Welcome to the Jungle

welcome to the jungleSince Welcome to the Jungle is a book about bipolar written for young adults. And since most people are diagnosed with bipolar as young adults, often thrown into a world of confusingly contradictory information, needing to suddenly understand a complicated condition, and make important self care decisions, when they have only recently started living independently, we thought this book could play an important role in our work. We asked one of our young, newly diagnosed, bipolar patients to read it and share her thoughts….

I was not a huge fan of this book. For the most part I felt like the author was trying to be funny. I can’t say that I relate to most of the things she talked about. She goes into great depths about the temptation to go off meds and that’s not something that has truly crossed my mind. I guess I have been warned that in the future this is something that I might encounter.

I wish this book had been more helpful on the subject of depression. It seems that the author hasn’t struggled with a depression of the magnitude of the one I’m facing. She has recommendations like “Make a depression playlist,” but she forgets that when you are depressed music has no meaning so having a playlist doesn’t help.

This book was comprehensive in dealing with all the aspects of bipolar including suicidal thoughts. She quotes a statistic that is quite scary: 50% of people with bipolar attempt suicide Although she warns not to take the statistic too seriously, it made me feel pessimistic about my situation. I wonder how long it will be until I attempt suicide.

I can’t say I feel wiser about bipolar after reading this book. A lot of it feels like it is written from the perspective of someone who hasn’t really been through what I’m going through and that, in particular, is why I couldn’t relate.

The review highlights one of the daunting aspects of writing a book about bipolar, it is not the same condition for everyone who has it, and how to write a book that is both helpful enough to be worth reading, and yet general enough to speak to all of the different presentations of bipolar we see…

Hopefully this site, is part of an answer to that dilemma, since you can search for posts on many different topics…