Read Carrie Fisher's 'Wishful Drinking', a funny and touching memoir about growing up in Hollywood and her struggles with addiction and bipolar. The point being that this is an illness that afflicts and has afflicted people from all levels of society, such as Winston Churchill and Ernest Hemingway to all of us on this forum. You see my signature; treatment resistant ultradian cycling. Aside from lousy Klonopin, there isn't one drug that can keep me even mildly balanced. Every day, from morning until I go to sleep(and that's not even restful)is a struggle!!! All of us, to one degree or another, are struggling. Do I think about death? Most certainly. And I kick it in the rear end when it shows up. I'm not going to dwell on it because if I do, it will become a self fulfilling prophecy. BS to that! To survive with bipolar illness means we're tough, even if we don't feel tough. How else can we endure all the misery we have to go through every day?