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Comment by adrianbye | Hacker News Reader

what is ignored (thanks to psychiatry being left wing, and trying to mitigate the downside rather than build on the upside) is that bipolar brings a lot of BENEFITS. when bipolar people are very hyper, they can achieve great things.

thats the reason why people with bipolar usually don't want to be medicated - the highs bring genius.. the problem are the lows which follow it.

average people don't make the big breakthroughs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_bipolar_dis...

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This doesn't sound like you're talking from personal experience.

Saying that the highs bring genius is a gross simplification.

Yes, manic episodes can provide productivity boosts and huge amounts of energy but it doesn't have to go much further before it becomes impossible to complete a thought let alone a sentence, where you cannot sit still, where your judgement is severely impaired or you're suffering psychoses.

None of these symptoms (and there are many more) are particularly conducive to productive work, let alone breakthroughs.

try this link: http://phys.org/news184573059.html

(PhysOrg.com) -- The Greek philosopher Aristotle once said "there is no great genius without a mixture of madness," and now there is some scientific evidence that there is a link between mania and high IQ and creativity, since a study of over 700,000 subjects showed those who scored the highest grades were almost four times more likely to develop bipolar disorder in their adult lives than those scoring average grades.

It's not like that, at all. Depressed or overly happy, I'm not productive, I just lose time doing nothing usefull, nor correct... But while stable, I van achieve very nice stuff pretty fast, because I van use my obsessive side tout good end. Trust me, being high or low is as destructive as the other, for you, your project and the people around you.

I know three bipolar people, and all of them take meds because they don't like what happens when they're off meds.

In bipolar disorder, depressive episodes are much more common than manic episodes. They get high , but they suffer much more than they gain from their illness and AFAIK, bipolar depression is much worse than usual unipolar depression and much much worse than depression caused by life events.

I'm not aware of any conclusive research showing that depression is more common than mania although people are more likely to seek treatment when depressed than when they're manic.

I also struggle to believe that there is any evidence to support your claim that depression as experienced by somebody who is bipolar is worse than somebody who is unipolar which is again worse than depression caused by life events.

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