The Upside of Bipolar: Conversations on the Road to Wellness
Living with bipolar disorder sucks! Each week Michelle Reittinger and her guests explore tools and resources that help you learn how to live well with your bipolar. If you are tired of suffering and want to live a healthy, balanced, productive life with your bipolar, this podcast was designed with you in mind.
The Upside of Bipolar: Conversations on the Road to Wellness
EP 73: From Labels to Healing: How Diagnosis Can Block Recovery
I challenge the idea that a bipolar diagnosis explains your life and show how labels can block curiosity, fuel victimhood, and fuse to identity. I explore the layered tools that helped me heal: micronutrients, trauma work, mindfulness, and a Mood Cycle Survival Guide.
• diagnosis as observation, not explanation
• relief and fear at first diagnosis
• victimhood mindset and its costs
• when labels become identity
• accountability after harm and repair work
• layered healing: micronutrients, therapy, mindfulness
• the fire alarm versus the fire
• incentives in pharma and training
• switch language from disorder to symptoms
• becoming a detective of symptom sources
• practical tools: sleep, tracking, cues, supplements
• resources: prior episodes, book, Upsiders Tribe
Join the Upsiders' Tribe. If you want to talk to me about it, here is the →link← that will allow you to set up a free consultation with me. Make sure that you reach out. For more resources, visit www.theupsideofbipolar.com. If you haven't read my book, click here to grab a copy.
FREE Mood Cycle Survival Guide: https://theupsideofbipolar.com/free/
The Upside of Bipolar: 7 Steps to Heal Your Disorder: @upsideofbipolar | Linktree
website: https://theupsideofbipolar.com/
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So the symptoms are very real. I'm not saying the symptoms don't exist, but bipolar disorder as a diagnosis is misleading because you have not been given an explanation. You have simply been given an observation. All a bipolar diagnosis does is observe the symptoms. Observe the symptom cluster that you're had that you have and put it in a category. That's it. Welcome to the Upside of Bipolar, where we uncover the true sources of bipolar symptoms and share proven tools for recovery. I'm your host, Michelle Reitinger, number one international best-selling author of the Upside of Bipolar Seven Steps to Heal Your Disorder. In this podcast, I bring you solo insights from my journey and guest interviews with leading researchers and experts. Join us to transform chaos into hope and reclaim your life. Let's heal together. Welcome to the upside of bipolar. I am your host, Michelle Reitinger, and I am thrilled to be doing a solo episode today, and it's a really interesting topic. We're talking about the barriers to healing that are created by the bipolar disorder diagnosis itself. And this is a topic that has been coming up more and more for me as I have been sharing the information about my book and the research that led to my healing and recovery. And I honestly was not prepared when I very first started this back in 2021, when I started my blog, I wasn't prepared for the anger that what I was sharing was going to incite in a lot of people. I wasn't prepared for the backlash and the frustration and, you know, anger, I guess is the best word to say it, that I was getting from people. It really caught me off guard. And I think it's because I, when I started, when you first start sharing something, you need to know who you're talking to. And the audience that I was addressing, that I created for myself, was my younger self. I wanted to share the things that I wish somebody had shared with me 27 years ago when I was first diagnosed. When I was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I was told I had a chemical imbalance. I was told that it was chronic and incurable. You know, I was told that I would need medication for the rest of my life. And I believed what I was told because they were doctors who had been through medical school and I didn't have any reason to not believe what they were telling me. And it did create a mixed set of feelings for me. When I very first was diagnosed, I remember feeling, on the one hand, some relief because I felt like they had given me an explanation for what had been going on with me for the previous couple of years. Even going so far, you know, as far back into my youth. Um, I once I was told that these symptoms were part of a disorder, my brain started searching back into my life for evidence of this disorder earlier in my life. And when you start looking at symptoms as a disorder, it's very easy to find those, those things. It's very easy. So it was very easy for me to look back into my youth and see patterns of hypomania when I would get hyper-focused on things, when I would stay up late working on projects, and then depression. I definitely experienced a lot of depression in my youth. Viewing it through the lens of a disorder, I thought, oh yeah, I've had this for a long time and it just went undiagnosed for a long time. And so it created some issues for me when I was diagnosed with this. Because number one, like I mentioned, it was there was some relief in having an explanation. But there was also this feeling of worry and fear that I was going to be stuck with this for the rest of my life. And what did that look like? Like what who would want me? I remember thinking that very specifically. You know, I was in college, I was single, I had hopes of getting married someday and being a mom. And I remember thinking, if I'm going to have this for the rest of my life, who's going to want me like this? I felt like I've been told I was broken. And