Question by reese: Is being “bipolar” a made up illness for people who just want to act like jerks?
I think “bipolar” is a lie. Whats the difference between being bipolar, and just being a jerk?

Best answer:

Answer by herblaura
Bipolar disorder is a serious condition. Sometimes sufferers do things that are hard to understand, and insensitive ignorant attitudes certainly do not help.

Answer by Cup Of Brown Joy
Bipolarity is a disease. It affects how you feel, and how to act. It is 100% true. Whether it is caused by a problem in birth, where you hit your head – or a problem later in life, where you experienced something highly dramatic. People suffer from it – random mood swings, jerking foot motions, and crazed rambling. See “Mary’s Story.”

Targeting Specific Factors Might Improve Bipolar Disorder Outcomes
Print. E-mail. Recipient(s) will receive an email with a link (good for 72 hours) to 'Targeting Specific Factors Might Improve Bipolar Disorder Outcomes' and do not need to have Psychiatric News account to access the content. Your Name:* ! Example …
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Trinny Woodall Reveals Cocaine Made Her A 'Fake, Lying, Thieving Person'
Michael Douglas received intensive treatment for throat cancer – and the stress of watching her husband's gruelling experience ignited Catherine Zeta Jones' bipolar disorder for which she attended a clinic in America.
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Anna Benson gives Dr. Phil her side of the story
Dr. Phil said she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder 11 years ago and has had bouts of depression. "I'm not bipolar on a regular basis," she said. Near the end of the hour, he tried to get her to see that coming to the home with all those weapons …
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Question by Meghan W.: General addiction support?
I have what I believe to be an addiction, but it does not fall into the regular “groups” (Drugs, Alcohol, Sex/Porn, etc). Are there any general addiction support groups where I could seek peer aid?

Best answer:

Answer by kim s
It’s kinda hard to help if we don’t know what the addiction is. But there might be a support group for it. Maybe try googling it instead.

Answer by orchidmg
www.NAMI.org

National Alliance of Mental Illness

They have support groups in many cities. See if your city has a group. They meet 1-3 a month for an hour and a half. Talking helps. You will be surprised that you aren’t alone.

I use to be addicted to beer and cigarettes and sex. After my divorce and having a child I stopped all that. But I’m now addicted to spending money on crap. Purses, pens, lighthouses, books, food. I’m also addicted to food. Big time! My health isn’t good because of it. I’m also addicted to Yahoo Answers 🙂

Good luck

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Question by ॐ Plea for Peace!: why do a lot of schizophrenics like to smoke cigarettes and drink coffee?
i’ve read that something like 90% of schizophrenics smoke cigarettes, and i’ve also heard that a large percentage drink a lot more coffee than those considered normal.

does anyone have any ideas? the smoking i can understand if it’s an obsessive behavior, but i wonder if the nicotine in cigs or the caffeine in coffee has anything to do with it?

Best answer:

Answer by gardensallday
I think I read recently that they have an inability to experience pleasure normally, and cigarettes fill that need. I don’t know about the coffee. I will say that I drink a hell of a lot of coffee & I have bipolar. Oh wait, found this on schizohprenia.com:

Scientists find link for smoking, schizophrenia – Schizophrenia Update, January 2004

A team of Toronto researchers has made a startling discovery about why people with schizophrenia are so much more likely than other people to be smokers.

Medications that block dopamine – commonly used by people with this debilitating condition – make smoking a more rewarding experience, they reported in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

The findings, which challenge long-held views about the role of dopamine in nicotine addiction, may provide science with clues on how to help schizophrenics and others give up cigarettes and kick other habit-forming drugs.

“It’s a first step in identifying systems in the brain that can mediate vulnerability to addiction,” said lead author Steve Laviolette, who is currently doing post-doctoral research at the University of Pittsburgh.

He admitted, however, that the findings are likely to spark controversy.

“It’s basically overturning 30 years of previous research. So you might come across people who are hostile to – if not shocked by – the results.”

Yavin Shaham, an addiction researcher at the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse in Baltimore, Md., agreed that the findings defy some of the dogma around nicotine addiction. But he said the science is sound and the findings will spark debate in the addiction research community.

