Sometimes my empathy has been remarkably deficient and I think this, in part, related to the condition of being bipolar. There's a surpisingly strong genetic overlap between, not only, bipolar and schizophrenia, but also between bipolar and autism. I'm not saying that bipolar people are autistic... that's a different thing.

But the process of understanding the depths of my illness has made me more empathetic of other people's suffering. It's human nature to relate to an experience more if one has been through something similar. That already creates a kind of shared experience which binds us into relationships.