so over the years, there were a lot of different sources that I went to for help with coming to grips with my diagnosis, you know, psychiatrists specifically. You know, I would go to my psychiatric appointments very faithfully, and I moved a number of times. And so each time I would move, I would immediately find a psychiatrist in the area and establish myself with a new psychiatrist, go to the intake, get rediagnosed. And, you know, each time the diagnosis was affirmed. And so I was being reassured by doctors on a regular basis that this wasn't my fault, that I wasn't doing something wrong, that this was outside of my control. I had a disorder, I had a chemical imbalance, I had a mental illness. And then I, you know, went to therapists. I was advised to go to therapist to learn coping mechanisms, you know, tools that could help me manage my bipolar more effectively. And that was a bit of a joke because it never, nothing ever helped me manage my bipolar effectively. I just kept getting worse. I I, no matter how hard I tried, I just kept getting more and more sick. And I started feeling like a victim. I started feeling like this was happening to me and I didn't have any control over it. And so I started trying to, it created this situation where I didn't feel like I had the ability to have control over myself. And I started to feel helpless. And that is a terrible way to feel, especially when I started having children. When I got married, and then I started having children, giving birth, and I went through some very serious postpartum depression and postpartum hyperthyroidism. I had some very serious issues after my first two births. And I could see the damage I was doing to my marriage. I could see the damage I was doing to my children. And because I had been told that I had a disorder and that it was lifelong chronic, incurable, and I felt helpless to do anything about it. My brain started looking for a way out. It started looking for a solution that would that would benefit my husband and my children. My children were truly the most important thing to me in my life, and I would have given my life for them. And I think that my unwell mind knew that. And I had been told that there were, there was no cure. There was, you know, I was going to have this for the rest of my life. We were trying to find the right medications, according to the doctors. But my mind started thinking, maybe I just need to remove myself from their lives because I didn't have any hope for getting better. And I could see the damage I was doing to them. And I, one of the things that is perpetuated in this system, because this diagnosis is created and viewed as an illness, it's viewed as something that people don't have any control over, it's viewed as something that is medical at its core. There is a lot of language that is used in the mental health care system that supports this victim mentality. And my soul was rejecting what I was being told. You know, I was being told this is not your fault. You need to have compassion for yourself. You know, there were a lot of things like that where, you know, I was being reassured, like you're doing your best. This is not your fault. You don't have any control over this. We're going to learn some tools to help manage things. But I kept thinking, it, well, maybe it's not my fault, but it's definitely not my husband's fault. And it's absolutely not my children's fault. So what are they supposed to do? They just have to put up with me like this for the rest of their lives. That just didn't feel fair or right to me. And it's interesting because when I finally started healing, I didn't know I was healing at first, but when I started going through the recovery process and I started to take more responsibility for myself and more accountability for myself and take ownership of my symptoms and for paying attention to them and managing them more effectively using my mood cycle survival guide, I started feeling better about myself. And I realized that we have created a class of victims with people who are diagnosed with these disorders because they feel like they don't have any control over what's happening and they want to have other people accept them the way they are. And it creates really unhealthy relationships. I want to go through point by point and talk about each of these issues because it's really important to understand the issues that are created by this diagnosis so that you can do something about it. So the first issue that is created by this diagnosis is that it effectively ends curiosity into what's actually happening. One of the best analogies that I've heard recently came from Dr. Joseph Witt During. He is a specialist, he's a psychiatrist by training. He came through, came up through medical school and psychiatric training. And he actually worked for the FDA for a little bit because he wanted to understand how these medications were being approved. He worked for a psychiatric drug company, seeing how they went through the process of researching and proving the efficacy or quote-unquote efficacy of these medications. And the result of his training, all of his training, was that he created a company called the Taper Clinic where he helps people get off of medications now. And he talks openly about the issues that are that we have with these medications and that they are not actually treating an underlying condition. They are just attempting to manage the symptoms and not very well and at great risk to the people who are taking them. And he used the analogy one day that when you give somebody, he was using specifically depression, but it goes for all of the psychiatric diagnoses. When you give somebody with depression an