Bipolar and the real sickness of humanity

Good luck trying to process what's happening
to you at the moment, cartoon caricature

The past couple of months (as you've probably guessed from my rapid flip-flops and general emotional instability) have been very intriguing to me. Severely painful and confusing to the point of psychosis, but when I try to look at it objectively, withholding judgement of the feelings, what I realize is that my brain cannot process the information it is taking in fast enough to match the rate that information is flowing in. And to me that's nothing if not interesting.

I will attempt to explain this (the bipolar- not why I think it's interesting) through an extension of Searle's "Chinese Room" thought experiment. The original formulation of the thought experiment is this: imagine you are trapped in a room (but don't have any desire to escape for some reason). There are two slots in the wall. Through one of the slots you are given letters (as in pieces of papers with letters written on them). The letters are in Chinese, but unfortunately you are uncultured and don't know chinese. Your job is to take those letters, translate them into English and then put them through the other slot. At first you panic, because you have no idea how to tackle this problem. But looking around the room, you discover that there is a manual which contains a translation of every possible Chinese phrase into English (I know there are an infinite number. It's a thought experiment). All you have to do is take the letter in chinese and sift through the manual until you find it. Searle used this thought experiment as an argument for a particular view of philosophy of mind called Functionalism. What functionalism says is that a mind is just something that processes information. It doesn't matter what the thing doing the processing is. It could be your brain. It could be the poor man trapped in this Chinese room. It could be the entire nation of China. Hell, literally anything could be a mind by this reasoning.

Pictured: The stages leading
up to a psychotic break

So what does it mean to have bipolar? First, let me say that this is only my personal interpretation from the information I've collected through my experience and through my extensive reading. It is by no means exhaustive, so this is only a caricature of what it means to have bipolar, but one that I hope will be useful to other people trying to understand it.

Bipolar is essentially when the chinese letters are coming through the flap much faster than they are for a normal person (which may be innate, but I believe it is something which may be learnable). They come in so quickly, in fact, that you are not able to finish translating one before the next one comes in. At first this is fine. No need to worry. But the letters keep coming into the room faster than you can handle them. As time goes on, you start to realize by the magic of calculus that there is a limited amount of space in the room and that the letters are gradually filling it up. The next unfortunate realization that you have is that if the letters fill the room completely there will be no room for air (or for you) and you will die. You start to panic. Your first thought is to look through the hole the letters are coming through to see if there is some way to stop them from coming. You see that a number of things are delivering the letters. Some of them are puppers giving you cute letters. Some of them are cactuses (or cacti- both are legal plurals) giving you prickly letters. But almost all of them are people, shoving their values through the slots because they don't realize or care that there is a person inside.

You try to ask them to stop, but they don't listen. They ignore you. They don't understand you. Or worse, they tell you to shut up and do your fucking job because they think having the contents of their letters translated is more important than your health and safety. In other words, they dehumanise you.

As this continues you gradually stop even trying to ask for help. No one will listen anyway. Your best chance of survival seems to be to focus your attention on translating letters, knowing full well that you will die soon. Our society has attempted to deal with people like me by saying that there is something wrong with us. We've come a long way since the times of locking "crazy" people in asylums where we could more easily ignore their pain, but things haven't changed as much as you'd like to think. Just like the transition in America from treating blacks as slaves to subjecting them to segregation to the current iteration where we systematically opress them using racism, we've treated people with "abnormal" brains in much the same way. However, there are fundamental differences- I don't wear my bipolar on my face. I've gotten very good at acting like a normal person because most people are uncomfortable when I'm not. In a way, having bipolar means being constantly in disguise, a concept which people don't take the time to understand (friends often tell me not to act- to just be myself- but that's not something I have the luxury of doing usually). We've stripped them of their humanity because we are too afraid to try to understand them and to realize that the systems that we have in place are failing them. We've stopped listening because it's too painful for us. We've chosen to ignore the beauty of these people and their special brains- because to have bipolar is to be superhuman (not that this makes you better than anyone around you. It just makes you fundamentally different, and in my opinion, more efficient, in the way that you process data. And again, I have a deep intuition that this is something which can be learned, you just have to listen) and this realization makes people without bipolar feel threatened that they will be replaced. When people feel threatened, they stop thinking clearly. That's when dehumanization occurs- it becomes a fight for survival of the "fittest" instead of the mutual quest for beauty- a world where can all coexist peacefully- that life actually is. Our emotions warp the world around us and language, the only thing way we have found to communicate, fails us. Basically, watch the X-men movies: they explain this perfectly. The only difference is that my mutation is that my brain is wired differently at birth.

