Breaking Down Bipolar

In response to one of my blogs, Louise posted:

"Physicians - mostly trained as biologists - need to go back to their roots. Taxonomy is very specific. Diseases are not."

Louise, Louise, Louise.

"Bipolar disorder is not a taxonomically consistent ‘thing,'" she continues. "It's not a plant that always presents in a nearly identical way with very identifiable features."

Damnit, Louise. You're forcing me to think.

"Someday," she concludes, "when doctors remember that they are biologists, they'll be more inclined to say that all these illnesses are members of the X Family of neurological disorders and subclassify them accordingly. In the meantime, should it be any surprise that bipolar, schizophrenia and other ‘mental illnesses' share symptoms?"

That does it, Louise. Now I have to cancel my world didgeridoo tour with Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis and get to work on this. Why me?

Louise happens to be a good friend of mine, revealed in previous post exchanges. She posted this on May 30, but I only spotted it several days ago in the process of catching up from an inexcusably horrendous work backlog. Naturally I dropped everything I was doing. That's what friends are for.

Here's my starting proposition: Think of all human behavior (including mental illness) as reaction meeting thought. Where over-reaction meets irrational thinking is where we are most likely to find frightening behavior.

So I set pen to paper (forgive the poetic license) and starting plotting a series of grids. Each grid contains two intersecting axes, kind of like what you see in all those algebra and geometry classes I flunked. The horizontal grid represents the limbic system, responsible for alerting us to danger, as well in stimulating us into seeking pleasure and reward (with over-reaction at one end and under-reaction at the other). The vertical grid represents the thinking brain, with rational thought at one pole and irrational thought at the other.

"Deconstructing Mental Illness," I call the project. The purpose is to get away from standard labels and classifications and break down behavior into its component parts and see what happens when worlds collide.

What happens, say, when your boss says he wants to see you right now? Do you take the situation in stride or do you react as if he were an assailant with a knife? Or do you simply not care?

What happens, say, when you are transported into transcendent ecstatic realms by someone you just met? Do you prudently propose marriage right away? (Just kidding.) You get the picture.

The outer part of the grid represents how we react and the inner part how we respond. It took me a good three days of tinkering before I could lie to people about the grid being just right. To further tease out reactions and responses, I added certain modifiers, one modifier per grid. My first grid contains an "Ego" modifier and my second its opposite, a "Social" modifier.