They say that Bipolar Disorder is a response to trauma but while making toast and coffee this morning, the thought popped into my head as the toaster popped its two cherries, that Bipolar Disorder is a response to repression. Of course it could be both! You are repressed and then you experience trauma. Double whammy! There is nowhere to hide then.
In my experience moods develop from frustration and an inability to articulate that frustration because who after all in this kind of society really wants to listen to your frustration apart from your nearest and dearest but what if they just can't or are absent.
Long waiting lists and horror stories about Mental Health Services are the propaganda that keep us walled in, that keeps adding to our represssion. "I better not say anything or bother anybody because of British reserve." Then we take to the bottle and the hard drugs and then because our minds are traumatised by repression we become addicted to the chemical substance that aleviates for a short while, the emotional pain.
The way we live, the way we are schooled. Some laughably call it education. These are all forms of repression. Our emotional lives have to be worked out ourselves. That's a big ask for a 13 year old, let alone a 33 year old. Work is a repression that we have to undertake in order to pay for the cost of our living but the cost to our living repressed lives is Bipolar Disorder. An inability to 'naturally regulate moods. So you go and catch whatever highs you can with your butterfly net and then you get addicted to the highs and then you want those highs to continue by whatever means possible.
As we know from painful experience that after every high comes a corresponding low because life and that dreaded word 'reality' is not an escape room or a Mills & Boon romance. It's down and it's dirty and we drink from whichever glass is presented to us. I usually go for the half empty one even though the positive psychology movement and the glassy eyed, white toothed automoton presenting you with said glass insists that it is half full.
Bipolar Disorder once diagnosed in an adult and often after many years of dealing ineffectively with trauma and repression is then treated by the mantra 'shake your meds'. Yet more propaganda to keep your repression in place. After all who wants to see somebody shake off their trauma and repression. It could get ugly and messy and none of us are equipped to deal with that after our regimented lives. Any sign of alternative living has been smashed by the repressive British State. From the Travellers at the Battle of the Beanfield to the Miners at Orgreave. From the inner city youth of Toxteth and Brixton to the modern day 'Kill the Bill riots.
Repression was woven into the very fabric of the Industrial Revolution. Repression disguised as oppression. Now we have a statue of Queen Victoria in every Working Class City in the UK to look up at to remind us of our oppressed and repressed histories. Groups within groups have it worse than others but when you suddenly lose the plot and become a lunatic or mad man, it's off to the Asylum with you.
"Here is an individual who couldn't cope with the stress and oppression of a large family living in poverty in a society that was divided on class, wealth and gender lines."
Bipolar Disorder is at epidemic levels. It is the catch all term nowadays. We do nothing but medicate it. Tell people who have been diagnosed with it to take long walks, go to the gym, sleep, eat healthily and all will be well but what about the repression? What about the trauma?
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