Secret Life of the Manic Depressive

Not NEARLY manic enough.

Missed the mark by a parsec...

Sounds like the illness in general goes along with what I've seen my brother do. I guess mono-polar means they are in a constant manic state or vice versa and never come off that. My brother is most prominent when he's manic....because frankly he's just annoying as can be. He can do everything better than you, but he never finishes anything. You can't talk him out of things, blah blah... He got locked up for a bit due to the drug possession and being on house arrest because of his outbursts in court. No one could stand to leave him in the house due to his constant yammering and then he started spending all his money on frivolous crap....canceled his health insurance that he wasn't even paying. My parents had me kill the internet connection to his room, the phone line, and started me on terminating his cell phone so he couldn't fuck up anything else. And before they got the cell phone away from him, he called the police on my parents. He was ordered by the judge to take medication, he eventually refused to comply and when my parents finally admitted he was not taking his meds...they took two days to come get him. During which he didn't believe it, thought my parents were screwing with him. He was shocked to see the police at the door and refused to leave the house for them because he was on house arrest. I mean it's like a comedy skit if you didn't realize that he was so totally twisted in his thinking that everything he did was perfectly correct. And it wasn't but maybe 2-3 days in jail after being removed from the house and held until trial, 5-6 guys kicked his ass. They broke his shoulder badly enough that they had to get a surgical consult and multiple scans to determine if it needed operated on. His arm was essentially useless for almost 2 months...he couldn't lift it much beyond his waist. And they knocked him out, split his head open on the floor..... he's still trying to get his case heard....that he should haven't been put in the public population since they had never had him in there before when he was acting in the same irrational manner.

Even now with treatment, none of what he did above is wrong in his eyes. He was in jail because the police decided to put him in jail without provocation. He had the right to spend all his money because he earned it, never mind he had a lot of bills due to all of this plus a tow and storage bill he still owed for getting caught with drugs in a vehicle that was my parents. He had the right to cancel his insurance, because it wasn't doing anything for him anyway. And keep in mind the insurance is what covered the majority of his therapies to deal with his arm...the jail would not repay anything but the initial visit/consult. He still won't admit that it was stupid as hell to cancel his insurance with everything going on and them wanting him to get medical treatment on his mental disorder by court order. Calling the cops on my parents for cutting off his net access, cell phone and telephone in his room......that was my parents fault because they violated his "civil rights". Never mind the fact that they didn't have to consent to house arrest to get him out of jail or that he was a TOTAL asshole during that whole period and for months prior. It was never his fault......and still to this day isn't his fault. Even for a lot of the dumb shit he does now, but at least you can convince him to stop doing it.

It's literally like trying to deal with a child or delusional elderly person, but he has all the rights of an adult and the physical strength to really hurt someone if it came to that. The police won't/can't act unless you have guardianship over a person in this circumstance or they pose an immediate threat to others or themselves. I saw the cops trying to help, they would try to insult him and push him toward action instead of words. To the outside observer it would seem like they were picking the fight because they are bullies, but the choice was "get him help" or "remove him from the house with no where to go in a really fucked up mental state". It was clear he would be dead within a month if he was left to his own devices, and the jail beating was just an example of that. People wouldn't tolerate his bullshit, and he couldn't comprehend any of it.

>> ^Sagemind:

Also to note: There is no cure for this this.
You don't wake up one day and think clearly - this is something that will follow him around for the rest of his life.
Yes, there are prescriptions that can be taken to help balance out the brain chemistry. And only if you can get him to take them. Even once he is accepting treatment, it can go sideways at any time. And when it does, it's an awful chore to get back to square one. He may never "Look Back" on this and see what we see.
Sad but true....

Having lived with people who have bi-polar in the past, it's clearly obvious what is going on here. Charlie Sheen is having a full blown manic episode. I am really shocked that no one out there is advising him right on this. Anyone who has seen this before knows what exactly it is. He is living in a world made of delusion and everything he is thinking and saying is related to whatever fantasy world his brain has contrived and stuck him in. This is why he is thinking he is superhuman and beyond everyone else. The world he is seeing and perceiving has very little to do with our reality as we know it. Someone better get him on some meds, because this just keeps getting worse and worse until treated. He is going to crash HARD when he comes down off his high (high as in bi-polar high). When you have this, you go up, into the stratosphere..and what goes up must come down..when he falls back down to Earth it is going to be ugly.

