Yesterday, I went with some friends to a huge used book/music store about an hour away from my house. I'd never been there before, but I knew to expect a lot of selections and whatnot. I spent about an hour browsing through fiction when I noticed a section called something like Coping with Mental Health and Psychiatry in the nonfiction area. I've been interested lately in some material about my disorders- BPII, BPD, etc., so I figured I could find some good reads. After about 2 minutes of looking through the shelves, I realized that most of the books were for healthy people who know someone with mental illness. The titles and taglines were things like, "How to Love Someone With Bipolar Disorder" or "Living With Your Adult Child's Diagnosis of Mental Illness: How to Handle Any Meltdown and Still Love Your Child" or "Loving Them, Despite Their Diagnosis" or things like that (these titles aren't verbatim, I don't remember the exact wording). But they made me really, really upset. The fact that books exist to help those who care for or are involved in the lives of people with MI isn't a problem- I'm glad literature exists to help healthy people better understand and interact with their loved ones. But the fact that I only found two books in the whole section (which had probably 200 books in it) that was written for the sufferer about their disorder or condition made me feel ill. I know that loved ones can have a hard time understanding the symptoms of my disorders, but in my opinion, the person with the mental illness is always the one having a harder time. Yes, it probably makes my mom sad to see me have a psychotic episode and that must be hard, but it is exponentially worse for me because, lets face it, dealing with mental illness and symptoms SUCKS, and I'm well aware of how miserable it feels to have an episode while I'm inside of it. The whole book situation just makes me feel like people who "deal" with us are seem as victims of suffering and hardship more than the individual who is suffering from MI. I don't want it to sound like I'm trying to throw a pity party for myself or say that our loved ones don't have a hard time sometimes. I just want to be able to go to a book store and find more information on my own conditions, not a book about how hard it is to love someone with mental illnesses.