"The question Creative or Crazy invites us to wonder whether young peoples’ behaviours are actually symptoms of a mental health disorder or are sourced in creative coping strategies to enable them to cope with childhood trauma/ abuse." Your thoughts? Here's the link: http://www.napac.org.uk/news/creative%20or%20crazy%20flier.pdf
I guess I could see myself agreeing. People with alternate points of view are actually the definition of creativity, aren't they?
I think we should let people be themselves instead of drugging them up... Most kids don't take their bipolar pills anyways...because it levels out their emotion to the point that they don't feel very alive...
If someone is taking meds that make them feel like zombies, they need to tell their doctors and need a dosage change or something. Bipolar meds do not level out emotions like that. I can say that with certainty, b/c I am on a metric shitload of meds, all at low doses. I can honestly say that I feel MORE alive than when I was untreated. My moods no longer control me, I control my moods. I am not ashamed that I have to take medication to stay sane. I also feel more creative now than when I was unmedicated. Mood stabilizers do not kill emotions. This is a myth that really bothers me when I hear it spread around. Peace and love
If a person is creative, zany, wacky, nuts and HAPPY, then they're fine. Leave 'em alone. In fact, they're probably better off than most of the human race. If they're creative, zany, wacky, nuts, and NOT happy and wish they were dead, they're not fine. Nobody deserves to live like that, and they shouldn't be looked down on for doing whatever it takes to make them feel better - be it meds, alternative therapy, counselling, lifestyle changes, whatever. On people with BP being more creative - I've heard from a few sources that with some illnesses, if you can get creative and paint/draw/write/sculpt/whatever what's going on in your head, it can help make sense of things when there's a lot going on and it's all getting chaotic. Haven't tried it myself - I just don't have the energy. zzzzz
Let me share some little know facts about the mental health industry. I am currently a home based community psychiatric support treatment specialist (big title, small paycheck) working in the innercity in a large midwest city. Daily, I work with kids refferred to me from the juvenile court system, children services, public school system, residential treatment centers and so on. These children have been ientified as problems that must be dealt with. In one way of another. The first step is to find something to label them with (ADD,ADHD, ODD, Adjustment disoder...). The purpose for this is two fold. First and foremost, medicaid must have a diagnosis if the are going to pay for behavioral health treatment. So everybody gets a mental illness. Everybody. Secondly, this label acts as both an excuse to drug up the child and a means to pacify the system regarding any possible flaws in the social fabric. Let's say I have a client who is constantly getting picked up on assualt charges. Babylon would say "his chemical balnace is obvious out of whack. Give him drugs and threaten him with incarceration to deter him from further misbehavior". The truth is that his crack addict mother is hocking the food stamps for drugs (no food), people who attend mom's crack parties break into his locked room and steal his money and clothes (no clothes or savings), because of this, he has 2 pairs of too small pants and a couple stained t-shirts, (no chance for self-esteem in a materialistic society), his school annually placest worst in the city (barely able to read or add), and so on and so on. So he decides that he has had it and begins hustling to feed himself and his younger brother, maybe score some respectable clothing and a hair cut. His frustration results in assualt charges. Does society addrress the massive flaw in it's structure? Does society blame the child for disrupting proper society? The point to this is: it's only crazy if it disrupts or makes uncomfortable those with the power to label it as crazy. Or if it is mindlessly hurting people. All peace comes from solid motives. Being creative for the sake of harming or scaring if definitly negative. If you create or the sake of bettering other's or your own life, then it is not crazy.
