Last night my wife and I watched Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking – the HBO film version of her solo Broadway performance based on her book of the same title. In Wishful Drinking, Fisher recounts the emotional ups and downs of her childhood and career and her struggles with depression and mania, all in a very humorous way.

One thing that struck me, and I’ve noticed this in other situations, is that families are often pretty screwed up and sometimes it’s the most “normal” person in the family, the one who seems to really have it all together, takes the hit and ends up with the bipolar label. Then the family treats that person as the crazy one – the problem. I can’t claim that this is usually how it plays out, but I’ve observed it in a couple cases.

About a year ago, a friend of a friend of mine from Slovenia, Helena Smole, sent me her book, Balancing the Beast: A Bright View of Schizoaffective Disorder – Bipolar or Manic-Depressive Type.

I tend to drag my feet when asked to do book reviews, and I was turned off by the use of the phrase “mental patient” on the cover (in a quote from someone other than Helen Smole, but it still made me hesitant to read the book).

Well, I finally recovered from my knee-jerk reaction and read the book. I’m glad I did.

I know this is Bipolar Beat and not ADHD Beat, but a close colleague of mine just published a book that I think is one of the best for helping families deal with ADHD, and I wanted to post about it to spread the word.

Mark Bertin MD is the author of The Family ADHD Solution (Palgrave Macmillan) which blends the science of ADHD and brain development into remarkably powerful tools for families and children living with this disorder. ADHD is a common and enormously challenging neurological disorder of the brain that disrupts children’s’ and family’s lives every day. In the first part of the book, Dr. Bertin presents the most current scientific understanding of ADHD in an accessible, useful discussion – efficiently cutting through a lot of the misunderstandings and distortions that surround this diagnosis.

Without my battle with manic depression I would still be that fear-driven little boy, unable to truly give, or receive, love. Manic Depression was a gift….

… Invisible Driving by Alistair McHarg… a captivating novel is his autobiographical account of surviving his third major manic episode.

I just finished reading Bi-Polar Expedition by Neil Walton (Chipmunka Publishing, 2007), and I must admit it was a very gripping read for me. I found it astounding that the paranoid delusions and hallucinations that Mr. Walton experienced during his manic highs so closely resembled my own imaginings.

After reading other bipolar memoirs and descriptions of people’s manic experiences, I guess these are recurring themes. How odd though, I think, that people from such different walks of life, education and socio-economic backgrounds, even gender (male or female) should experience the same types of far-fetched fantasies in our hyped-up minds.