Thank you all so much for such thoughtful responses. I'm ecstatically overwhelmed to find myself in "conversation" with peers. Not something that springs naturally out of my life these days, as it usually implies going "out" in some sense. Winters are the worst, and this one is a doozy so far. But as bad it feels, I'm still ok with not hurting myself.

My brother has a harder time with that part. He and I have many similar aspects of illness. His primary dx is borderline personality, major depression with bipolar features, and psychotic features. My primary dx is bipolar with some of the other features. "Features," you want fries with that? My brother's medicated state is a pretty dismal looking existence. He's only a thin facsimile of his former self, but he no longer stabs himself, or feels suicidal. He stays on his meds, aware of the trade off, but counting it fair trade for being alive. Fair enough.

In my own med experience, I never achieved a level of improvement in symptoms that would have allowed me to return to work, or resume almost any of my pre-break down life style. Not only did I not get the benefit of improvement but instead, become host to a variety of side effects which generated RX's which generated side effects which generated rx's, you see where i'm going with this? At one point when the sexual dysfunction, never mentioned to me as a side effect, was in full bloom, my shrink rx'd a pill to counteract the anti depressent long enough to have sex. Maybe it's just me, but that struck me as, well i can't find the right word for it, but it didn't feel "sound" at the core.

The med program quickly escalated into this gigantic regimen I could barely manage, with out any effect that I could say was helping me. So if with meds and without meds, I'm a fluctuating, up and down, nut case hearing voices, afraid to go outside, but who doesn't kill himself, what is the difference to anyone but me?

Lest I give the impression that I'm just thumbing my nose at even the idea of meds, I could also explain that I would be interested in talking extensively over time with a shrink to really dissect this pantheon of symptoms and see which meds are really appropriate. I was dx'd on my very first visit to a psych, and what did he have to go by but what was freshest in my mind on that day? But then of course, that's it, the dx, it stays, it's never challenged or reexamined. Or at least, mine hasn't been. The mental health systems are all so overloaded in relation to public assistance as to be unavailable.

A writer named Phillip Dawdy has been publishing a series of articles on mental health in the Seattle Weekly news paper. In a letter to the editor in response to one of the articles someone articulated the observation that it was due to Dawdy's "insight" ability that has enabled him overcome his own psychotic illness to the point of being a successful writer. I don't know where I got it, but I have insight into my illness. I didn't always. Before my breakdown, I never examined how I felt about the world and myself in relation to it. Or I never challenged it for reality checking. How I felt just was because of how things were. The epiphany of understanding that the only change in the world was my own brain chemistry has had a profound effect on my whole understanding of life. It's down right humiliating to recollect the naivete with which I so utterly presumed my perception of self to world to be true.

I tend toward tangents and could quite go off on just that single experience. Another time.

I'm running out of gas for now, but would like to be sure I have thanked each of you for your responses. This is a whole new level of contact for me and I feel good about it. Thanks.