Is he just surrounded by syncophants or what? If he dies from this the people around him will be the ones to blame. Charlie sheen is not with us mentally and needs someone to intervene ASAP.

>> ^spaceman:

Why I don't care:
1) You once believed in a god.
2) You are a guy.


@spaceman | The reason why the rest of us watch and listen to "just some guy; who believed in God":

The only reason you can type your sentence is from/due-to "other" men. Religion in all forms is from "other" men (unless you claim to hear voices or a physical divinity; but, please, not as an affront to you, make sure you're not psychotic or schizophrenic before telling us your interesting story as that is the case almost always; same with drug use; same with some other illnesses: narcolepsy, sleep walking, night terrors/sleep paralysis, and many other sleep related issues and all nervous system illnesses). Only a few things below talk more about what you said.
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A little more to add to the conversation. Hopefully, this gets it all out as it will be fairly long, but the video is hard to reply to in a short manner. I hope this covers a large extent of what I wish to say about this very well done video witness/testimony.


One set of values you can research and witness to it's validity on your own, as he has done. Science also allows for this methodology, using the well known precept of "The Scientific Method".

A quick example is that many people of faith, even Evid3nc3, talks of feeling "x" with their "hearts" and knowing "x" with their "soul". In science there is nothing more than a simple, yet complicated, physical processes. It's all a creation and manifestation in your brain; if you think you "feel" something with your heart you're causing minor self-hysteria to the extent of creating a minor hallucination.

The "soul" is called the(primarily in psychology, neuroscience, and neurology; there are many other terms that try to mean "you"; typically, in grossly inaccurate ways, such as: ghosts, "psychic" remote viewing, many religions use of the magical-energy-divine soul, etc...) psyche which is typically (starting from the outer-functions and moving into core-functions) sensory systems, language center, feelings, memory, and then the key-piece the neo-cortex. So it must be understood that your brain does a lot of things still baffling (mostly the mechanics or mechanisms of function and chemistry), but the overall picture is fairly clear.

But, the brain is not a floating energy source, nor is it an absolute definition at any given point or time. Depending on how and where you look at the brain the very concept of you is different. It more akin to superposition of an electron or a kaleidoscope; the definition of you is not concrete until measured and even then you are already not what was measured.

Even from what little we do know, belief plays a central role in how our neo-cortex makes decisions and operates (even with memory and other functions, which is why we do make many mistakes as it's due to how our brain physically commits to anything it must or will do; it's perhaps the single best reason to show why, "To err is human; to forgive, divine."; you don't understand the human condition if you cannot forgive...). Could this translate into a bigger picture; our connected neurons telling us to accept faith and belief, sometimes, because that is what it does at the small scale?

*Offtopic Look up articles, books, and videos (look at TED for Marvin Minsky, Jeff Hawkins, Craig Venter, Jonathan Haidt and others --some of which are here on the sift-- related topics on there like the Mind, AI, facial-pattern-contextual-semantics-divergent-cat vs. dog software based Recognition, and then other media pertaining to 'Artificial Intelligence') or if you want to know strictly about how the brain works and makes it's decisions, look for a type of setup called a "hierarchical structure"; also known as a pyramid or pyramid scheme. One cell makes a decision based off of the accumulations of "guesses" the other millions of cells connected to it made; these cells are fundamentally the foundation for that setup, but the neurons are more flexible than that as each can be a parent and also part of the "foundation" structure, making the brain a fantastic structure. With time this becomes accurate (this occurs in less than a few milliseconds), although our vision, for an example, is horrifically distorted and wrong, if you could look at one "frame" based on a few cells. Only a small fraction of the frame would be correct; literally it would be as though your senses got one pixel correct in a 1080p image. Yet, repeat this millions of times with different data sets each round (and this is done as said above, fast) you get an accurate picture; or at the least 20/20-to about one-arc minute (the resolution for the human eye, on average).

