Aside: If you are a person who uses the word "bipolar" as a synonym for moody or indecisive, I hope reading this will help you understand what actual bipolar mania looks like.
For reference: I've never had a mania or true low since working with it this way, and if I did I would immediately seek a medicated solution knowing the severity of the situation. But, I've managed to hold a full time job, excel my career more than I thought possible, and generally be quite well physically professionally and mentally without it.
The important lesson is that, if a treatment isn't working for you, then you should try something else. My first psychiatrist was extremely hostile to the idea of me switching drugs, so I concluded that all psychiatrists were useless. In retrospect he was wrong, because switching to Seroquel was a good idea for me, and I wouldn't have tried it if I didn't fire him.
I am now on Abilify and it's no worse than slugging back a coffee.
Depakote, yuck. Gain weight, feel like shit. Or others that remove all desire (except hunger).
It's sad that medicine currently has no attractive offers for strong mental disorders like this.
You are right that many of the medications have serious side effects. There are certainly better choices now than in the past, but there's plenty of room for improvement.
Actual mania (not hypomania) is usually more unpleasant, from what I've seen. (I know quite a few people who've had it.) The stereotype is that the happy mania is the "normal" mania, but the anxious, angry, or psychotic versions are more common. I also think (although phren0logy is going to know a lot more about this than I do) that it's very rare for a person to have only the "happy" mania, unless you're talking about mild hypomania that might not even be classified as bipolar (I tend to think of BP as a spectrum and think that 10-20% of people are "on the spectrum", but that's not the same thing as having BP1 or BP2).
I've only had one actual manic episode (almost a decade ago) and my current doctor's pretty confident that I wouldn't be classified as bipolar based on recent and current state... but the one manic episode that I had was awful and I'll never forget it. There were flashes of the "happy" mania, but it was mostly anger and anxiety, with not a small number of panic attacks.
Impaired judgment. The 'godlike feeling' results in thinking you cannot fail, and therefore in making decisions that are not even remotely prudent. For example, I know someone who, during a manic episode, tried to buy a limo off of ebay.
From what I understand, the deep depression isn't actually all that dangerous -- you don't care enough to do any active harm. The climb out of depression, where the emotional funk is still present and there's sudden volition, is most dangerous from a suicide perspective. The peak of mania, where you're unstoppable and fearless and possibly thrill-seeking, is almost as dangerous.
Borderline Personality Disorder is probably going to change to Emotionally Unstable PD. It's a controversial diagnosis which results in a bunch of stigma. (Not just from the wider population but also MH professionals too.) the document "meeting the challenge, making a difference" from UK NHS describes modern best practice for personality disorder, and the problems the illness, and the diagnosis, cause. The old name borderline comes because it was thought to be sub-threshold psychosis style illness. We know now that's wrong.
The bi in bi polar just means "more than one" - so someone does not have just mania or just depression.
I agree that the jargon being similar to everyday words is problematic. There are very many examples. (Recovery, in England "low secure unit" (which actually have higher levels of security than most MH units) etc etc).
Polar=extreme,
So bipolar means "two extremes", and the question is how does one transition between them-- continuously varying across the gamut, or discretely jumping.
People use "psycho" to mean "violent". Psycho is close to psychotic, and you sometimes see people use psychotic to mean violent. This ignores the fact that people with psychosis are overwhelmingly not a danger to other people. The psycho there refers to psychopath, which is now rolled into the list of different personality disorders.
I think that this is harmful. When people see someone having a psychotic episode in public they'll call the police. If they saw someone having a cardiac arrest or epileptic fit they'd call an ambulance. The police are probably not trained to deal with people who have a mental illness, which results in some police shootings of people with mental illness. (About half the people shot and killed by police each year are people with a mental illness. Since we know that violence is not more prevalent in people with a diagnosis this demonstrates huge over-representation).
I had a bad reaction to it ("zombification," as we call it), but it has clearly helped so many.
Over my lifetime, depression has become something you can talk about without too much stigma (though perhaps not completely), but these other illnesses have a long way to go. "My boss is bipolar." "The weather is bipolar." OCD is similarly treated like a big joke, and not the devastating illness it can be.
I wish I could explain to people what it's like to be bipolar. The biggest problem you have is that the feelings of hopelessness, exhaustion, and despair seem to you to be caused by a lack of hope, laziness, and the fact that everything is dark. The feelings of elation, invincibility, the thought that you've "figured it all out, and all the energy just mean that things are going really well -- maybe that you're not bipolar at all! And if you're experiencing "negative mania" (angry, irritable, etc.), well, then it's whatever in front of you that's causing that, not your brain.
And this is coming from someone who knows they have this illness. You just can't see it while you're having it. It's only when it's over that you finally see how screwed up you were, and for many people, there are jobs, relationships, and finances left in ruins for you to sort through.
What's worst of all is that even the people closest to you can have a lot of trouble understanding it. Why can't you just snap out of it? Get out of bed? Why can't you see that that project is, um, a little nuts? But we just can't.
And then even when the medication works, we live in constant fear that it's going to come around again. A lot of us are deeply traumatized by manic episodes (it only takes one). It's like we're watching and waiting for it to happen again. "I feel fine now (or do I)?"
The end of that article really gets to the heart of that last bit. Totally heartbreaking.