Dont throw the word ‘bipolar’ around

Ms Bipolar - Mental Health beautiful people

It’s tempting, isn’t it? Automatic almost. The go-to word you want (and will) use for someone who is in a good mood one day and in a bad mood the next. A mood-shifter in a matter of minutes. I know it’s tempting, I’ve used the word myself, and I felt like the hugest hypocrite in the world!.

The word itself defines an illness — one that can be earth-shaking, mind-twisting, trouble-making and at times uncontrollable.

Yes, the illness can convince you out of a happy and healthy life.

Being bipolar can make a person seem to have split personalities or to be high one minute, low the next. But whenever I have heard “bipolar” used out of context, it is not labelling an actual person with the condition. It is labelling someone who is a terror one day, and then a saint the next.

The concern is not that calling a person “bipolar” is an insult to people who are bipolar. It is that people who wrongly use the term are transforming the term “bipolar” into an insult. It is always used negatively. “She’s always in a bad mood. Oh, she must be bipolar or something.” (A sentence often followed by laughter.) “He’s bipolar. He’s happy one day, then, angry the next”

Anyone can get carried away with the use of catchy phrases. . If he or she actually did struggle with bipolar disorder and you joke, “Are you like bipolar or something?” What then? You don’t know if that person is barely holding on to every little bit they can, in order not to crumble.

I am writing in hopes people refrain from using a term that can prove dangerous if said to or around the wrong person. A term that can hurt or harm. A term that gets under my skin sometimes and makes me shake my head and makes me hope they are teaching kids about mental illness in schools these days.

Love Ms Bipolar x

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