One set you can't test, we call that belief or faith. "What is the reasoning for taking the leap of faith?", this is what you have to defend at this point. If faith is your only defense, I will (like many others will) assume you haven't looked into your own faith enough yet or you even refuse to look out of fear of being wrong. If you do not understand the topic you must be willing to ask for help as he did or you'll be a slave to your willful decision of ignorance, to the extent that you feel compelled to defend them, but you never convince anyone except yourself--and for yourself it is only because of the rote-righteous indignation.

If it's true it should withstand all scrutiny. Unless truth isn't your ultimate goal. Then, for us and many others there is no reason to follow your faith. Usually, this type of merit and defense are directly related to age due to learning this all when you're a child and devoid of an intense ability to decipher, attribute values, connect, and draw in a belief (if with some facts and proof you could call it a hypothesis).

It's all from men... I'm wagering you're dismissing this flippantly due to religion; if not what exactly is your point, as I truly would like to know why and where this claim of non-relativistic knowledge comes from, without a woman or man?

Also, if it has to do with his belief in being mistaken for believing in God that's a moot point as we have all erred in life. I know of no person that has reliably been able to "claim divinity", other than Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, etc... But, we also know now that mental illness and other factors can account for any manic or psychotic leanings. We also know magicians (or magister, proper) have been around A LONG TIME.

Plus, as Arthur C. Clarke put it, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.". Which then one must ask another question, "Can divinity itself ever be established as being magic only?". This is then rounded up by a statement from Larry Niven (sometimes called Niven's Law(s)), "Any sufficiently rigorously defined magic is indistinguishable from technology.". These collide and distinctly form a conclusion about divinity and any of it's powers (descriptive magic or divinity and it's "how to use it" manual are indefensibly getting closer in each step to being more akin to physics; plus the Christian God hates magic, which begs the question, "Why do you need a God, if we can exact the same effects?"):

Divinity can only hope to use advanced knowledge and technology in a collusion to bring about one standpoint alone: "divinity" if described by God in any kind of ruleset (some of it is in the bible, already) stands on a rigorously tested and time shown: shaky ground.

Men would be gods whether God existed or not.

(P.S.: only the beginning and some bits here and there are for you, @spaceman. The rest is for our vestibule.)

Again I must add that this is a great find @dystopianfuturetoday.
You're doing yourself a great disservice not watching it (or all of it as the case may be).

Congratulations! Your video, Stephen Fry on Manic Depression, has reached the #1 spot in the current Top 15 New Videos listing. This is a very difficult thing to accomplish but you managed to pull it off. For your contribution you have been awarded 2 Power Points.

This achievement has earned you your "Golden One" Level 1 Badge!

Stephen Fry — The Secret Life Of The Manic Depressive

>> ^colt45:

After having wallowed around in depression for a bit, if there is a hell, that is certainly a reasonable means of implementing it.


No, I found hell and it was being on hallucinogens during a depressive state whilst watching Pink Floyd's The Wall. I literally tore my house apart looking for any type of religious artifact so that I could beg the universe to save my tortured existence from existence itself. Can you imagine being in pure physical and existential misery, listening to your ceiling tell you that when you die it will be far, far worse. Now THAT is fucked up. On the other side of the coin, coming down from that trip into a manic state was the single greatest feeling I've ever experienced.

Your video, Stephen Fry on Manic Depression, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

^I ain't the forgivin' type.

As I write this it looks like Repubs will take control of the House and the Dems will retain control of the Senate. So you won't be able to have your wish fulfilled in its entirety, @blankfist, because now we'll only be able to loathe one legislative chamber. We'll all probably become manic-depressive because of it, so make sure to take your lithium.

But let's try to be positive. Let it comfort you to know that in 2012 we'll have another crop of losers to vote for. Feel better?

legally insane meaning what the law considers insane, not what the dsm-iv will diagnose as a mental disability. >> ^peggedbea:

legally insane and a manic episode are not the same thing.
>> ^ForgedReality:
Furthermore, the fact that he drops his weapon right away proves that his cognitive abilities are just fine. He's thinking about worse consequences should he use an actual weapon. He at least reasoned that part out. He knows what he's doing. It's not blind madness. He's just a dick.

legally insane and a manic episode are not the same thing.

