I've had so many wild thoughts and hallucinations over the past five years that memory triggers from daily life continue to resurface them. Now that I'm being treated for my unstable moods (I never reached a consensus diagnosis) I feel good most of the time and treat these flashbacks as ideas that can be creatively massaged into music videos, business ideas, jokes, even topics for serious scientific study. One of the topics that my hospitalizations and treatments brought forth concerns bipolar disorder, which leads to the study of cyclic behavior in moods.
I detest the naming and classification of mental illnesses, primarily because they are not necessary to effectively treat patients. Cyclic moods vary among individuals, and good useful drugs can treat such abnormalities according to their severity. Why call it bipolar? or Schizophrenia? or Anxiety/Depression? With matters of the mind, patient accounts and direct observation of behavior should be carefully documented to provide a course of treatment. No classification is required; diagnoses can be made at an anatomical and genetic level without having to "simplify" matters with a tag.
The psychology that defines our selves will never be fully characterized by reductionist methods such as scientific research. For this reason, mental disorders should not be classified like other bodily diseases. They stigmatize the affected and there are very distinct areas of uncertainty that prevent an accurate grouping of symptoms.
About 30% of the psychiatrists I visited as a patient did Not conclude that I was bipolar. The rest very confidently did. One of them even used a flow-chart style questionnaire; I consider him to be unacademic and maybe unintellectual.
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