Just to be clear, I’m not the biggest fan of drug companies. I’ve written about how much I dislike them and I’ve written about how wrong it is when they break the law and I’ve written about how ridiculous the penalties are when they do. I understand why people are outraged at companies that produce a healthcare product and then don’t follow the rules designed to protect of the health of the consumers that take it. But that aside, people seem to be really mad that pharmaceutical companies put profits before people. And my point is, so what?

Erica was going through a huge life transition. After her break-up and the move of her best friend across the country, she was having a hard time. She described her self-esteem as “non-existent” and found it difficult to enjoy her life; even the things she used to find pleasurable and fun. Erica was spending most of her time at work, rather than in her empty house filled with memories of the past. She was becoming more aware that she needed to do something to get her out of this funk.

As many of you know, I am a devotee of quotations – those bite-sized nuggets of wisdom summarizing great truths of life quickly and with wit. Some years back, in a cold, dingy room choked to the gills with cigarette smoke, bad coffee, tattoos, and incomprehensible blather uttered badly by battered bikers, businessmen, beauticians and stay at home moms, united in anonymous terror, I first heard this said. "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." Later I found that this pearl of wisdom is credited to everybody’s favorite patent clerk, Albert Einstein. However… The more time I spent on the Internet the more I realized that roughly half of all quotes found there are bogus. Some are real but credited to the wrong author; others are totally made up and attributed to a famous, credible person.

Panic attacks suck the reality out of us! I talked two people down from panic attacks recently and both of them had been worrying that they had lost touch with reality. They felt totally disconnected to the world around them. In talking to them, they were so convincing. I almost believed that this episode was different. But I let go of my own fear for them. (My worry doesn't help anyone.) I quickly assessed that they were not, in fact, psychotic. They were speaking rationally and eloquently. And I remember from my panicky days how I felt different and disconnected.

I am crazy. I am a fraud. I wanted to understand dissociative identity disorder (DID) because I wanted to understand myself. I didn't like it, though, all this multiple personalities crap that made me feel out of control. So I changed it. I made DID okay. Hard, but okay.

What do you think of when you hear the word “addict?”  Do you visualize someone with a crack pipe, syringe, or bottle of pills?  Or what about the perp standing in the courthouse being convicted of felony DWI?

It is a sad reality that life is full of things we don’t want to do and mentally-different or no, this is something with which we have to deal. And it’s even sadder to know that people with bipolar disorder and other mental illnesses have a much longer list of things they don’t want to do than the average person. And, of course, ironically, the mentally ill are typically the least-equipped to deal with such things. But beating bipolar disorder, or any mental illness, means doing what you don’t want to do, pretty much all the time.

It’s been a few weeks since the Succeed with ADHD Telesummit and my mind has finally quieted. All those tips and strategies, plus the energy and excitement of the listeners and speakers, had my brain fired up. I wanted to implement everything at once and make changes in my life right away! All those great ideas buzzing in my head, all the ‘I have to do that’, created such noise that I didn’t know where to start. Often when there is too much, there’s no clear path on what to do and where to go. So I stepped away and focused on other projects. Then last week, I downloaded the recordings and listened to each of the calls again with the goal of choosing one or two strategies that I can do right now (with the plan of listening to the recordings again in a few months for more ideas). Here are some of the key points and “ahas” I plan to add in my life right now:

What a silly title, right? After we reach adult maturity--hopefully before--we understand that the word 'normal' means very little. It is socially constructed and does not do anyone any good. But that does not mean it is not attached to our psyche, our feelings, in one way or another.

Stigma abounds when society is misinformed.  Think back to the initial AIDS epidemic.  The tuberculosis pandemic.  And even the current societal view of addiction as a personal and moral failure. Stigma begins with misinformation, and spreads with a complacent disinterest in the truth.  Therefore, the more people know about mental illness, in theory, the less stigma there should be.