Me and My Mood Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Part 1

Several years ago, I was diagnosed with a Mood Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, which kind of surprised me at the time since the Moods in question were always Pretty Damn Specific, if not Predictable, Appropriate, or Pleasant.

What it basically means is that, if I'm unmedicated, my mood swings from depressed to manic to various places in between and back again completely detached from the actual circumstances of my life. My highs don't go quite as high as someone with full-blown Bipolar Disorder would (if it were up to me, I'd live my entire life in my manic zone, even though my wife would probably be forced to kill me after a couple days for the sake of her own sanity), and I have other moods that don't really fit on either end of a scale, like "agitated" (manic but irritable), "cranky" (depressed but energetic), and "WHARRGARBL".

Wharrgarbl.

You can think of me as Bipolar But With Longer, Gentler Swings, or as Depressive With Occasional Highs. Or, as most people thought of me before I was diagnosed, Weird.

One of the dirty little secrets of modern psychiatry is that they don't really make diagnoses the way other doctors can; they don't really have diagnoses. They have categories. When a doctor says "you have strep", there's a strep virus he can point on a big picture on a flipchart with one of those metal pointing things, and lo, that's what's wrong with you. The fever, sore throat, et. al. are symptoms. They can be markers of the underlying condition, they can help your doctor figure out what the underlying condition is, but they're the effect, not the cause. Although it annoyed my psychiatrist no end when I pointed this out, neuroscience is very much in it's infancy, and psychiatry is in many ways still a "Black Box" endeavor. In other words, they toss a few pills into the Black Box that is your neurological/system, shake it around a bit, see if it works or not, change up meds, and try again until they get a result they can live with. There's a reason I have a Mood Disorder instead of a Mood Disease; they don't quite know what my disease is, yet. There is no blood test for depression.

Oh, if only we knew. If only.

Mind you, they're working on it, which is great, but until they suss out the underlying causes, the way they figure out whether you've got a mental illness or not is in many ways subjective. The dividing line between a mental illness and what we call, oh, a "personality"?

Is it interfering with your life?

Or, as Peter D. Kramer noted about Sarah Palin's supposed "Narcissistic Personality Disorder", "If a personality style gets you a devoted husband, admiring children, a loyal circle of friends, a governorship, and a vice-presidential nomination, can we really call it a disorder?"

In any case, my Mood Disorder was definitely interfering with mine. Thankfully, they have a pill for that, now. But more of that anon.

Next time, I'll tackle the dualistic mind/body divide in Western thought and why my Mood Disorder has caused me to conclude that it's total bullshit. Or, "Why I Want to Cockpunch Aristotle for More Than Just Poetics."

-- The Prolix Wag
It's called erudition. Look it up.