Mood Stabilized, Spirit Crushed
What if the rise in bipolar disorder isn't a mental health crisis, but a cultural one?
I. The Epidemic That Isn’t
Bipolar diagnoses are exploding, especially among the young. Psychiatry calls it progress—finally catching what once slipped through. But maybe it’s not progress. Maybe it’s a culture-wide nervous breakdown mislabeled as disorder.
We are not broken. We’re reacting to a world that is.
II. The Biochemical Trapdoor
You feel electric, then hollow. Psychiatry says: malfunction. Your brain is to blame. Not your job. Not your isolation. Not the meaninglessness.
So you take the label. You take the pills. You stabilize.
And under the fog, the real question fades:
Why is everyone quietly unraveling?
III. Soul Screams, Redefined as Symptoms
Mania isn’t always madness. Sometimes it’s the soul slamming the walls.
Depression isn’t always dysfunction. Sometimes it’s clarity. Refusal. A body saying: No more of this bullshit.
We didn’t treat the wound.
We tranquilized the alarm.
IV. Pharma: The New Priesthood
Bipolar is a subscription. Diagnosed young, medicated forever. Mood stabilizers. Antipsychotics. Pills for side effects from the other pills.
They promise balance.
They deliver sedation.
Not healing.
Billing.
V. Teen Collapse or Cultural Collapse?
The sharpest spike is in 15–24-year-olds. They call it a youth crisis.
But maybe the youth are the sane ones.
Crushed by debt, melting ecosystems, and curated despair.
They aren’t malfunctioning.
They’re responding.
VI. The System Must Pathologize the Rebel
Here’s the maneuver:
Despair becomes diagnosis
Rage becomes instability
Refusal becomes disorder
If your pain is valid, the system is guilty.
So it has to make you the problem.
Resistance gets rebranded as imbalance.
And then medicated.
VII. New Diagnosis: Reality Awareness
Maybe you’re not bipolar.
Maybe you’re absorbing empire’s incoherence.
Your emotions are not a glitch.
They’re protest signals.
They’re accurate readings.
We don’t need sedation.
We need ritual.
We need repair.
We need each other.
Stop calling the canaries crazy
just because the coal mine is collapsing.
Author’s Note: This piece is not medical advice. It is a cultural critique rooted in personal experience and systemic observation. The author has firsthand experience with a bipolar II diagnosis and the pharmaceutical model of treatment. This blade is not meant to invalidate anyone’s path to healing, whether through medication, therapy, or other means. It is an attempt to question the broader structures that define, label, and monetize suffering.
