NeuroTalk Support Groups - Stronger Than We Seem: from McMan's Depression and Bipolar Web

http://www.mcmanweb.com/article63.htm
I was reading about work and bipolar.
Here is an excerpt:

Quote:

In 1999, a past president of the American Psychological Association and Stanford University professor, Dr Albert Bandura, attacked his own peers: "The field of psychology is plagued by a chronic condition of negativity regarding human development and functioning," he said in a speech to the APA.

"People have the power to influence what they do and to make things happen," he went on to say. That he felt compelled to state the obvious speaks volumes for the misperceptions that pass for wisdom in the mental health profession.

Marsha Langer Ellison PhD and Zlatka Russinova PhD of the Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation at Boston University had this to say about their professional brethren:

"Professionals in the mental health system, employers, and the general public often cast a dispirited and pessimistic eye to those who have a severe mental illness and yet aspire to careers as professionals or managers. People with psychiatric conditions often talk about how they have heard that they will 'never work again,' or that they must resign themselves to the simplest, least rewarding, and lowest paying work."

Even those who occupy the rehabilitative end of the field, the authors note, peg their clients into low wage and menial work, the three f's: "food, filth, and filing."

It's as if the professions are more depressed than their own patients. That need not be the case. In an article commenting on Jay Neugeboren's "Transforming Madness," this writer observed:

"Eventually, over the long term, most of us do improve. Our brains are not simply genetically hardwired to keep us in one state of mind the rest of our lives.

Citing famed neurologists, Neugeboren writes of the plasticity of the nervous system and the brain's unending capability to remap its seemingly limitless neuronal pathways. 'All experience,' he says, 'can transform the ways in which the brain is constructed and functions.

. . . . .

The study surveyed 500 professionals and managers, all with serious mental illness, and showed that 73 percent were able to achieve full-time employment in occupations that ranged from nurses to lawyers and CEOs.

An additional six percent were self-employed. Sixty-nine percent increased their responsibilities since starting their jobs, and more than 20 percent earned more than $50,000 a year

. . . .

Not all of us, of course, are able to return to work. Sometimes, the only criteria of success we have is our own self-knowledge, of what we are up against and our own heroic efforts in fighting back.

Mentally ill? Perhaps. Mentally tough? The rest of the world can't even begin to imagine.