Ya know, I was sitting here thinking of why it's been so hard for me to grasp that bipolar is a real illness, and I think I have come up with a reason. I told my mother one time that I have been diagnosed as having bipolar, and she kinda brushed the thought off. Basically she just said " it's just a good name that alot of people are being tagged with nowadays, and if you want to be "crazy" then you just have to be named bipolar". See, I am having my head pumped with all this junk that she says, and what's awful is that the rest of my family agrees with her point of view. The people around me feed the idea that the diagnosis isn’t real, and it makes it so much harder for me to cope with it under these circumstances. I'll get so frustrated and just offer to stop taking my medicine since "this isn't a real illness". That's when my family starts to encourage me to take it, because they say that I am too hard to handle without it. They confuse me so badly. I'm just now coming to the conclusion that this is a real illness and that I am not just crazy like they think. I just wish they wouldn't make it so hard to swallow.