>>8780387Mother is bipolar; I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder when I was 16. Have largely gone untreated despite being on Cymbalta for six months when I was 17. I am now 30.
I've observed my mother's struggles with various doctors, the medical establishment, and of course a long ever-changing, ever-increasing battery of psychotropic drugs. I could absolutely write a book about what I observed as her son throughout my upbringing and afterward but I will spare you the details in order not to write a blog post.
Essentially I have never observed any overall improvement in her well being. Her specific diagnosis is 'Rapid Cycling Bipolar 2/Hypomania". Basically what this means in actuality to me is that approximately ever two to three weeks my mother will enter either a period of incredible passion and zeal or a bedridden lethargy in which she will become possessed by some sort of fantasy either regarding her imminent fulfilled purpose or her imminent uselessness unto doom. To my estimation the drugs have done nothing but allowed her to, at points, avoid confronting the reality of her situation and have after approximately 25 years of use left her without the experience requisite to become a fully actualized adult. The drugs I also blame for destroying her memory and her ability to think logically about simple tasks.
The combined expenditure for her disorder cost my family tens of thousands of dollars per year to my estimation.
I say all this to caution you. There's a great song called "Frontier Psychiatry" I'm sure you've heard before; but just the title of it encapsulates what I consider to be the current state of mental heath diagnosis and treatment of our time. Even excluding the profiteering of the drug companies and the human proclivity for selfishness and evil, well-meaning doctors and scientists are still operating from a base of knowledge that has only been developed for at the most about 100 years.
