Living With Bipolar Disorder: Self Determination, Personal Responsibility, Recovery

Recovery in Mental Health: Reshaping scientific and clinical responsibilities (World Psychiatric Association), by Michaela Amering (Author), Margit Schmolke

"This book is amazingly positive. It not only talks about hope, it creates hope. Its therapeutic effects reach professional mental health workers, service users, and carers alike. Fleet-footed and easily understandable, at times it reads like a suspense novel." Andreas Knuf, pro mente sana, Switzerland

This book was originally published in German, now available in English. It outlines and describes documented systems and examples of recovery from mental health disorders. It provides hope, and helps one view mental health disorders not as a permanent psychiatric label, but as something from which to recover from, and to work hard towards that goal.

Wellness Recovery Action Plan® (WRAP®)

Learning self help skills for dealing with physical and emotional discomfort can be simple ... but it's a much greater challenge using self help methods during the most difficult times - when they can help the most - and incorporating them into daily life.

This book presents a system developed and used successfully by people with all kinds of physical, emotional and life issues. It has helped them use self help skills more easily to monitor how they are feeling, decrease the severity and frequency of difficult feelings, and improve the quality of their lives.

This book helps people:

1. develop their own list of activities for everyday well-being

2. track triggering events and early warning signs

3. prepare personal responses for when they are feeling badly

4. create a plan for supports to care for them if necessary.

Included in this very accessible guide is information on developing a support system, using peer counseling, focusing, creative activities, journaling, music, diet, exercise, light, relaxation, and getting a good night's sleep. Using the Wellness Recovery Action Plan, self-management in difficult times becomes possible and practical.

Relapse Prevention in Bipolar Disorder: A Treatment Manual and Workbook for Therapist and Client (Relapse Prevention Manuals series),
by Dr. John Sorensen

Warning: Psychiatry Can Be Hazardous to Your Mental Health, by William Glasser

How psychopharmacology has usurped the role of psychotherapy in our society, to the great detriment of the patients involved. Millions of patients are now routinely being given prescriptions for a wide range of drugs including Ritalin, Prosac, Zoloft and related drugs which can be harmful to the brain [and body]. A previous generation of patients would have had a course of psychotherapy without brain–damaging chemicals. Glasser explains the wide implications of this radical change in treatment and what can be done to counter it. (from the publisher)

Image courtesy of graur codrin / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Page updated: Novemver 21, 2015

Living with Bipolar Disorder: Self-Determination

Towards developing personal responsibility, with the goals of
recovery and remission.

In the book, Recovery in Mental Health: Reshaping scientific and clinical responsibilities, by Michaela Amering and Margit Schmolke, the work of Mary Ellen Copeland is cited, under the subheading, "Wellness Recovery Action Plan (WRAP)". Amering and Schmolke’s book take a positive look at mental health disorders and outline success paths towards mental health recovery.

Copeland, who witnessed a close family member being crushed by a severe mental health disorder, with inadequate "status quo" treatment, developed a program to better facilitate mental health recovery through action. That is, not simply resigning oneself to a label, and laying oneself on the doctor’s table to delegate the job of recovery to someone with better qualifications than yourself.

Self determination and personal responsibility are crucial.

Every individual needs to take personal responsibility for health decisions and actions. Self-determination and personal responsibility are crucial elements of mental health recovery and remission.

Of course, the status quo for the past few decades has increasingly shifted in a direction that greater facilitates economic benefit for all professional parties involved, that is, psychiatric labeling, identifying the mental health disorder, and prescribed medicine, perhaps with a bit of therapy in the mix. This sometimes works the opposite way, and better facilitates regression rather than recovery.

Copeland’s model is based on "hope, empowerment, self-determination, recovery and wellness". Some of the key factors in recovery considered by Copeland are:

Hope.

Self-determination - taking personal responsibility – that it is up to each individual to take responsibility for his own wellness.

Education.

All people grow by taking positive risks.

The point we want to get from Copeland’s work, along with the many examples of success stories associated with her work, is, to keep a positive hopeful attitude towards recovery, you can recover if you work hard at it from various fronts. Take personal responsibility for your life. The doctor at the end of the day, goes home to his own family, and that is where your relationship with him or her ends, in most cases. You can’t call your doctor in the middle of the night if you are having a crisis or perplexing question, it is generally a professional relationship.

In the end, you are accountable for yourself, not your doctor, whether or not your doctor’s advice and method of treatment is good or lacking. We need to avoid, then, the tendency to blame or write everything off to the disorder. You can make positive incremental progress, even if you have setbacks, but progress, including recovery and remission, is, to a large extent, up to you.

Self-Determination Contributes to Empowerment Towards Positive Steps for Recovery and Remission

Self-determination, then, contributes to empowerment. Realizing that you have power over your own decisions, and can affect positive change within your own life, will help get us off the couch and shake us out of complacency and resignation. The tragedy of modern psychiatry, that is post-Freudian medical model based psychiatry, is the hopeless resignation it inspires, with the exception of exalting the benefits of psychiatric drugs.

In Blaming the Brain, by Michigan State University professor emeritus Elliot Valenstein. Ph.D., a very well-documented treatise against the medical model and towards a more realistic approach towards understanding mental heath disorders, by an impartial and unbiased researcher. It presents the facts in a convincing argument, providing a useful foundation against the mainstream approach to labeling and medicating, and empowers the one suffering with a serious mental health disorder such as bipolar disorder, to take whatever positive steps are necessary towards his or her own recovery.

Self-determination, then, does not inspire guilt, as much as it inspires hope and contributes to a sense of empowerment. Take the horse by the reigns, even if the horse is still bucking. If you fall off the horse, by all means get back on!

Pages Related to Bipolar Disorder

Bipolar Disorder Self Help 50 Natural Ways to Overcome Symptoms of Bipolar Disorder

Help for Bipolar Disorder - Coaching

Dealing with Bipolar Disorder: Self Monitoring for Relapse Prevention

Labeling in Psychiatry - The Medical Model of Mental Health and its Shortcomings

Bipolar Disorder Overdiagnosed

Bipolar Disorder and Music

Bipolar Disorder and Children, Sharna Olfman

Bipolar Disorder Treatment - Children and Teens

Bipolar Disorder Drug Treatmemt

Bipolar Disorder Poem

Anger Management - Tips, Strategies, Therapy and Techniques

Best Psychology books - Natural Method - (off-site)

Living Without Depression and Manic Depression: A Workbook for Maintaining Mood Stability, by Mary Ellen Copeland

Living Without Depression and Manic Depression outlines a program that helps people achieve real breakthroughs in coping and healing. This workbook covers the following issues:

self-advocacy

building a network of support

developing a wellness lifestyle

achieving calmness with energy

symptom prevention strategies

building self-esteem

developing a personalized plan for mood stability

building a career that works

trauma resolution

dealing with sleep problems

diet and vitamins

dealing with stigma

managing medication side effects

psychotherapy and counseling alternatives

learning to have fun, laughter, and pleasure

Some of Copeland's other books of note for persons with bipolar disorder or symptoms of bipolar disorder are,

The Depression Workbook: A Guide for Living with Depression and Manic Depression, Second Edition

Healing the Trauma of Abuse: A Women's Workbook

Wellness Recovery Action Plan & Peer Support: Personal, Group and Program Development