“I think that it’s very interesting research that points in new directions to understanding nicotine reward,” said Shaham, who was not involved in the research.

“It’s not necessarily the way we thought about it in the past. And it’s certainly relevant for the understanding of why schizophrenics are smoking so much.”

Laviolette wrote the paper with co-author Derek van der Kooy while working on his doctorate in neuropharmacology at the University of Toronto. The pair was trying to identify areas in the brain that are involved in nicotine addiction.

“The schizophrenic angle came up almost accidentally, really,” Laviolette said from Pittsburgh.

The work, done on rats, involved injecting nicotine or a placebo – in this case saline – directly into a portion of the brain known as the ventral tegmental area, or VTA. The VTA is thought to be the pleasure centre of the brain and is known to be involved in nicotine, alcohol and drug addiction.

To the team’s surprise, they discovered the VTA also is involved in aversion. Low doses of nicotine administered to that area of the brain actually induced a negative reaction from the rats. It was only when the dosage crossed a certain threshold that the animals began to perceive it as pleasurable and to seek it out.

“That was surprising, that a single brain area was responsible for both the aversive and the rewarding effects,” Laviolette admitted.

More surprising still was what happened when they gave the rats drugs that blocked the dopamine receptors in the VTA.

For decades, research has shown that dopamine, a neurotransmitter, is responsible for the rewarding effects of nicotine. But researchers could never explain why people with schizophrenia on dopamine-blocking drugs tend to smoke like chimneys.

It didn’t seem to make sense: if dopamine allowed the brain to enjoy smoking and dopamine was blocked, smoking should no longer be a pleasurable experience.

“And what was the surprising thing was the rewarding effects were not blocked at all,” Laviolette said of the rat experiments.

In fact, the contrary was true, he said. Blocking dopamine blocked the adverse effects of nicotine, but ramped up the rewarding sensations induced by the drug. Dramatically.

The findings suggest that schizophrenia medications that block dopamine are fixing one problem but causing another, he said.

“What’s really happening is that you’re blocking dopamine in the schizophrenics, you’re increasing nicotine’s rewarding effects. And that’s why you see 95 per cent of schizophrenics are heavily addicted to nicotine.”

Further, the same effect is probably happening with alcohol and possibly other drugs, Laviolette said.

“It’s a two-edged sword. The drug is removing the psychosis but at the same time making them addicted to these extremely dangerous drugs.”

Not all medications used to treat schizophrenia work by blocking dopamine, however. The newer generation of medications, known as atypical anti-psychotic drugs, work by a different mechanism.

Laviolette said the research suggests that the reactions to a drug induced in the VTA fall on a spectrum from aversion to pleasure. Whether one finds a cigarette satisfying or disgusting may depend on one’s baseline dopamine levels, he said.

and another article with another explanation:
Scientists have found that smoking and schizophrenia are tightly linked, but are not sure why. Could nicotine actually be helping the disorder? If so, then it is a double-edged sword, because smoking is a life-threatening behavior.

Now, new research on the effects of nicotine in people with schizophrenia is beginning to answer these questions and uncover clues that may help to treat this serious disorder.

Schizophrenia is characterized by disordered thinking; hallucinations, such as hearing voices; and delusions, such as paranoid beliefs that people are conspiring against you. Schizophrenia affects about 1 percent of the population and places a substantial burden on those afflicted, their families, and society.

Many people with schizophrenia smoke, and their unique smoking behaviors have led scientists to believe that nicotine, the addicting substance in tobacco, may represent a form of self-medication, normalizing some central nervous system deficits involved in the disorder.

People with schizophrenia smoke up to three times more than the general population and more than most psychiatric populations. Schizophrenia patients who smoke also have higher levels of nicotine in their bodies because they tend to extract more nicotine per cigarette than other smokers.