>> ^ForgedReality:

Furthermore, the fact that he drops his weapon right away proves that his cognitive abilities are just fine. He's thinking about worse consequences should he use an actual weapon. He at least reasoned that part out. He knows what he's doing. It's not blind madness. He's just a dick.

It's not the milk drinking that's crazy.

It's the manic personality that's crazy.

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

Is it any less crazy than drinking the milk from the teet of a cow?

^Say you're manic-depressive, bipolar, or what have you. You have good days and bad days. The bad days are bad. You want to die, to kill yourself. On the good days, life's all rainbows and lemon drops and you can't imagine why you would feel that way.

Is it the ultimate crime if someone forcibly keeps bad-day you from offing yourself? What if they make you get treatment to help balance you out?

Yep. Hear you 100%. Not only does it take guts to turn someone in, but I would even say that someone has to have cahones to admit to THEMSELVES that someone has wronged them. A great deal of my own therapy has involved attempting to actually believe (truly believe, in my core) that a certain person wronged me (consistently) when I was a child. Hence the (initial) privacy of any context of abuse, which I think is really lost in cases like this one.

But anyway, I do not think I am trying to say that "she only made the tape to expose him publicly for a hollywood public spectacle factor and that stems from, or is evidence of some kind of fame whoreness." Just the last part... I would take issue with that. I don't think she is a whore... or is even acting like a whore. What I am trying to say is that, by deferring to the whorish media as an intermediary, that she might not only be taking the gravity out of Gibson's actions, but is using similar mechanisms of public humiliation and shame to which bullies like Gibson might themselves be quick to defer. YES, such violence needs to be brought into the open, and YES Gibson should be shown as the monster he is, but (again) to expose him in such a way would seem to risk exposing Gibson the character rather than Gibson the genuinely troubled and potentially dangerous man.

>> ^peggedbea:

so, it seems you think she only made the tape to expose him publicly for a hollywood public spectacle factor and that stems from, or is evidence of some kind of fame whoreness? i can see the logic there, and perhaps it is the case.
however, as i said before, the relationship messes with your head. a lot. i never once turned my husband into the cops. not when he hit me. not when he held a knife to my throat. not when i knew he was driving around drunk with a bag of methamphetamine and i knew all i really needed to do was call the cops and he'd get locked up for a while and i could leave peacefully. not when he stole my credit cards and ran up 8k worth of debt. not when he was in a dysphoric manic fit and screaming similar things with a gun to his head. never. i think i thought it would have been some sort of betrayal to the man i married, who i was under the impression was a sweet, shy, sensitive, creative boy who loved me and my daughter but struggled with demons from a life filled with abuse and addiction (which i was hard wired from early childhood to understand and empathize with, because i was raised by the mentally ill and by drug addicts, its just how the world looked from perspective). and maybe i knew how impotent law enforcement was to help, he did after all, belong in a hospital as opposed to a jail cell. because i was close to him and i knew all this torment was mental illness, demons from his past, and the drugs he uses to self medicate because he lives every single day in unimaginable mental anguish and stress and it all comes from bad chemicals. and he could be good. 60% of the time he was at least passably decent.
i did however, tape a few of his fits. i thought i could let him listen to it later when he was calm and more rational and he would see how badly he needed help. i thought it would convince him to take his meds. i bring this up because i now know several other people who have done the same thing. you dont want them locked up, you dont want to press charges on family, because they need psychiatric help. you just want them to see how crazy they are and put down the dick pipe and take their meds. i think this is probably the more likely scenario especially since there seems to be some doubt as to whether or not she was even the one to release them. i'm not sure anyone is equipped to handle these situations well, particularly not the type of person who would be attracted to them in the first place. that's why it's called a "cycle" of abuse. i learned in a class a few years ago that only 30% of adults who were abused as children abuse their own children. i thought that was sort of hopeful and interesting. i would like to know though what percentage of adults who were abused as children end up in abusive relationships. i would bet its also somewhere around the 30% mark.
>> ^griefer_queafer:
I think you're right to react the way you have. But I honestly think that part of my frustration with this video might have been lost in what I do recognize now as a real insensitivity on my part. It is definitely easy to say that you've missed the point, because you haven't, and you have brought my attention to a whole other level of insult allowed by my comments. Plus, you are right to say that it is easy to blame the victim, because it is SOOO easy, and I have done it.
HOWEVER. While I have def. made some serious assumptions about this 'tape', I think you have also. I also feel that you have tacked on a good deal of information onto the position of both Gibson and Grigorieva. First, you don't seem willing to admit that her taping this conversation indicates a very real violation. I'm sure it sounds really 'academic' of me, but I do believe that her recording and releasing it elevates Mel's chauvinism to the level of spectacle even more so than before. You might argue that it NEEDS TO BE HEARD; that this monstrosity needs to be brought into the light. But at the end of the day, isn't there something a bit less dignified... a bit less spectacularly absurd about a court hearing and a restraining order as opposed to an audiotape? Doesn't something like this run the risk of turning his behavior into a 'product' or 'caricature' than say... a nice day in court? Wouldn't something like this run the risk even more so of having his actions digestible as some kind of ironic or absurdly funny gesture, by some asinine, pigheaded, 'middle-class', 'academic', pseudo-intellectual white boy on the internet?
So, while your outrage is rock-solid, it would seem counter-productive for me to insist I was wrong, because I believe that I am fundamentally right. I HAVE blamed a victim... but for now, its an invisible victim (unfortunately), made all the less clear by her acting that role out through the very avenues of power and control utilized by foul-mouthed, violent, and dangerous people like Gibson himself. So for now, Gibson unfortunately remains fascinating. And that is an unfortunate reality I truly believe you need to come to terms with in this context. Until he pays a very real price for his behavior, he will remain that fascinating image of horrific thoughtlessness, and will CONTINUE to represent everything that is wrong with Hollywood (for as much as it gives us). Sadly, with these kinds of videos, he continues to just play ANOTHER ROLE, thanks to the very people who would listen to his voice with very real horror, and feel justified in their disgust while at the same time refusing to see the only REAL evidence of violence ACTUALLY available to them, which in this case is really only its fucking screenplay.
I stick to my upvote, as well as my comment, all the more because of your upsetting and honest response.

