Bipolar Disorder

criteria bipolar
19 year old & Bipolar disorder?

I have been noticing recently that i have been depressed, especially today at dinner when my mom asked me what was wrong and i balled infront of my parents and brother for no apparent reason.

I was diagonosed with Panic Disorder several years ago.
I am going to be 20 yrs old this December.
It would be good to fine a counselor that suits you, and to talk to them about your feelings regularly.
Keep yourself busy.
Exircise and make sure you are eating right.
Also make your that you are on a sleep schedule and getting enough sleep.
Spend time with your family and friends, at church, etc if this is at all an option.
If you feel that your depression is severe enough, consult your doctor.

Why Sarah Palin is Not Bipolar

In what has been a strikingly bitter and divisive US election campaign, one of the most distasteful forms of personal attack has been left-wing bloggers labeling VP candidate Sarah Palin as bipolar. These commentators apparently believe it is possible to diagnose Governor Palin as a closet sufferer of manic-depressive illness, without ever having met her or going through a formal diagnostic process. Bipolar is actually a specific medical term and the criteria for bipolar is set forth in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV).

For those of us who do have bipolar disorder (also known as manic-depressive illness), or who advocate on behalf of the bipolar community, this is a disturbing development that epitomizes the extent to which bipolar has become synonymous with bad behavior. Increasingly, lay people feel free to sling the term bipolar around as a pejorative, and seem to believe they have, through pop culture osmosis, become experts on this very complex illness. The term bipolar has become contemporary cultural shorthand for anything we interpret as extreme or obnoxious in light of our own personal belief system.

In reality, bipolar is a spectrum of mood disorders, characterized by mood swings between mania and depression.

The symptoms of mania include excessive risk taking, hypersexuality, reckless financial spending, gambling or investments, and incoherently rapid and disjointed speech. Another common bipolar symptom is grandiosity, a grossly inflated sense of one's abilities and entitlements.

The bipolar community has disproportionately high rates of marriage breakdown, financial problems, substance abuse, obesity, and career under-achievement. During depressive phases, bipolar people may become withdrawn, unmotivated, despairing, or even suicidal.

Governor Palin has a very happy and successful marriage, her personal finances have been scrutinized and found above reproach through the VP vetting process, she has maintained a successful career, and does not abuse alcohol or drugs. Instead of grandiosity, Palin drives herself to work, listed the Governor's jet on e-Bay, and dispensed with an executive chef. Like many Alaskans, she does use a tanning bed during the long dark winters to fend off vitamin deficiencies and Seasonally Affective Disorder (SAD), a far cry from clinical depression.

Of course, not all Americans are pro-life feminists like Sarah Palin. Some voters disagree strongly with her on the important issues of the day, and will choose to support her opponents instead. It should be possible to go through this process without further caricaturing sufferers of manic-depressive illness. Invoking the specter of mental health disorders to denigrate individuals with a different political perspective is ignorant, hurtful, and childish.

Governor Palin is a hard working, high functioning politician, with views some do not share. Labeling her bipolar in order to express ideological disapproval is taking a medical term already overloaded with cultural baggage, and using it to further marginalize millions of fellow citizens who bravely struggle against this misunderstood disease every day, and who are already subject to a heavy burden of stigma and ignorance.

About the Author

To learn more, see
Bipolar Symptoms
. Sarah Freeman is an attorney with manic-depressive illness, and webmaster of
Bipolar Lives
- one of the Internet's leading sites on bipolar disorder.

Generalized Choquet-like aggregation functions for handling bipolar scales [An article from: European Journal of Operational Research] List Price: $7.95 Sale Price: $7.95

This digital document is a journal article from European Journal of Operational Research, published by Elsevier in 2006. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.Description: We are interested in modeling interaction between criteria in multi-criteria decision making when underlying scales are bipolar. Interacting phenomena involving behavioral bias between attractive and repulsive values are in particular considered here. We show in an example that both the Choquet integral and the cumulative prospect theory (CPT) model fail to represent these interacting phenomena. Axioms that enable the construction of the preferences of the decision maker over each attribute, and the representation of his preferences about aggregation of criteria are introduced and justified. We show there is a unique aggregation operator that fits with these axioms. It is based on the notion of bi-capacity and generalizes both the Choquet integral and the CPT model.