Finding Your Marbles
A Mental Health Survival Guide

There are hundreds of online mental health forums, covering everything from depression to synesthesia. Some of them are quite large, like the About.com forums, and others are grassroots forums that emerged around small communities of mental illness sufferers who joined together to support each other as they struggled to cope with their mental illness and hopefully get on the road to recovery.

Online forums can be a great resource to help you manage your mental illness and to help you with your recovery. They provide you with a great opportunity to meet with other people who are suffering from the same conditions and talk about your problems in a safe, anonymous environment.

I have participated in several mental health forums, both as a member and as an administrator, and I have written this guide to both help you choose a mental health forum and to get the best out of your mental health forum experience.

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Medication can be very expensive, especially medication for mental illness. Lots of expensive research goes into those drugs, and the drug companies charge very high prices to recover their costs.

Since costs can run upwards of $75/month for some medications, this can be a major problem if you are out of money or if you’ve got to take a lot of different medications together. Even worse is when you run out of money in the middle of a medication cycle and you might start missing doses. With some medication, such as SSRIs, missing doses can be very serious so there are some major health implications if you can’t afford meds.

There are a couple of things that you can do to get your medication if you can’t afford to pay for it. Some of them take a bit of work and patience, so it is a good idea to plan ahead and make sure that you always have a good supply. The last thing you want is to be on your last pill when an unexpected bill comes in.

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Bipolar Disorder is a very frustrating and terrifying illness. People with bipolar can feel terrifyingly out of control, and even with medication, bipolar people rarely feel “normal.”

Because bipolar disorder can make such a mess of your emotions and your mind, it is very difficult for people with bipolar to express their fears and frustrations, and even more difficult for their friends and family to understand them. Bipolar disorder is one of the most misunderstood mental illnesses, and bipolar sufferers can end up tragically marginalized by society.

Boris Donlin’s photo essay “Catching a Darkness” tells the story of his sister’s struggle with bipolar disorder, which ended tragically in suicide. It is a touching and sometimes terrifying look into one woman’s struggle with this illness, from the perspective of her baby brother.

Continue reading “Link: The Other Side of the Mirror - Catching a Darkness” »