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We don't have many psychiatrists here but every one of them took time to come to our meetings and speak on a different topic. At those meetings we often had one hundred or more people in attendance. I was with the group for two years and near the end of that time my illness became very unstable. In 1994 I had lost a close friend and group member to suicide (see Jeff's story under Collie in the About Us section). I was in and out of hospital most of 1995...spending 3 months one time, eight weeks another etc. My doctor determined that I would never return to work. He also strongly advised that I not return to the support group because he felt that I was allowing myself to be under too much stress. All of that was fine with me though because I had lost all desire to go anywhere outside of my own home. In 1996 I got my first computer!!!! I met many other people with bipolar disorder on the "net" by visiting message boards, making friends, and emailing back and forth with them. I "surfed" constantly for information on the internet and was amazed at what I found. It wasn't long before I was thinking about trying to do a web site of my own. I knew nothing about HTML language and next to nothing about design, but my office skills were still sharp. I decided that the internet had as many Bipolar Disorder web sites as it could handle and I launched my small web site "Psychiatric Drugs and Weight Control" at Geocities...this was a subject I was, and still am very interested in. There is only so much can be said about this topic though...I became partners with a friend Dave on a bulletin board where we worked for a year....but I still wasn't satisfied. I finally decided that I wanted a general Bipolar Disorder web site that would combine warm and friendly support with information about the illness, I had learned a lot about programs and graphics and it was time for Bipolar World to be born. On April 12, 1999 Bipolar World was opened at Virtualave.net and it grew from a few pages to the over 250 pages we have here now. The site you are seeing right now is a complete overhaul of the previous site and is due to be launched about September 5, 2000. |