antidepressant, quote unquote antidepressant, it is like trying to turn off the fire alarm. You are not resolving the fire. You're not resolving the issue that created the alarm. You are just shutting off the alarm. And that is what's happening when you give somebody a bipolar diagnosis, bipolar disorder diagnosis, and then start medicating them. You are not addressing what is actually causing the symptoms. You are simply turning off the fire alarm or attempting to turn off the fire alarm. And sometimes you make things way worse by using medications to treat these symptoms. And so the disorder diagnosis leads people to believe that they have been given an explanation. That's what I believed. I was told when I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder that I had a chemical imbalance. I did not know at the time that that theory of illness had been completely debunked and continues to be disproven. But I believed I had been given an explanation for why I was sick. And that's what I hear on a regular basis from people. They tell me that bipolar is a, you know, they get very upset, very defensive when I say that bipolar is not a chemical imbalance. They believe that they have a chemical imbalance. They believe that they've been given an explanation, explanation for why they are experiencing these symptoms and that the medications are addressing this chemical imbalance. It's not true. And it is terrible to be ending curiosity because then people don't look anymore for answers. They don't look at why they're experiencing these symptoms. So that's the first problem with this bipolar disorder diagnosis is that you are eliminating the curiosity into what is actually happening and what is causing these symptoms to occur. The symptoms are very real. I want to be very clear. A lot of times when I say things like bipolar is not a chemical imbalance, people think I'm saying that bipolar symptoms aren't real. And they are very real. I was, I experienced them front and center for a long time. You know, I was experiencing sleeplessness and symptoms of mania and symptoms of depression, you know, going through periods of time where I couldn't get myself out of bed in the morning. Taking a shower was like a you know a monumental task, and it completely exhausted me. Sometimes I would go through times where I couldn't even brush my teeth. Like it, I, these symptoms are very real. The anxiety symptoms that I started experiencing, the first time I had a major anxiety attack, I was in the in the hospital in the ER for eight hours thinking I was having a heart attack. They ran all kinds of tests on me, and we discovered that it was actually anxiety. So the symptoms are very real. I'm not saying the symptoms don't exist, but bipolar disorder as a diagnosis is misleading because you have not been given an explanation. You have simply been given an observation. All a bipolar diagnosis does is observe the symptoms. Observe the symptom cluster that you're had that you have and put it in a category. That's it. The second issue that this creates is as I mentioned before, is it creates victims out of the people who are diagnosed. And quite frankly, it creates victims out of the people that are loved ones of those people because you are told that you don't have any control over what's happening, that it's it's an illness, that you don't have any control over it. And so when somebody is experiencing symptoms of mania and they are spending money like crazy and running their family into debt, or taking on gigantic projects and talking a million miles an hour and talking about how God's talking to them, or or you know, seeing things that aren't there, or somebody who's having serious depression and they can't function, they're unable to go to work, they lose their job, they're unable to take care of themselves, they're unable to take care of their children. When they're experiencing those symptoms, the person feels like they have no control over that. So they are feel like a victim to the symptoms. I remember feeling this sensation of being yanked onto a roller coaster and just holding on for dear life until it was over, just praying for, you know, to survive till it's over, and then observing the damage that I had done to my life and to the people I loved during that episode. It also creates victims out of the people who are loved ones of those people because they are observing with dismay all these bad behaviors and destructive behaviors. It's doing damage to the relationship and they want to keep loving that person and stay connected to that person. But if if they don't have any control over it, people don't want to subject themselves to those, to that anymore. And so it it creates victims out of everybody involved. And it makes it so people don't feel like there's any way for them to take responsibility for themselves. And being responsible for ourselves is one of the main sources of feeling good about ourselves. It's one of the main sources of our feelings of self-worth is being responsible for ourselves. And so this disorder diagnosis creates victims. The third thing is that it becomes people's identity. I used to say this all the time. I used to say, I have bior, I am bipolar. I would tell people I'm bipolar. I hear that all the time from people. I am bipolar. Also, you'll also hear things like, you know, I'm neurodivergent. They believe that their brain just works differently from other people's, and that these symptoms are just evidence that they are neurodivergent. And that has become, I'm not saying this to be disparaging, but it has become kind of a badge of honor for people. Like my brain just works differently from other people's, and and they they wear