mschu528: Yea, I've tried going without medication every manic episode, only to end up with severe psychotic symptoms and forced by my family to go back to the psychiatrist for another medication. I certainly won't say it can't work, but thus far it hasn't for me. And I'm the one with the R.D. Laing quote as my signature - isn't that a bit ironic?

Yes, and I'm the one who managed to recover from an "extreme state" without meds and apparently, can sometimes be helpful to other people who have undergone similar experiences. I just can't seem to help my own child. More irony.

I certainly do have a lot more to learn about mania. In some ways, I think it's far more destructive than psychosis. In my own case, I went into a room and locked the door behind me. It wasn't deliberate but I ended up creating a container as a result. In my child's case however, they want to go out into the world and interact with it -- it becomes very difficult to contain the experience as a result. When people talk about creating a mania plan (i.e. locking up their credit cards, reducing socialization), this appears to be a means of attempting to contain the experience and thus, limit its potential to be damaging. I would imagine that anyone who is attempting to learn how to manage mania without medication may need to create some strong containers. It might be easier to pass through that state with less damage in an isolated cabin in the woods than, say, a highrise in a city.

Insofar as med use goes, I've always said meds are a tool. Right now, my child is using them and identifies them as helpful but they don't want to be dependant upon them forever either. I also believe people do have a right to know about, explore and try alternatives to medications if they want to try. Perhaps for some, that will produce their cure. For others, it might allow them to reduce their meds and that's not such a bad thing either. There's also the reality that many people face wherein they can't afford the medication. I'm not sure about mood stabilizers although I know some of the antipsychotics can be outrageously expensive. So... people look to alternatives both out of hope and reality.

In the examples I linked above, Steve Morgan has identified Jungian psychology as helpful to him (I find mania itself seems to correspond with a state of shadow possession); Jane made use of Eastern forms of self-exploration; Sean was so disgusted and traumatized by his first hospitalization experience, he walked away and never went back, and; Gianni Kali undiagnosed herself after taking medications for years. A great deal of her blogging efforts have detailed her slow attempts to withdraw from psychotropic medications she felt had become more life-draining than sustaining. It has been a very slow process for her.

All four of them seem to have found stability without medication, maybe even full recovery. I've seen and read similar stories in relation to schizophrenia and the temptation is always to say, "Maybe those people who recover (don't need meds) were never really sick to begin with, maybe they were misdiagnosed." I would imagine there will be a similar temptation in regard to bipolar disorder. However there does seem to be an abundance of evidence that tells us that many people make full recoveries but that doesn't mean doing nothing at all -- they simply find different forms of treatment/therapies that work for them. There is no guarantee the same will work for everyone else.

As for nutritional therapies, it's new to me but it looks like it might be worth exploring. Maybe it will help, maybe it won't. We won't know until we try. I don't know if this is something we'd want to try right away but if we do, I'll let others know how its going.

~ Namaste