The future of mental health "problems."
Probably not my kid- having bipolar isn't
an attractive trait so I likely won't procreate

We've labeled their identity as a "mental health problem," and tried to assail that identity. Most of the time we attempt to hijack the processing power of the bipolar brain by forcing it to internalize shame- a rejection of your core identity and, in my opinion, the most unbearable emotion a person can endure (also a very hot issue right now, as Trump and the rise of neo-nazism are forcing us to realize that maybe shaming people to silence them isn't a good way to deal with problems effectively). The pain I've endured will never leave me. It will exist in my memory until I die. Sometimes I wake up in cold sweats in the night remembering it. But I refuse to be ruled by the emotions you've taught me to feel. I've adopted the role of reclaimer, for me manifest through comedy, taking the shit we've decided to label as "pain" and "bad" and to mine it for the valuable information it contains. You'd be surprised what valuable gems you can find when you allow yourself to fully embody the pain you've been taught to avoid. I've conditioned myself to endure the pain, because I had no other option. The world we've created has no place for someone like me in its current state. Either it must be changed or I must die. You've likely had the same feeling, regardless of your race, gender, sexuality, or whatever else. The world in its current state is inhospitable to us all. So we try to reshape ourselves, a process that is possible through neuroplasticity (the brain is a remarkable little gadget), but that is too slow and painful. Also, if you don't conform to society's standards of beauty- tallness, whiteness, maleness, richness- you're pretty fucked. Why not just change the world instead?

Do you want to know how the bipolar person in the chinese room story ends? In the world as it currently exists the letters keep coming. There is too much unprocessed information in the room and it drives the person with bipolar insane. Psychosis is this feeling manifest. And it doesn't turn out pretty. All brains appear to have a predisposition to psychosis if you push them hard enough. Most people just kill themselves to escape the intense emotional suffering they are enduring, but occassionally you get those rare individuals who decide to weaponize their hatred against a world they feel has only ever attacked them. This has a lot of fun consequences: crime, school shootings, genocide, lil' pump. And I've found the beauty in even these horribly painful things. They are symptoms that we've foolishly decided to treat as the real problem. The real problem is the world we've created- a world that has no place for most people. We've allowed systematic oppression to exist, where countless people are made into slaves or (in the beautifully insightful words of Anarchists) "wage slaves"- people who, in order to survive, are forced by those with power to enter into working contracts that are abusive.

But the world is changing. The only unchanging thing is change (I love the Buddhist concept of duality because it so elegantly helps to explain aparent paradoxes like this). You have no way of stopping it. We all have an innate sense of beauty- what we truly want the world to be- which, whether we care to admit it or not, exerts an attractive force on us. To resist it is futile. But we seem to have the ability to focus on different aspects of it. We all want to get to the same place, so the real question is how to get there most efficiently. This problem is referred to in graph theory as "the shortest path" problem. Sounds easy enough, right? Wrong. As the number of possible paths increases, this problem very quickly becomes larger at a rate of X^2 (so if there was 1 path, it would take 1 time step; 2 would be 4; you get it). The possible paths to this beautiful world are limitless. You do the math. So if we want to get there intact, we've got to stop being humans and become whatever the next step in the evolutionary process is (I think studying mental health, with the realization that these brain states may actually be adaptive, holds the key. But I'm a biased kid with delusions of granduer, as I imagine most people are).

If you found this helpful, please share it with other people. Ideas don't spread themselves and there are a lot of people with bipolar that are suffering right now (seems like everyone is suffering right now. This message is for non-bipolar people too).

Good talk