>> ^peggedbea:
have you lost your mind?
a logical extension of your rant could be "i have no sympathy for this bitch who claims she was date raped, it just shows what little respect she has for herself for going somewhere with a date rapist and then being whiney enough to go to the cops about it, fuck her"
like it or not there are thousands of women stuck abusive relationships they cant get out of. i can see where the "its your own damn fault for getting into it in the first place" argument would seep into the mind of some assholes who lack perspective and experience. but speaking as someone who has been there and is speaking to you from the other side of it, there is an overwhelming amount of manipulation that goes on in the beginnings of a relationship with an abuser and in the process a very real shift in logical and your ability to think clearly happens. being a child of abuse makes you very susceptible to these kinds of relationships as your brain was wired very young to feel comfortable and tie feelings of abuse to feelings of love. after a prolonged period of time behaviors that are wildly inappropriate just become normal. on top of that you live your day to day life in survival mode, and being in perpetual survival mode robs you of your ability to THINK. and certainly of the confidence to leave. adding a baby on top of it and your brain becomes completely fried and totally warped.
admitting you let someone take this much power, and degrade you senselessly takes an incredible amount of courage. it takes an insane amount of courage and fortitude and balls to go back into the world and KEEP TRYING. how dare you chide her for this.
this shit needs to be exposed. and the stories need to be told. the more people who hear the stories of these women the less ignorant twat assholes will open their dickless middle class white boy academic internet mouths and blame the victim.
fuck you.
>> ^griefer_queafer:
Also, I have no sympathy for this woman. By releasing this tape, she is not just showing what kind of a person Gibson is--she is also showing that she has very little respect for herself by dating a person who would say these things to her. Also, I am not even sure how much this kind of thing reveals about the guy. Again, sounds like he is on drugs, or is manic, or both. Plus, from the sound of the audio, I wouldn't be surprised if she re-recorded he responses to Mel, which sound really rehearsed anyway. So... Mel is an ass, but fuck her too.