In simple terms, yes. I believe everyone could benefit from a good friend to talk to, someone they can bounce things off of, someone who can give them advice and direct them in the best place possible. But we can get all those things from friends' we don't have to pay, right? Wrong!
Friends are great to have, but it's really not fair to them or their own mental well-being if we are constantly bogging them down with our troubles.
Yes, I believe therapy is important & this blog post states it very fluidly. Therapy has saved my life. I highly recommend taking a read of the rest of this post. It is so honest and well thought out. Great Post.
(This is in response to a post I read. I thought about what I have done after finding out I was Bipolar and how it has effected having this knowledge.)
Bipolar as an “excuse…” I don’t try to use bipolar as an excuse but at times I know it is the reason I lose control. Since I was 19 I have been in and out of therapy for many reasons. I am pretty positive I had bipolar when I was a kid but my diagnosis was never caught until sometime in some psychiatrists office they decided I had bipolar but never bothered to tell me. They told me I had other severe diagnoses but they always seemed to leave that one off the list. Last year, I asked my most recent therapist if she could check my Mental Health charts and find out what was written down as my diagnoses. In black and white on April 20th 2011 she read out to me the list and said that I also had Bipolar Disorder. We both were shocked. She hadn’t been told before taking me on as a client and as I said no one ever told me. They did prescribe the medication for it a long while back. We are talking about double digit years. I’ve since stopped taking any psych meds recently (pyschiatrist approved) with the exception of something for anxiety and panic attacks. I hated the way they made me feel so numbed out and my mind wouldn’t function right and I felt depressed and sleepy all the time but couldn’t sleep. Since then I have been working with my therapist and reading every great book on bipolar that I have been able to find. Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison has written many and the first one I read was: “Touched With Fire.” This book is a fantastic first book to read after you are diagnosed. The author makes you feel good about yourself while she writes about all the famous creative people who had manic depression and left the world with th most magnificent art, writings and all manner of creation. And the many famous people alive today who live with Bipolar. Admittedly, living with Bipolar is not an easy life but it does have its satisfactions and fulfillments if you work with the treatments for it.
Knowing about the Bipolar has made everything make so much more sense. It has given me an anchor. I work hard on the anger that lets loose and it is extremely difficult to hold the rage back. I work hard in therapy and in my most important relationships to find some sense of control. It is easier to let loose than to hold back but I am trying to find a way to do just that. Writing helps work out my thoughts and emotions and so does talking with my therapist and partner and my doc. They are the rutter that guide me and keep me alive. Doing creative writing helps more than anything. I can focus on my characters in any story I want to give them and work on any subject. So I really try not to use Bipolar as an excuse any more than all the other mental health issues I have. It’s impossible for them not to effect all regions of my life but as I said earlier I have been working in therapy for years and with many therapists on understanding and trying to get ahold of my behavior and to understand my self. Meditation really does help to release some of the stress and music and writing mixed in, all cause an evolution in my world.
Sherry Turkle studies how technology is shaping our modern relationships: with others, with ourselves, with it.
Why you should listen to her:
Since her pathbreaking The Second Self: Computers and The Human Spirit in 1984 psychologist and sociologist Sherry Turkle has been studying how technology changes not only what we do but who we are. In 1995′s Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Turkle explored how the Internet provided new possibilities for exploring identity.
Described as “the Margaret Mead of digital cuture,” Turkle has now turned her attention to the world of social media and sociable robots. As she puts it, these are technologies that propose themselves “as the architect of our intimacies.” In her most recent book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, Turkle argues that the social media we encounter on a daily basis are confronting us with a moment of temptation. Drawn by the illusion of companionship without the demands of intimacy, we confuse postings and online sharing with authentic communication. We are drawn to sacrifice conversation for mere connection. Turkle suggests that just because we grew up with the Internet, we tend to see it as all grown up, but it is not: Digital technology is still in its infancy and there is ample time for us to reshape how we build it and use it.
Turkle is a professor in the Program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT and the founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self.
“What technology makes easy is not always what nurtures the human spirit.”
Sherry Turkle
