Bipolar Makes People Perfect

I noticed it when I was first diagnosed, but have been watching the phenomenon ever since. I have seen it happen in so many people that it might be true in three quarters of the cases. What is even more amazing is how fast it happens. Bipolar may be the fastest path to perfection known to man!

I have been working on more thorough assessment programs for my new book and think that I have found a breakthrough. Through the assessments I have it traced to the exact moment that it happens. I wonder if you can help me verify my research with your own experiences and share your ideas on how to improve upon it?

As soon as we are diagnosed, everyone else becomes perfect! All of their flaws are instantly wiped clean and every relationship problem is blamed on our illness. Now that we are deemed crazy, our behaviors are purely a result of our illness and have nothing to do with the behaviors of those around us. Has this happened to you too?

What really brought it out was when I started testing assessments designed for friends and family members. I originally thought that such an assessment would be a way for them to help us to see things about ourselves that we could not. I had already been testing a self-assessment tool that is much more refined than the simple ones you usually find on the internet and thought that the questions for friends and family would be similar, but from a different point of view. The questions revolved around what they noticed about the bipolar person. I hoped involving those around us in the assessment would bring up things that even the doctors were missing.

The tests proved much more insightful than I had expected. I found the assessors were often blind to their own roles in the problem. They had become perfect and saw everything as an issue for the bipolar person to address, but none of their own role in their problems. It made me change the assessment in fundamental ways.

The assessment now asks the friends and family members about their own issues first. Only after that do the questions target the bipolar person. This minor change made the friends and family assessment the powerful tool that I was hoping for.

But it can be much better. With your help we can come up with questions to ask that will help us all to grow. What do you think we should be asking our friends and family that will help us to gain insight about our own condition while helping them to be more aware of their own?