People with mental illness have various levels of functioning. Sometimes a good day is when you talk in your group therapy session at the psych ward. Sometimes a good day is getting out of bed. Sometimes a good day is going to the doctor. And sometimes a good day is giving successful presentation to a bunch of executives. It varies from person to person. And while anyone can tell you to “take your meds,” that doesn’t really tell you how to get from non-functional to functional. It’s true no one has the exact answer, 33 high-functioning people with bipolar disorder identified six things that keep them moving forward.

Happy is what brings healthy, and viceversa, so it can't be that much of a surprise anxiety and depression have had some pretty rough consequences on my health; High blood pressure at 25, on-and-off flings with anemia, near-constant sleep deprivation. I may as well have an imp bouncing up and down on my kidneys whilst someone tells my nervous system to pump out all the stress hormones its got, so I can feel normal, or at least prepared. Like a Girl Scout on crack. That's PTSD hypervigilance for you. It's also that sometimes our bodies express what we are otherwise unwilling, or unable to say.

One day in 2001, I recorded in my journal: "I don't know why I am so angry." Hindsight is 20/20 (or maybe the "hindsight bias" is at play). Either way, by piecing together the evidence from my journals, I was angry because my abuser: dishonored the goals I set for myself, following only his own ignored my thoughts or feelings when planning "our" life together demanded I raise our children by his rules, as if he were their only parent and on and on... In short, I was angry because he denied that "I" existed. "I" meant so little to him that he wanted to pretend he was the only person in our "relationship".

I’ve written about what to do when your doctor gives up on you and while I consider this to be unacceptable, it does happen. And you have to deal with it. But sometimes, you need to give up on them. Sometimes you need to fire your doctor.

My therapist said to me today, "This is your recovery." Each person is unique, and that includes people with eating disorders. There may be a checklist of symptoms, but how an eating disorder manifests itself in each person is different. It is logical that each person's recovery process from an eating disorder also would be unique. Then why do I find I compare myself to others in recovery and often feel I come up lacking?

Continued from Part 1 As you may have guessed, the large dog, startled by the remote control car fast approaching it, bolted--knocking its elderly owner off her feet and dragging her along the sidewalk before she was able to regain control of it. (The only witnesses to this were the kids, the victim, and the dog--but the victim's neighbor came to our door the next day looking for the glasses she lost in the scuffle and reported she was "pretty bruised and scraped up.")

The predictability of domestic abuse is, overall, easy to see; but case-by-case, domestic abuse eruptions are unpredictable. The predictability of domestic abuse exists because you know that the abuse will happen again, following a pattern; the unpredictability is in when it will occur.

When mental illness meets recovery, does community matter? You bet it does. I just returned from a meeting with my son's new support team. This meeting was demanded by the the Wicked Witch (me, in this case), who was upset with the way the transition was handled from group home to supervised independent housing.  In the space of two weeks, I've seen signs that Ben is lost, lonely, unmotivated, forgetful, swinging from depressed to hyper, and probably not taking his meds when he can get away with it. Schizophrenia still looms underneath all the progress he's made. Back and forth went the conversation, over and over again. me: Where was the support for Ben's transition from 24/7 supervision to independent living?

Since this is a blog on “Addiction” I thought it would be important to discuss the diagnostic criteria and terminology the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) uses, because the current manual does not include the word “addiction.” The current manual uses substance abuse and substance dependence. For the definitions and criteria on what substance abuse and dependence is see here.

It is sometimes hard to maintain a positive body image and stay in recovery during the "bikini season." HealthlyPlace blogger Angela E. Lackey talks about how to stay with recovery during a time of year when people are flooded with messages about dieting and having the "perfect body." Watch here: