Thanks. I really wanted to respond to your comments since yesterday, but didn't find time.

RE: Fixing it. I know I am ultimately responsible, the buck stops here so to speak. But, I feel like having competent professional help makes all of the difference. My job is about 90% fixing the mess people have made for themselves by trying to do it themselves, or by not doing it at all and hoping it just goes away. I believe that in medicine, as in law, it takes someone with a lot of training and experience. And I am extremely committed to doing everything it takes and giving a thousand and ten percent to it. I feel I am completely fixable now that my Dx is no longer bipolar. I felt that bipolar was a death sentence. And that took me to dark places in my mind and disaster scenarios. And the big lie/big cover up.

Which brings me to your second thought. I know it happens everywhere, to every demographic. The response I feel is different, based pretty much on financial ability in the uniquely dysfunctional American health care system. I just don't "hear about it" in the circles I move in. Or, people with MH issues are mocked, ridiculed, or spoken of in the context of the 1 in a million worst case scenarios of the mass shooters. Then people say things like " lock up all of the crazies" without making any distinctions or acknowledging that "danger to others" is ecceedingky rare. One more reason for my big cover up. But I know that, in my very catastrophizing frame of mind last year (a term from the day program) my mind took that to "I'm going to be cast out, banished, because they (family, community) don't want someone like me around, they would fear me as dangerous and I would make them look bad." And that was not only irrational, it was self-stigmatizing and implied the same about MI as I said others felt. But I was convinced I would die homeless in a Detroit ghetto.

I love my life, I know that, despite everything, my upbringing, last year, I have it really good. When I thought I was losing everything, it made me realize how exceedingly lucky I am. Blessed, really. And I WILL fight for it to the death.