If you’ve made it this far, you probably don’t need to be told that bipolar disorder is a devastating disease. To be a victim of bipolar depression is to be caught forever between two emotional extremes, a withering low on the one hand and a terrifying high on the other. Bipolar sufferers, in other words, live in a psychological world that is largely beyond their control…and so it’s perhaps no surprise that so many of them turn to drugs and alcohol as a way to ease their anxiety and dull their pain. The obvious corollary, of course, is that meaningful addiction recovery can’t occur unless a patient’s underlying bipolar disorder is properly addressed.

The best rehab programs are those which promote holistic healing. If you’re going to get better in a substance abuse treatment center, you’re going to have to get all-the-way better, in body as well as in mind. No victim of bipolar disorder can get sober without first achieving meaningful emotional healing. That’s simply not the way recovery works. For your own sake, don’t force yourself to learn that lesson the hard way.

The worst thing about depression? Nothing. Nothing at all. And that’s what’s so utterly awful about the thing.

Depression is a subtle disease. You never really know it’s there; there’s nothing to indicate that there’s actually anything wrong with you…except for the fact that you can hardly stand to get out of bed in the morning, or leave the house during the day, or do much of anything at all that might distinguish you as a Normal and Functional human being.

And over it all: Nothing. It’s got to be You, you figure: The problem has got be You, because it can’t just be Nothing. Depression is so hard to live with, and so hard to overcome, precisely because it doesn’t exist as a palpable or identifiable thing. Depression exists in, takes its shape from the Nothing. When you’re depressed, that Nothing becomes you: in every moment, in every way.

And believe me, nothing…Nothing…could ever be worse than that.