it as like a badge of honor or, you know, it's something that makes them unique. And there are lots of things that make each of us unique. Every single person has unique qualities and gifts and talents. We should not be taking on these symptoms as part of our identity. But when you are given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, that's what we do. In order to, you know, to try and love yourself, you have to take ownership of these things because you don't you can't help it. It's just part of your disease, it's part of your disorder. And so people start to take on this disorder as an identity, and it creates a major barrier for healing because that threatens their sense of identity. It threatens their belief about themselves. And so, if if somebody, you know, when I tell people you don't have to live with this for the rest of your life, if they have made that part of who they are, it feels threatening to that identity. It feels threatening to the sense of themselves and it creates a major barrier to healing and recovery. I understand where people are coming from when they guard this part of themselves so carefully because there is a lot of pain associated with the symptoms and the actions that we have taken while we are experiencing these symptoms. I know that very firsthand. Like I experienced so much shame and pain and heartache because of the things that I did when I was really sick, when I was really struggling with these symptoms. And it took years for me to, number one, to take ownership of them. And because it was very difficult for me to take ownership of them. It was really painful to take ownership of the fact that I had abused my children. I wasn't trying to be an abusive parent, but one of the things I've talked about in the past is what they call what's a symptom which was called bipolar rage. And it was one of the worst symptoms, in my opinion, that I experienced as a mother because I had, I want to call it like I always say it's kind of like a hair trigger. So I would go to therapy. You know, I was supposed to go to therapy to learn coping mechanisms. And they would say stupid things to me like, count to 10 when you start feeling angry. And I kept trying to explain to them, you don't understand. There's no like space between the trigger and the response. There's no space between whatever happens that incites the anger or this out of control angry response for me to make a decision. I can't give myself a timeout. I can't, I can't count to 10. It wasn't, I wasn't capable of doing that at the time. And it made me feel even worse because I kept thinking, like, okay, next time I'll I'll try to do that. And and every time I experienced this symptom, it was like a switch was flipped. And I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience watching myself. I was, and I've been told since then that what I was experiencing was called dissociation. But I was viewing myself raging at my children, and it was so terrifying to them when I when this would happen. And it didn't happen all the time, but when it happened, it was terrifying. So when I was starting to go through the healing process and I was starting to learn how to take responsibility for myself, it was a very painful experience to take ownership of that and to acknowledge, even though I loved my children, I was abusing them. That was abusive. And even though I didn't do it on purpose, they still experienced abuse. And so I had to go through some very painful experiences with my children when I was trying to help them heal, going through therapy sessions and letting them talk about the pain that I caused, and just sitting and listening to it and acknowledging it and taking ownership of it and telling them how sorry I was and that I was working on that. And that leads to one of the biggest challenges that I've seen with people when they are working on trying to heal, when they are actually getting to the point when they are ready to start the healing process, which is takes it takes tremendous humility and courage to go through the healing process. Because part of that healing process is learning how to take responsibility for yourself, learning how to take ownership, not allowing yourself to behave as a victim any longer, but recognizing that yes, you can do something about it. And maybe not in that moment, maybe not when you're experiencing like I experienced with the those that bipolar rage symptom. But I can do something to work on preventing it from happening. I can work on the source of the symptoms. I can work on identifying, you know, for me with this symptom. There were it was a layered approach. So the very first thing was getting off of the medications and onto micronutrients through cross titration. That takes time and it takes diligent effort and patience. And once my brain started to heal, then I was able to start working on going to therapy for working on unhealed trauma. That was that created, you know, a hair trigger for me. I would, I was experiencing, part of what I was experiencing was micronutrient insufficiency. Part of it was um a trauma response that was being triggered. And and so my I was going from my upper part of my brain into the lower part of my brain where I stopped having control over myself. So I had to accept responsibility to go to therapy and go through the pain of processing past trauma. I had to work diligently at developing mindfulness meditation, the skill of mindfulness meditation, because that started creating a space between the trigger and the response. It started creating space for me so that when something happened, I was staying present and I was able to stay aware or become aware of the fact that I was starting