I've had years to get used to carrying the weight of the BP label on my back and had begun to find that it wasn't that arduous a task, with acceptance yielding an understanding rather than the other way around. However, following my last inpatient stay, I am now once again questioning the diagnosis.
It is the heavily subjective aspect of the diagnosis which I am particularly calling into question this time. Don't get me wrong - it is not my actual psychiatrist as I fully appreciate him and over the last 5 years have built a solid relationship with him, but I can't help but think how it is one persons' thoughts alone which have led to me carrying this burden, crippled on some days, some weeks, with the weight that comes from bipolarity.
Apart from the odd questionnaire and self-reflection, it is a diagnosis which is completely subjective in it's nature, with all scientific aspects of the dis-ease which bipolar creates being obliterated when it comes to the diagnosis itself.
In a period of my life when I am questioning the preliminary diagnosis, which just so happened to determine the rest of my life, I also call into question the metastatic attributes that go along with being diagnosed - that is the medication and indeed the constant medication 'tweaks', the therapy, the familial strife and hardship, the fiscal side of things, not to mention the seed of a question as to 'who am I now?'.
A woman who was before all this, self assured, career motivated, unbelievably pointed in her decision making and confident, yet whom is now questioning her very being and what that represents is finding it now an extremely arduous task to accept that one mans' words have changed the rest of her life. That one mans words 'You have BP disorder' can mutate her very future and thus demoralize her human spirit as she once knew it is a frightening yet realistic occurrence.
A professional scientist, I crave the analysis of a situation for 'there can be no grey in a world of black and white'. Analyses brings understanding, talking about something which is biochemically based does not - it merely gives us a temporary relief on the outside for something which is fundamentally charged at a molecular level. In a world of scrutiny where we constantly search for an unrivaled understanding of everything which surrounds us, then why is the world of scientific mental health so under populated and direly understood. Why do we accept the constant subjectivity of the majority of diagnoses - because there is no fight against it. In a world of technology and electronics with the availability of MRI and PET scans of the human brain, why do we not fight more for such an understanding or our very selves when this is the understanding which does exist on lower animal models?
Money is the reason, at least where I am situated in the world. In a world which until a year ago was still in a financial boom, still sucking money from each and every one of us with each and every one of us glad to be part of the boom, why did we not stand back; stand up, against this world of subjectivity and revolt into a world of objectivity.
The objectivity is the know, the subjectivity is the want to know the what...
Nut.
The subjectiveness of the label 
