Put A Fence Around It

“Put a Fence Around It” is a way of thinking about Mania and Depression while you are manic or depressed. Consider the following analogy. Suppose you have a dog and a fenced yard. You leave your dog in the yard while you go to work. When you get back from work what can you expect? You can expect your dog to still be contained within the confines of your fence. However, it is uncertain what your dog did during those hours you were gone. Within this bounded region there exists uncertainty. Your yard is like your moods and your mind is like your dog. Mania and depression are bounded events in time despite their encompassing chaotic behavior. Each mood definitely has a beginning and an end regardless of the uncertain behavior of your mind within that mood. However, to help you gain certainty over the duration of your moods you must “fence your yard.”

 An imaginary “fence” can be constructed around your mood by actively predicting its duration while you are experiencing the mood. It's very easy while you are depressed or manic to forget that these things have beginnings and ends with or without your conscious prediction. These feelings as I’m sure you already know can be all consuming. You might feel like light trying to escape the event horizon of a black hole. There's no turning back despite travelling at the greatest possible speed in precisely the opposite direction. The gravity of these feelings becomes so immense that time itself becomes warped. A minute can feel like an hour and hours can feel like minutes.

When I came up with “Put a Fence Around It” I created a running tally of my moods on an Xcel spread sheet. However, I decided to add the mood called centered. I call it centered because it's somewhere in-between mania and depression. Centered turns out to be my dominant state of mind at least in terms of the amount of time that I experience it. However, the other two moods are so much more powerful than being centered. So they must be weighted in terms of their contributions. The amount of energy required to be either depressed or manic is greater per unit of time than being centered.

Prescription Thoughts for Manic-Depression

Cell-phones used to have only one function. They were hardwired to operate in one and only one way. Now cell-phones are computers. They serve multiple purposes and can even be repurposed by downloading new software that expands their functionality. Cell-phones or any computing machine with these kinds of capabilities are called universal machines. They can simulate any computer with a fixed program. In an abstract sense, both you and I are universal machines. As part of our input we accept data that describes the operation of other minds. The knowledge that you will encounter here is precisely of this nature. It is a collection of ways of thinking that you can “download” that will make up the difference that prescription medication alone cannot make. I have never been able to by force of will improve my mental health. There were times in my life when I believed I could. I had a very strong will before my diagnosis. It subsequently was irrevocably shattered.

Bipolar disorder used to be called manic-depression. Mania and depression are fairly easy to distinguish between because they are essentially polar opposites of each other. Thoughts and moods have a distribution or a shape spread out over time. Some ideas or memories I’ve discovered are "stored" or only occurred in conjunction with specific states of mind or moods. I have manic thoughts or depressed thoughts and mostly won’t remember those thoughts until I am depressed again or manic. It used to be the case that I would make changes to my soul frequently but then I couldn’t remember the work that I had done until I found myself in the same state of mind. Even after years of dedication to my prescription regiment I was still trying to pick up the pieces of my mind and restore continuity to my soul. It's humbling to realize that when you go to sleep tonight you won't be picking up where you left off today.

However, my confidence was restored when I discovered that I have a saving grace. The universe has blessed me and you with something very valuable and especially given our circumstance i.e. that we suffer from mental illness. Intelligence has some kind of protective effect when it comes to bipolar disorder. As IQ increases the likely hood of someone who is bipolar needing hospitalization decreases. My experience has shown me that I can't fight my illness and win, nor can I be proactive and defeat it with strength of spirit. It seems my only option is to outsmart it! But how does one handle fixing a broken mind with the very mind that is broken? It’s not easy but it can be done. The main idea here is to use intelligence not force and the problems you face will begin to reveal their secrets.

Prescription medication takes center stage in most of the literature on bipolar disorder. What I realized I was lacking was medicine in the form of pure thought. There are no manuals written specifically for my thoughts, no words to show me how to live with this illness in my mind. From the date of my diagnosis until the day that I began working on prescription thoughts not my psychiatrist, religious leaders, friends, others with bipolar disorder, or online sources and books had any ideas to share regarding what I need to do with my thinking in order to restore continuity to my soul and gain dominance over my illness. Since no one had produced medicine in the form of words for me, I decided to do it myself.