to feel a trauma response and I could remove myself from the situation. I could, you know, choose what to do in that moment rather than it just happening. So it takes a lot of diligence, persistent effort, and humility and courage to go through the healing process, to be first engage with it and to persist in it. And one of the things that I've talked with people about is when I was first starting to go through the healing process, and I started like I wasn't going into the hospital anymore, which was very costly every time I had to go to the hospital. And I wasn't on all the medications and I wasn't going to, you know, regular psychiatric visits. You know, there was a lot of money that went into my care. And even though I was paying for the supplements, overall I was saving a lot of money because the supplements were not costing as much as all the other things combined. And I told my husband one day, I feel like there's a financial incentive to keep me sick. And this thought has persisted with me. And I've started to consider all the different aspects that the money that is made off of psychotropic drugs and this industry, how that has influenced the diagnoses, the treatment, all of these things. Because there is a financial incentive here. There is a big one. It's a, you know, the psychiatric drug industry itself, by itself, is a$20 billion a year industry. And I I actually did a TikTok on this and it got taken down for community violations. I appealed it and they persisted. They said, nope, you've violated the community. And so just just pointing out the fact that there is a financial incentive to keep people sick was enough to get me flagged on TikTok. And it's really important to think about what the who benefits from these labels, from the bipolar disorder label. Who benefits from that? Certainly not the person who's diagnosed. Certainly not the person who's diagnosed. When somebody is diagnosed with bipolar disorder, that's a life sentence, according to the psychiatrist and according to the industry. You have been given a life sentence, no hope of recovery. You're going to need medications for the rest of your life. How is that helping that person? And 83% of the people who are diagnosed and treated for bipolar disorder end up, they call it severely impaired. So 83% of the people diagnosed and treated with bipolar disorder end up severely impaired. They end up disabled by the treatment and by the diagnosis. Not the diagnosis, but but the symptoms that go along with it, that are not being treated at their source. They are being masked, and attempted an attempt is being made to control it using mind-altering psychotropic medications. And so it is definitely not the person who's diagnosed that benefit that is benefiting from the diagnosis. And it's not the per the people that love them. The people that love them who have somebody who is diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which is sometimes I call it like a get-out-of-jail free card. Like somebody is behaving in a bad way, and we're supposed to just put up with that behavior because they have bipolar disorder and they can't help it, and they're doing the best they can. So that diagnosis is not benefiting the people who love the person who's diagnosed. Who benefits from the diagnosis? The people that benefit from the diagnosis are the industry themselves. The psychotropic drug companies have zero incentive to find anything that will that will resolve the symptoms. They want drug customers for life. And the earlier somebody is diagnosed, the better, because the sooner you start somebody on psychotropic medications, the longer you will have them as a customer. They have no incentive to make sure that these drugs are safe long term. There's the financial incentive is just to try and make sure that they can prove that these medications, at least in the short term, are safe and effective, is the words you know, a lot of times that we hear. And there is a lot of manipulation that goes on. That was one of the things that was so impressive about listening to Dr. Joseph Witt Doring's experiences working for the FDA and for this drug company, is that he he kind of saw how the sausage was made and recognized this is not, these are not being tested thoroughly and properly. And they are not being tested long-term. None of these drugs are tested for longer than like eight weeks. There is no long-term efficacy studies that are done on these or safety studies that are done on them. There's no financial incentive to do those studies. They don't have any, there's no benefit, and there's only risk involved in doing those. And so they just don't do the studies. And so there is a huge financial incentive to keep people sick, to keep people on these drugs. And all of the psychiatric training has been funded by drug companies. I that was a biggest eye-opener for me, one of one of the biggest eye-openers for me when I read Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker. That all of the psychiatric drug training training that psychiatrists go through over the years has been funded by pharmaceutical companies. All of the textbooks and everything have been written by doctors who were on the payroll of psychiatric drug companies. And when I went to my last psychiatrist that I saw, when I went to him with the information from True Hope, the only reason he looked at it was because he had been treating me for eight years at that point. And he felt so bad that I was suffering so much. And he wanted to help me. He put my needs ahead of his own hubris and over, you know, over his own, you know, professional ego. And he admitted to me at one point that had I come to him even a year before, he