to him? Did a person with Bipolar Disease, wasted out of his mind on Elavil, rob their local Seven-Eleven armed with a pill cutter and steal all of the Gatorade because he had such intense dry mouth?  And now Mr. Twitt is out to keep the world safe by ridding society of these psychotropic drugs?  Is the suicide rate not high enough for him?  Have not enough people suffered from Bipolar Disease alone and depressed?  Am I missing some sort of satisfaction that comes from making people that already have severe depression feel worse?

The problem with social forums is that naysayers can jump on and make unsubstantiated comments remaining anonymous and unaccountable.   And although I understand the nature of the technology and should be well past letting things like this stick in my crawl,  every once in a while a dingleberry like Mr. Twitter breaks through and ignites me.

But please ignore me.  I’m stoned out of my mind on Effexor, Lamictal and Topamax.  What do I know?

People were so gullible back in the 1950’s and 1960’s.  “9 out of 10 doctors recommend Pall Mall Cigarettes because they are less harsh on your throat. ”  “In a side by side comparison, Lincoln is better than Cadillac.”  “More people trust Goodyear than any other tire.”  I’m paraphrasing, but you get the gist.  And people believed this stuff.  Nobody was calling out for Google Analytics, or even for Pall Mall to simply show how they conducted their survey.  All you had to do is make the claim and everyone assumed it was fact.

Before you start musing at people’s low level of bullshit detection back then, we are still eating up the same statistical nonsense in 2012.  It’s just packaged differently.  Take the Bipolar Disorder drug Lamictal.  According to Wikipedia, between 5% to 10% of patients taking Lamictal will develop a rash, but only 1 in 1,000 patients will develop a serious rash. Plus only 1 in 50,000 patients die from the rash.  This is an un-cited claim according to Wikipedia.  The information powerhouse aggregator went on to say that 9 out of 10 doctors smoke Marlboro Cigarettes because the brand gives them steadier hands in the operating room.  Personally, I’d like my doctor to smoke Marlboros while he’s actually operating on me to insure the very best outcome.

Most people reading this aren’t looking for citations.  Wikipedia has credibility because it says so.  And if 1 in 50,000 actually die from Stevens-Johnson Syndrome (the killer rash), those are pretty good odds.  They are willing to take the gamble if they are suffering from bipolar symptoms and Lamictal is their greatest hope.

Wikipedia downplays the killer-rash statistic, as does its manufacturer GlaxoSmithklein.  But just getting the rash must be scary.  The patient doesn’t know if it’s “the big one.”  And 5% to 10% of patients will get it.   That’s at best 1 in 20 people.  Maybe 1 in 10.  I see these very same statistics influencing people not to try Lamictal,  So you see, we really have not evolved from the 1950’s and 1960’s vulnerability to marketing mind melding.  Any statistics can be made to lean in any direction you favor.  It’s the interpretation you chose to believe that makes up your mind.  However,  I don’t think anyone can argue the Lincoln is a better car than the Cadillac.  Everyone says it has a better ride.  Everyone.

Personally, I chose to flirt with death and take Lamictal for my bipolar symptoms.  Fortunately, I did not get the rash.  I also didn’t know any of the rash statistics.  I just trusted my doctor when he said getting Stevens-Johnson Syndrome was very remote.  And the minute a rash developed he’d stop the medication.   Notice how I used the phrase “I trusted my doctor.”  I think when the drug manufacturers and web sites are whipping statistics at you for their own less than altruistic reasons, you need a doctor or knowledgable advisor you can trust.  Someone from the real world who can talk from experience, not an Excel Spreadsheet.

Years ago when I was just out of college and had started my first job, I had a crippling attack of depression hosted by my bipolar illness.  It was a Friday night and I was rolling around on the living room floor shaking, unable to keep still and telling my then girlfriend that I wanted to die.  I couldn’t get through to my usual psychiatrist and I needed something to help me sleep and keep me from killing myself over the weekend.  One of my Dad’s friends had a brother who was a psychiatrist who I called at home and he said he’d see me first thing Monday.  But to get through the weekend he wanted me to have a glass of wine and a couple of Benedryl whenever I needed it to calm down.  He hadn’t met me yet and did not want to start pumping drugs into me site unseen.  From 30 years of practicing, he knew this was unorthodox but safe and effective.

I didn’t do it.  I was so depressed I ended up overdosing on sleeping pills and was taken to the hospital.  But I admired the doctor’s practical grass roots approach to getting me through the weekend.   He had excellent credentials, 30 years experience and a solution, albiet a little off beat one.   I trusted him more than a statistic.  I’m sure there are many statistics telling you not to mix even Sweet Tarts with alcohol.  However, we all do it now and then usually to no ill effect.  The doctor knew this.  He was being practical and compassionate toward my deteriorating condition.  He also definitely agreed more people trust Goodyear than any other tire.

For these reasons, I am not a big fan of the statistic, especially when it is not cited or the fine print is a disclaimer for it probably being inaccurate.  I also detest when people just make a claim citing everyone as their source.  My grandfather, a Philadelphia native and its biggest cheerleader, used to tell me things like “Philadelphia has become the restaurant capital of the world.”  I’d say “Pop, where the hell did you hear that?”  And he’d say, “Hear it?  Everyone knows it!”  He also smoked Lucky Strikes because LSMFT.  (Lucky Strikes Means Fine Tobacco).   How could you argue with that kind of logic?

So when negotiating the bipolar landscape of doctors, medications and therapy, do your research.  But don’t believe everything you read, even the statistics.  Find people you trust and talk with them.  Statistics are not real.  They are man made.  Experience is real.  And someone you trust to help you evaluate it is invaluable.  Just please always remember, Michelob is the right beer when you’re having more than one.  At least that’s what they say.