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Things aren't improving much and I am finding it hard.

I can't do anything and because I can't do anything I don't know what to do with myself.

Bi-Polar Land is the only place I know where someone can sleep for eighteen hours straight and wake up just as exhausted as before going to bed. It drives people who go trough it crazy and I am no exception. It is driving me round the bend.

The last two days I have been in prison. I am not aware of having committed any crime but I have been incarcerated all the same.

I reach a point in the deep depression phase of my BPD (Bi-Polar Disorder) when my body feels like a block of concrete. I can hardly move. I walk about as if I were wearing an all-body straight jacket with heavy plaster casts on my legs. I feel like I weigh a ton. Each movement demands enormous effort. I am two inches away from becoming a statue.

Inmy book Conversations with Batty - How Talking to myself Kept Me Sane, I wrote a chapter on willpower and it's place in recovery.

Just so that you understand the 'conversation' that follows, here is how it came to be:

After a day of Amazing Grace, today was a day of Slipped Back down the Hole.  Fortunately the hole wasn't a Black Hole so, although my energy was low, I didn't feel like my very marrow was being sucked out by some hungry dog.  You have to be grateful for small mercies ....

It doesn't matter how many times I experience this process it amazes me, stuns me, baffles me, astonishes me and puzzles me. if I weren't limited by my vocabulary I could go on and on.

When I feel as awful as I do at the moment, there is one thing I tolerate with great difficulty: my inability to have a shower. I hate this! My whole body feels like it is in revolt and it does get revolting after a couple of days...

Having a shower is one of the simple pleasures I usually enjoy (to the point where I often have two showers a day) but at the moment wild horses would not drag me to wash myself:

As midnight has now passed, it is officially my birthday. Happy Birthday to me.

I haven't written for a LONG time. Even though I gave up playing The Shame Card many years ago, I am still deeply embarrassed by my long silence. I feel I need to tell you the truth so this is what happened:

At the beginning of last year, I was on an equal daily dose of Tegretol (Carbamazepine) and Seroquel (Quetiapine.)

Whenever the subject of mental health medication comes up, either on the Internet of in face-to-face discussions, it seems to me there are basically two camps: those for and those against. I don't think that's good enough.

Those against medication fall into three groups: