recycle

Laf, what you are saying is uncontroversial in my mind.

Live

LaFemme...I was in denial about being bipolar, I jsut couldn't see it...all I saw was depression. It took 2 psychiatrists and one counselor to convince me....and a really bad negative mania that put me in the hospital after reducing my medication to only depression treatment. (I dropped the amnxiety med whcih was sedating the mania)
Now that I have read avidly to learn what it is...it is pretty clear to me.
I will say that the 1st pdoc would just ask me if I might be bipolar. No I am not was my answer to that, and I believed it.

We are encouraged to trace our family tree for bipolar and related disorders, alcoholism and substance abuse are to be counted as relevant disorders when we fill in our family tree. They are considered to be related brain disorders and there is more of a clustering of these disorders along hereditary lines.

I think education would strongly help in earlier recignition and treatment, at least in the classic forms of mental illness...I can't really speak for subtance abuse or alcoholism.

For myself....I have two siblings....one is alcoholic and the other I often wonder if she is...she would definitely say: no... but I can state for a fact that whether or not it is an addiction with her, she does have sibstance abuse issues and alcohol abuse both in the past and currently. She would be highly offended if I even suggested as mcuh to her.

I have both substqnce abuse and alcohol abuse in my past...I thoguht I had an addiction problem with the xanax for awhile.... but have found that while I had the dependence upon the chemical such that I had withdrawals and needed to take it to avoid withdrawals..that it was basically the same as my effexor. Certian madications have to be tapered onto and tapered off of and some I just plain need to take.

scuse the typos...just got my nails done..too long, just the way I like them LOL

Zencat

I don't think your doomed either. Bottoms, I hit them more than a few times, yet I managed to crawl about on them for long times. So for me bottoms don't mean much. There is other recovery jargon that is nonsense to me as well...so I don't put much into it.

As for new people in recovery and how dose recovery jargon help or hinder...I don't know. For me when I first entered recovery some 12 or 13 years ago I started off with CBT type stuff at the Ventura County Drug and Alcohol Program. I attend groups, one on one counseling and had some good discussions with an addictions specialist. So, we as a group discussed recover language in depth. I don't know where I'm going with this...LOL. Anywho I guess at the time everything sounded good to me. Haha aww crap my mind don't work so well .

Live

I might have used terminology wrong say that the addictions are a brain disorder....I know that I was reading about molecular biology and they were discussing the genetic, heritable and possible treatment of all the conditions I have discussed.

Also....my bipolar is a lifelong illness which is treatable to a certain extent, there is no cure and I will need to treat it medically for the rest of my life....I can have recurrences at any time, even with treatment...so I will always have to be vigilant about it.
It seems that is in some aspects a parallel of what I have heard/read about alcoholism here.

My subjective experience of having bipolar illness lends me no special insight into the mechanics, causes etc of this illness.
I would have liked to believe I could overcome it with strictly personal resources but because it does skew my perceptions, that does not make me the best candidate to treat myself...I need professional assistance.

Supercrew

Sorry for answering the title of the first thread, so it had to be changed. First of all let me state that "alcoholism" as it is refered to here or anywhere I guess seems to come in many different shapes and forms. There are different types of drinkers who abuse alcohol in many different ways. So I think even if there is some form of the affliction that could be considered a disease there is such a wide variety of people with alcohol issues that it is not a one size fits all. So by labeling all of our different drinking problems as one universal disease seems problematic to me. Now I guess the easiest way to lump them all together would be due to the fact that the cure is the same for all of the problems......quit drinking. But quitting drinking is the biggest problem most alcoholics and problem drinkers have, and that could be where it is some kind of mental disease/obsession.

So I guess my first issue would be that alcoholism is much too broad a spectrum as to label it as one disease/ailment/issue.

Dee74

I removed one post from this thread which discussed AA...then reading more closely I realised the original post and several others, make reference to HPs.

It's not my place to make the judgement on whether this whole thread breaks the forum guidelines or not...so in the interest of fairness I'm closing it until such time as Alera can look at it.

thanks everyone for your understanding.
D

shockozulu

I'm keeping this thread locked as it discusses twelve-step programs. It may not use the term, but it is very transparent what is being discussed.

Why don't we discuss our own recovery instead?