Talking openly about bipolar altered state experiences

What this episode covers

I want to talk a little bit more about what I was talking about yesterday which had to do with talking openly about experiences that we've had in our different altered states of consciousness and in my case my altered states of consciousness resulted in a mental health diagnosis of bipolar one with psychotic features and the conversations that I'm talking about are not necessarily about disputing a diagnosis or trying to get rid of it or explain it away but rather to expand the conversation and expand the language and the vocabulary that we use to describe some of our inner subjective experiences relating to the diagnosis or you know the whole process before diagnosis in my case I was in an altered state for two months before I was hospitalized and then given a diagnosis and during those two months I would have never guessed that at the end of it all it was going to be explained in terms of a mental health diagnosis it felt like some sort of spiritual journey and spiritual experience a lot of it was really scary and a lot of it was really blissful but I never thought that I was mentally ill I was told that so if i could imagine that if I could imagine going back to how I felt about the situation on a daily basis as I was experiencing it before I was given a mental health diagnosis I could probably share a lot of different things if I if I could pretend that I was never given the diagnosis and then you know I just got through that crisis without and got back to some sort of normal functioning without being given a diagnosis and without being given medication I know that didn't happen what I'm saying is I would have a very large amount of things to share and talk about and different wonderings and curiosities and and I would be sort of in awe of the experience and I would think it was kind of mysterious and wonderful and magical even though there was a lot of really scary stuff to I'm not trying to glorify these states as something that I would want to exist in all the time I'm just saying that in retrospect if I was to talk about it without having a diagnosis I would share something a lot different than after I was diagnosed and after I was diagnosed I was told how to interpret everything that went on and just explain it away in terms of a mental illness and and basically that gave me the impression and it wasn't an impression was pretty obvious which was don't talk about what happened there's no point in talking about what happened and what you experience because it was just a mental illness and I think that is a mistake I feel that there's a lot of really interesting conversation that can come out of the experiences and that maybe it's conversation that we need to start having and again that doesn't mean that i say i completely disagree with my diagnosis I'm just saying that's a very small amount of the overall story that's part of the story but it's not the entire story and I think that you know it's troublesome to assume that just because I have that diagnosis that that's the end of the story in terms of everything that I experienced you know that would be like saying to someone who has cancer to just say I have cancer and not share any of the story your struggles or or anything about it just say I've cancer so if I'm supposed to just say well I have bipolar disorder and not say anything that I went through and I have shared stuff before but a lot of its in terms of like my recovery journey so it's like well these are the symptoms i had and this is how I've gone about my recovery journey and that um you know that's usually for like a hopeful story for people to get better but you know that's like the diagnosis assumes there's going to be some kind of recovery story and so a recovery story implies a diagnosis and a diagnosis implies they'll be some kind of recovery story well what about all the other stories yes there is a story of recovery but there's also stories from the experiences and what that meant and what it mean

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