I have witnessed first hand the bootstrap conundrum. There is a prevailing attitude in our country that people who have problems need to learn to pick themselves up by their bootstraps, snap out of it, and “just do it.” A typical bipolar response to this attitude, however, is “how do you pick yourself up by your bootstraps when you don’t even have any boots?”

» Continue reading “Part 4: The Bootstrap Conundrum & Personal Accountability”

In ye olde days, doctors used to call it “compliance.” You were prescribed medication and if you took your meds, you were compliant. If, for whatever reason, you did not take your meds, you were labeled “non-compliant” with all the attendant bad juju that went with it. Non-compliant was fairly well synonymous with “difficult” or “untreatable.”

» Continue reading “Part 3: Treatment, Adherence, Crisis, and Stigma”

“Denial is an unconscious defense mechanism used by those faced with a painful reality. It is an automatic reaction in an attempt to reduce anxiety by denying thoughts, feelings, or facts that are consciously intolerable. It is common for those who are diagnosed with a life-long illness to go through periods of denial.”

» Continue reading “Part 2: Denial”

Someone recently related to me that they had received a diagnosis but weren’t sure they accepted it. I have seen this scenario played out in the bipolar community many times: “But I am not psychotic/manic/suicidal” etc. The “problem” with diagnosis, with any kind of labeling or categorization of a person’s personality or identity or deeply ingrained mental characteristics, is that it is an incomplete way to communicate information.

» Continue reading “Part 1: Diagnosis, Misdiagnosis, and Manifestations”

I have been thinking about mental wellness over the past few days, in response to the idea that a patient might not accept a diagnosis and the role diagnosis plays in mental wellness. I’ve also been thinking about the concept of “reframing” that my therapist has me working on, and the concept of mental illness. I wanted to try to reframe the idea of mental illness to approach it from the perspective of mental wellness instead.

» Continue reading “Four Part Series: Diagnosis, Denial, Treatment, and Personal Accountability”

Two Families Grapple with Sons’ Gender Preferences : NPR.

I have a friend grappling with the fact that her young child identifies as transgender. She will have many decisions to make in the comings days, months, years, not the least of which is how to treat her child right now, this moment. Does she respect the preferences her child is expressing, or does she try to redirect her child to more “appropriate” forms of expression that validate the child’s physical gender?

» Continue reading “Link of the Day: Gender Identity”

“Finagle’s Law of Dynamic Negatives (also known as Finagle’s corollary to Murphy’s Law) is usually rendered:

Anything that can go wrong, will—at the worst possible moment

One variant (known as O’Toole’s Corollary of Finagle’s Law) favored among hackers is a takeoff on the second law of thermodynamics (also known as entropy):

» Continue reading “Finagle’s Law of Dynamic Negatives”

This site evolved from a previous site called Pendulum Parenting which was specifically written as more of a support site for people who were working through issues with mental illness while parenting children. I eventually found the format too narrow and oppressive to keep up with and abandoned it. I maintained an interest in writing, however, and decided that a new domain that more accurately reflected my identity and not one small part of it would better serve me in the long run. I started lunasmom.com so I could write about anything that struck my peculiar fancy, but with my personalized stamp.

» Continue reading “A Spammer Asked Me Why I Started This Site”

The Cost of Face Time » The Glass Hammer.

A good article on the benefits to companies of teleworking. I am a telecommuter and I can attest to both the challenges and the rewards to both myself and my company of working from home.

Earlier I blogged about community; one of the ideas presented was the idea that neighbors should “build a database of house locations, contact info, number and name of family members, number and name of pets, emergency numbers, etc for use during fire, earthquake or other disaster.”

When I opened my front door to see a geyser of flames shooting out from the chimney of the house across the street, I thought two thoughts. 1) Jiminy Crickets, is everyone OUT OF THE HOUSE?? (they were.) 2) We need emergency personnel, where’s the phone, I  need to call 911 (I did and fire trucks were already en route). Once over the initial shock and emergency response, however, my next thoughts were how scarily appropriate my earlier post on community was. Our entire neighborhood turned out to help our unlucky neighbors, one neighbor with a flashlight, everyone concerned as to whether our neighbors got out of the house before it erupted like Vesuvius. We prayed the wind died down, loaned out driveways to get cars off the street so emergency vehicles could get through, and generally gathered in fellowship with a general air of “Do you need anything? Is there anything I can do?”

» Continue reading “Fire Across the Street Highlights Need for Disaster Preparedness”