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Teaching Others

By Michele Soloway

According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), mental disorders are common in the United States. They claim that an estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older—about 1 in 4 adults—suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year. This figure translates to 57.7 million people.

With a figure as high as 57.7 million people, shouldn’t the public be better educated about mental illness? Yet, unfortunately, they are not; at least not as much as they should be. Organizations such as NIMH are helping, but it still, more often than not, falls to the 1 in 4 of us who have a mental disorder to teach others (beginning with ourselves), thereby dispelling the ignorance, fear, misunderstandings, and myths surrounding mental illness as a whole.

Most of you have probably heard the expression, "You are the only Bible someone may ever read." Applied in this case, you may be the only person with a mental illness that will ever cross a person’s path—the only opportunity that person has to become educated about mental illness in general, and/or about your illness or disorder in specific. I would ask you first, how well-educated are you about your illness? Enough to be able to answer the general questions someone might ask you about it?

When first diagnosed, I actively sought out any and all information available to me on my disorders. Although there were some books in the library, when I searched the Internet, I was amazed at the sheer amounts of information available to me! I read for weeks, soaking up the information like a sponge. It’s not that I’m an expert now, but I learned things I hadn’t known about myself and my disorders and got the most up-to-date information available. I was also able to research medications, so I was less afraid to take them—I knew what each one was and what it was supposed to do, as well as what side effects I could expect.

Each of us cannot teach the world; but we can teach our small part of it. The more that people around us, especially those we love, learn about our illness, the less we will feel abnormal or different, and it is our responsibility to teach them.

About the Author

Michele Soloway has dealt with bipolar disorder from a very young age. Her grandmother, mother, herself, and her teenage son all have the disorder. She also lost her sister to suicide because of bipolar disorder. Michele has a blog for bipolar survivors at http://bipolarsurvivor.blogspot.com, and is also a contributing writer to www.bipolarcentral.com.

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Featured Article:

Being the Ultimate Perfectionist

                                                           By Michele Soloway Sexton

I am the ultimate perfectionist.  Yes, me.  I even got a fortune cookie one time that said, "You have a yearning for perfection," do you believe that?"  Even Confucius knows it!

But it's a real battle for me.  I expect things from myself that I would never expect from anyone else, and it really messes with my bipolar disorder, because, well, no one's perfect, and no one can live with that kind of stress.

So I was talking to someone about it lately, and they told me, "It's ok to strive for perfection, as long as you don't expect to arrive at perfection."

It's ok to make mistakes.  That's what I've been learning.  If you don't learn that, you'll be bound up in fear (another thing that's bad for our bipolar disorder). 

Click here to read the entire article

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