Recovering from mental illness

Bipolar Disorder mental illness recovery? Recovery as a concept is about the process of building a meaningful life as defined by the person with a mental health problem themselves. There are four key processes suggested: Finding and maintaining hope The re-establishment of a positive identity Finding meaning in life Taking responsibility for one’s life

books on bipolar disorder

Good books on Bipolar Disorder

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Another Bipolar Digestion Day

Diet, Digestion & Depression?

It was a big night out, the end of Songkran celebration in Pattaya where we'd gone to see old friends, and the food just kept coming. The first time in almost a year that I've eaten western food too, and today the old bipolar rhythm has set in.

More attuned to my biorhythm's these days I feel the metabolic energy needed for digestion, the tension of sympathetic - parasympathetic nervous system activity involved and the old sinking feeling.



That reptilian part of my brain wants me in the undergrowth, maybe basking in the sun, but definitely not moving. Heavy digestion work had become coupled to the FREEZE response through my early life experience of trauma.

Freeze Response:  If the fight or flight is not successful, then at the point of recognizing defeat and impending death, the animal goes into a state of helplessness and hopelessness, physiologically the freeze response.

Bipolar Disorder Instinct?

The Power of Instinct in Bipolar Disorder?

Trapped Survival Energies in Disordered States?

The Social World & Instinctual Energies?

The Autonomic (Animal) Nervous System?

Do You Really Believe the Theory of Evolution?

No Bipolar Depression Now

You Cannot be Conscious of Your Brains Neural Activity?

Your Autonomic Nervous System’s Triune Stimulation?

Objectivity can Only Rationalize this Hidden Motivation?

What is this Hidden Stimulus to Bipolar Depression? 

Tuesday 12th April 2011, I wake fatigued and hung over after being up till 4am, so I’m paying the price now of with physiological state.


I fell into an old habitual work pattern yesterday and now those primitive neural networks in my brain have me in autonomic conservation/withdrawal mode, which I would have worried into a depressive mood in times gone by. That was before I educated myself in the latest neuroscience on brain and nervous system activity, and now I know how much physical state can stimulate my bipolar thoughts.

My Bipolar Disorder States

Bipolar Disorder Altered States

Born in traumatic circumstances and suffering from infantile Asthma I never got to access the social world in the way that would have made me feel comfortable inside my own skin, and satisfied my metabolic needs of vital social interaction. Instead I lived a life of bi-phasic engagement and withdrawal stimulated by, my twin branched autonomic nervous system (ANS), patterns of behavior energized by my mammalian instincts for survival. My social interaction with others had always been effortful rather than spontaneous, and based largely on a mimicked simulation of affect rather than the spontaneous affective states available to humans through the newly discovered third branch of the ANS.

Peak Experience or Psychosis?

Peak Experience or Psychosis?

It was the 8th October 2010, psychosis had peaked the day before, in a delusional state when I associated a passing Buddhist procession with Jesus entering Jerusalem. As always in my 30 year experience of these altered states of awareness, I was extremely euphoric, spiritually enthused with intense feelings of universal oneness. Heightened senses with feelings of unusual calm, brought sensations of harmonic attunement with nature, the trees, birds, every wisp of wind on my skin and a eerie feeling that I was ‘affecting’ a resonant harmonic balance in the atmosphere surrounding me, or visa versa. It felt like, whenever I stilled my mind, and matched heart and breath with rhythmic nature, I could touch a oneness with all the usual sense of separation dissolved away.

The Wise Man and the Whore

Written at the Height of Psychosis

A wise man once walked the pre dawn hour practicing his walking meditation and he chanced upon a woman sitting by a Bodhi tree, instantly aware, this creature's ill reputation.


‘Hello young Sir,’ said the woman, drawing not a flicker of response, and oh! So intrigued by his calmness and handsome face, she moved to cross him with temptation.

Ripples in Bipolar Attachments

"The Face in the Water?"

“Marching to the promised land. Where the honey flows and takes you by the hand.”

Its one of my favorite songs by Genesis and its been stuck inside feedback loops of heart and mind for over a week now. Do you ever get that kind of thing with your favorite songs?

I mean it’s not every minute of the day of coarse, yet it keeps spontaneously springing to mind, like I’m wondering in and out of the sound proof room where its on constant playback, only the verse’s I remember though.
Is it just my quirky brain?


“The face in the water looks up. And she shakes her head as if to say. That it's the last time you'll look like today.”

My Last Manic Episode - Maybe?

My Last Manic Episode - Maybe?

Could there be Purpose in My Manias?

To Reorganize my Autonomic Nervous System?

Can Systems Theory Explain the Chaos of Mania?

Can I Integrate the Experience with New Insights?

Changing Unconsciously Conditioned E-Motivation?

It is just over six months since the beginning of my last manic episode 17/9/2010, and just like my first in February 1980, it was triggered by LOSS. I had lost an intimate relationship, a potential life partner who had gone the way of five others, in another classic confirmation of the damage done by affective disorder. Only time will tell of coarse if the six weeks of hypo/hyper mania will be my last, yet something has definitely changed, with no autonomic descent into depression despite the highest and longest mania of my life.

No Bipolar Genie Yet?

With all the advances in genetic research over the past two decades researchers had been very confident of identifying the gene or genes responsible for bipolar disorder and other mental illnesses thought to have a strong genetic link.

Yet the search has proved to be more elusive than Aladdin's famous Genie. Even the white coated researchers are getting discouraged by the complexity of their task, as suggested in two recent scientific articles. Searching for Genetic Risk for Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder. & The missing genes: what happened to the heritability of psychiatric disorders?


In the first article the authors explain that:
"Ten years ago it was widely expected that the genetic basis of common disease would be resolved by genome-wide association studies (GWAS), large-scale studies in which the entire genome is covered by genetic markers. However, the bulk of heritable variance remains unexplained."