Anger at the Bookstore

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.

There seems to be a lot of books about dealing with mental illness as the sufferer as well; I'm not sure if this store is just badly stocked and run (weird having those in fiction ) or if they had the books you really wanted in another section, I hope you keep looking though and find ones that will help

This thread may help as far as finding some book titles

http://forums.psychcentral.com/bipol...h-reading.html

Oh no! I meant to say I found them in the non fiction area.

I don't think the ones I was looking for were in another section, as I spent another hour after this looking through all the psychiatry/mental health/coping/etc. books for something like what I wanted. But it was a huge, huge store (two floors, about 3/4 of a football field) and I could've definitely missed them.

For years I lurked and occasionally commented on a bipolar support forum on another site. But in the last 6 months or so it has been taken over by the spouses of people with bipolar all asking for advice in "dealing" with their mentally ill partners. You get to hear all about how bad they think we are as people and mean and unreliable and it gets you down. Most of the posts are like this now. I'm not mean and lots of us aren't but the partners who are getting along aren't writing in. So now it's a whole lot of usually well meaning people looking to tell their stories and get help with their broken loved ones and it's no longer very interesting to visit the site. The folks with bipolar seem to have mostly left after leaving a comment on how they can't keep coming to the site for help and just have non-sick people ragging on us.
So I know what you mean.

Hell, if we all wrote a book they'd be best-sellers, lots of people love to read about psychos. That's what will put books on the shelf. Everyone, if you can string some words together, write your life story. I'd buy it.

For some of us, I guess blogging works. Personally, I think the more well known writers troll blogs and use the info to get ideas for articles. So write your own story anyway you can. It's therapeutic, even if no one else reads it.

I have found the same type situations in used book stores.. The way I figured the big difference in books for actually Bipolar people and books for those needing help to understand and live with someone is this...

We Bipolar people buy a book about our illness and keep it.
People who buy books to learn how to help someone with Bipolar are often read then
gotten rid of ..