Nicotine and its brain receptors—proteins on the surface of cells that receive chemical messages—are keys to understanding the links between smoking and schizophrenia. Already, research has revealed that:

Nicotine and its receptors are involved in functions such as cognition or thinking ability, reward, movement, and pain relief.
Schizophrenia patients have fewer and more poorly functioning nicotinic receptors, especially in the hippocampus, cortex, and cells that wrap the thalamus—brain areas involved in several cognitive and sensory deficits of schizophrenia.
Increased nicotine intake—from smoking cigarettes or sometimes from a skin patch, gum, or nasal spray—may temporarily normalize sensory disruptions of schizophrenia. For example, nicotine may improve eye tracking abnormalities, mostly by altering activity in the hippocampus and brain areas involved in eye movement. Nicotine also has been reported to improve the brain’s ability to filter sounds and to respond and adapt to strong sensory inputs.

Cognitive ability in people with schizophrenia may get a boost from nicotine as well, including temporary enhancements in learning, memory, processing speed, and attention. Several studies have examined spatial working memory—the ability to hold information in the brain and recall it when prompted. Spatial working memory is involved in planning, judgment, and attention—tasks that people with schizophrenia find difficult. Schizophrenia patients who smoked or who received nasal spray nicotine temporarily enhanced their spatial working memory, and those who quit had further impairments.

Smoking also may help decrease medication side effects and other symptoms of schizophrenia. According to one study, receiving nicotine through a skin patch reversed the cognitive slowing associated with haloperidol, a common drug for schizophrenia. Nicotine may improve lack of motivation and indifference in this population, as well. However, it remains unclear if nicotine minimizes hallucinations and delusions, and some studies have reported that people with schizophrenia who quit smoking did not experience worsening of their symptoms.

Nicotine may help lessen some symptoms of schizophrenia by increasing deficient levels of the chemical dopamine—which is thought to regulate key emotional responses—in areas of the brain such as the nucleus accumbens and prefrontal cortex. The nucleus accumbens is involved in reward and pleasure, and the prefrontal cortex organizes complex cognitive and social behaviors.

Since evidence shows that nicotine positively affects schizophrenia, scientists are exploring drugs that act like nicotine in the brain but do not have adverse health consequences. Researchers now are working on safer and less toxic drugs that potentially could enhance cognition. These drugs may help treat schizophrenia.

One type of nicotinic receptor, known as the alpha-7 receptor, is proving to be a major target for schizophrenia drug development. These receptors are found in brain regions important for cognition, including the cortex and hippocampus. Already, scientists have completed preliminary tests of drugs for schizophrenic nonsmokers based on a toxin, called anabaseine, found in marine worms and ants. Subjects showed improved sensory processing and cognition, especially attention.

Scientists continue to research the biology and function of different nicotinic receptors. As knowledge advances, so will development of new and safer drugs to help treat s

Answer by nat
they probably lilke the effect the stimulants have on them.

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Question by Sky: Why do some prescription drugs have some really adverse effects on people?
I just came out of kidney surgery yesterday for stones–twice this year alone–and the drugs I’m on have made me really jumpy, nervous, wiped out, and just too energetic for my tastes.

Why am I feeling like this? Is it because I don’t have the same tolerance to meds as some people do, or is it because I lack that “addiction” factor that sometimes pops up with blatant drug abuse?

Thanks.

(Yes, they put a stent in me.)

Best answer:

Answer by rick29148
Nothing is perfect, everything is a compromise. The drug(s) have a side affect, and your doctor has decided that the side affect is not bad enough to have you stop taking it. I has in a truck wreck 5-1/2 years ago, and there were some internal injuries. One of my daily meds is a super niacin pill for spleen damage. If I don’t take it with an asprin at the right time, it will make my skin turn red and try to crawl up my back….not terrible, but not my idea of a good time. Doc says it’s the only med available to keep the spleen producing the white blood cells I need, so, I take the pills. Ask your doc, maybe there is another med you can take that will do the same thing without the side affects… Good Luck.

Answer by Susan Yarrawonga
Prescription drugs are regarded as invasive alien substances by our bodies that reject them and the side effects are basically protests by our bodies.

Unfortunately, we sometimes or even often need prescription medication as it usually works much faster than natural medication which often fails to overcome the relevant medical problem. Natural medication sometimes helps a bit but often not enough so then you have to take prescription medication which is rarely without side effects.

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