would not have considered looking at these this information because all of his training in medical school taught him that the only valid treatment for bipolar disorder was psychotropic medications. And all of the continuing education that he had been through in the following years after his after his licensure was funded by drug companies. So it's really the benefit, the people who are benefiting from this diagnosis are not the person who's diagnosed and not the people that love them. It is the drug companies and the psychiatric industry that is benefiting from this diagnosis. And one of the things that is really important to remember as well is that you have to change the way that you view yourself, that you view these symptoms in order to even believe that it's possible to heal. If you keep viewing this through the lens of bipolar disorder and you keep looking at it as an incurable condition, you know, a chemical imbalance, a brain disease, neurodivergence, all of those things that we've been told that, you know, are what bipolar is, it's very difficult to believe that it's possible to heal. And interestingly, the treatment itself validates those claims because the psychotropic medications are not addressing any underlying issue. There has never been an underlying etiology. There has never been an underlying disease identified. When this diagnosis was first developed, it was developed for the sole purpose of prescribing medications. The first DSM, the diagnostical statistical manual, was created so that doctors would know which medications to give to people. And they had not identified underlying sources of symptoms. They had created diagnoses based on symptom clusters. That's it. And then over the years, the reason why this manual has expanded so much is that because we are viewing symptoms as diseases, and as people started presenting with symptom clusters that didn't fall within those parameters, they would either create a new diagnosis or they would expand the parameters of the diagnosis in order to keep these people or put these people in a category. And I've heard people over and over again say to me, you know, oh, you must have been misdiagnosed. And I always ask them, what constitutes an accurate diagnosis? We have been led to believe that this diagnosis is identifying an underlying etiology, an underlying condition. And it is not true. Bipolar disorder is only identifying a cluster of symptoms. And I met every marker on that, on that, the list. That's why I saw over eight doctors in the 12 years that I was in psychiatric treatment. And every single one of the doctors affirmed my diagnosis, every one of them. Because I had all of the symptoms. And there's no such thing as a true bipolar diagnosis, because a bipolar diagnosis is only identifying a cluster of symptoms. So what do we do about this? If you want to heal, if you if you want to believe that it's possible to heal, the first thing you have to do is stop viewing yourself as a victim to a disorder. It's very difficult when you first start doing this because if you've had this diagnosis for any length of time, you've had to adjust your thinking. You've had to adjust yourself to this idea that you have this disorder, because you've been told that you'll have it for the rest of your life and it's very hard to live with. And so your brain has to accept what you're dealing with. You have to accept that you have this disorder. So you've already gone through a process of a mindset shift to try and accept what you're dealing with. But if you are not wanting to live that way anymore, if you want to believe that it's possible to heal, you have to change the way you talk about what you're experiencing. We do this in my uh coaching program all the time. We don't talk about bipolar disorder. We talk about bipolar symptoms. And the language you use matters because it affects the way your brain views things. So the reason we don't talk about bipolar disorder is because bipolar disorder keeps you in that mindset that you have a disease, that you have a brain issue, that it's a biological issue that you will have for the rest of your life. So we don't talk about bipolar disorder. We talk about bipolar symptoms. And the reason that that language change matters is because symptoms have sources. And we talk about becoming a detective. And I've talked about this in earlier podcasts. We talk about becoming a detective in your life. You are looking for clues that are going to help you identify the underlying sources of your symptoms. And if you can identify the underlying sources of your symptoms, then you can identify which tools and resources are going to help you address the underlying sources of your symptoms so that you can heal. So moving forward, if you are new to my podcast and this is the first time you've ever listened to an episode, welcome. We're so happy to have you here. I want to encourage you to listen to more episodes. The episodes right before these, um, I believe it's 70, 70, 71, and 72 are fantastic episodes because it's it is uh I am interviewing the vice president of True Hope, which is a micronutrient company that changed my life. And I don't make any money off of this. So this is not, you know, I'm not trying to sell these vitamins, but it is a life-changing company. And those three episodes talk about the origin of this company, how they came to be. You know, it was a man trying to save his two children's lives who were in psychiatric treatment for bipolar. His wife had ended her life. His father-in-law had ended his life. Both of them were in treatment for bipolar schizoaffective disorder, I believe, or bipolar effective disorder. And two of his children were well on their