Our society is blind sometimes...

Bipolar is a misunderstood mental disorder that is sometimes looked at in different and bad ways. One of my good friends has this disorder. I find that sometimes it can be hard to put up with it, but that’s because our society doesn’t teach us very much about this disorder and usually we think of them as “psychos”. Is this really a way of treating another human being? I talked to my friend about the issues that she comes across in her life.

One of the main problems, that my friend tells me, is that there is not enough education on the issue and people tend to believe that they are “emo” or just being a teenage girl. Bipolar is really just a disorder in which the person, without their medications, is prone to extreme highs and extreme lows. The mood swings are uncontrollable, unless the medications are taken. My friend and I believe that there should be education and awareness on how to react and take care of a person with bipolar because when people are faced with the problem of a bipolar person they do not know how to react.

Another question that I asked my friend was how do you think society looks at you? She responded with multiple answers saying that the people that knew nothing about bipolar deemed her as “crazy” or that she is faking it whereas even the closest of her friends do not always understand her. She sums it up as that, “the majority of people I know view me negatively most of the time.” So our society isn’t used to the problems of confronting a bipolar individual. Our society has failed to educate the people on this problem and the media does not help either (portrayal of people with mental disorders as crazy lunatics).

Since society has failed my friend, I asked her how she deals with having this mental disorder day to day. She says she does take nine pills (five different kinds) a day to keep her moods in place. She tries to educate the people around her about her problem. Another part of this burden is that there are many lies involved when she gets upset, so that she can mask her true emotions. The only way that she believes calms her down when she did not take the medicine is listening to music which, she says really helps. Maybe if our society knew how she feels they would understand and not call her “crazy”.

In conclusion, I believe that Canada, or the whole world for that matter, needs a better education about people who not only are bipolar but really any other mental disorder because our society is ignoring them and we need to do something about it.