way. They were headed in the same direction. And he was being told by the top psychiatrist in the country that there was nothing that could be done for them. That they were, that was their life, that they were going to be on medications for the rest of their life. When, you know, his teenage son, they told him he'd probably have to be institutionalized. So in the first episode, episode 70, we, you know, I talked to um to David Stefan, who's the vice president of this company, about their founding story, about how this company came to be. In the second episode, we talk about micronutrients and omegas and aminos and why those things are so essential to our brain function and why taking these supplements can help actually resolve the underlying sources of symptoms. And then in the third one, we talk about the challenges that are presented by going through cross-titration or cross-tapering, which is the process of helping your brain heal with micronutrients and slowly going through the process of withdrawing the medication so that you can actually get the brain functioning in a healthy way. So you can start addressing the other underlying sources of symptoms. So if you're new here, go back and listen to those three episodes. They're phenomenal. I learned more. You know, I've been studying this for several years, but I even learned more in those episodes. If you've been here for a while, if you haven't read my book yet, I highly encourage you to do so. I wrote that book as if I was writing to my younger self. I wrote the book to try and provide the information I wish I had been given back in 1998 when I was first diagnosed. It is the steps that I took to recover, to heal. And yes, I am completely healed. I have I have been symptom-free for years and it's not in remission. I hear I hear people say that all the time: that it's not possible to heal bipolar disorder. And we've already addressed the fact that bipolar is not identifying an underlying condition, it is just symptoms. And I have gone through systematically and resolved all the sources of my symptoms. And I have been through tremendous trials in the past five years, like life-altering trials. And I have still been able to maintain stable mental health through all of it because the underlying sources of the symptoms that led to my bipolar diagnosis have been resolved. So I still experience normal emotional responses to things. I still experience grief when I lose a loved one. I still experience stress when we go through a move or a job loss, or but I am able to maintain a healthy, balanced perspective on life and able to maintain, you know, do all the things I need to do, take care of myself, take care of my family, because I have resolved the underlying sources of my symptoms. And if you have not, if you have not registered and developed a mood cycle survival guide, I strongly urge you to do that. There is a link to it in my show notes. It is a free resource that I offer on my website. But this was the first step in the healing process for me. It was the thing that helped me start taking responsibility for myself. And I've done episodes on that. So if you want to listen to the podcast episode, I'll link the episode that I talk more extensively about what the mood cycle survival guide is. But I urge you to go and get started on developing a mood cycle survival guide for yourself. If you are ready to heal, if you've been listening to this and you're thinking, yes, I'm ready to do this, I've read your book. This sounds like what I need, please join the upsiders tribe. If you want to talk to me about it, there will be a link in the show notes that will allow you to set up a free consultation with me where we can talk about your specific needs and what you might need in order to go through the healing process. We can talk about the upsiders tribe. And one of the new features that we've added to the Upsiders tribe is something called partner support. We've realized that when somebody's going through the healing process, their loved ones, if they're married, their spouse, if they're in a committed relationship, their partner, you know, family members, there are people who are trying to support them that need support themselves. So we have added a feature to the upsiders tribe, which is um the upsiders partner support, which is specifically for loved ones of people who are in the upsiders tribe. So if you are, if you are interested, please click the link in the show notes and schedule a session with me to talk about your specific needs and see if maybe joining the upsiders tribe might be your next step. If you have any questions, I would love to hear from you. Make sure that you reach out. I would love to hear your questions. I would love to hear your insights. And I really hope that you are able to gain the courage that it's necessary to start viewing yourself through the lens of I don't have bipolar disorder, I have bipolar symptoms. And symptoms have sources, and I'm ready to heal. I look forward to hearing hearing from you. I hope that you are taking advantage of all the resources that I have to offer on my website, my podcast. If you haven't read my book, please read that. And I look forward to seeing those of you who are ready to heal in the Upsiders Tribe. Until next time, Upsiders. Thanks for joining me on the Upside of Bipolar. Your journey to recovery matters, and I'm grateful you're here. For more resources, visit www.theupsideofbipolar.com. If you're ready to dive deeper, grab my book, The Upside of Bipolar: Seven Steps to Heal Your Disorder. If you're ready to heal your symptoms, join my monthly membership, The Upsiders Tribe, to transform chaos into hope. Until next time, Upsiders