I'm a regular reader of HN and a sometimes commenter. My other account is over 1100 days old. I'm going to write this anonymously because the content is otherwise not well linked to my online profile.

I started writing this in response to @Gibbon1's comment: Might be people suffering an episode of mania in a rural area pass unnoticed by the various authorities.

Which raises the question: which is better, to be noticed by the authorities, or to have your episode of mania / psychosis, and then return to your (slightly more?) centre way of being?

Presumably once you've had one episode that gets noticed by the authorities you then probably get 'treatment'. Yet do we even know what these conditions really are, and do the treatments work? If the definition of the treatment worked is that the person is too dulled or numbed to function well enough to have another episode then, in my opinion, we aren't really treating the condition, we don't understand it well enough to heal it.

The troubling thing is when the episode results in harm, or risk of harm, to others. With reference @Hydraulix989 comment, perhaps the ominous house up the road is a better place to be an in a city crawling with cops and psychiatrists. There are, or tend to be?, fewer 'services' for mental in rural areas, but maybe that's a good thing because I'm not convinced who the services serve.

Urban mental health services are a form of institutionalisation of people with mental health issues. The overwhelming dogma of the medical field is that mental health needs treatment of some sort. More recently we're seeing that treatment can include things like dietary or gut flora therapy, relaxation meditation, that sort of thing.

I was adopted, I met my biological parents when I was 22. Biological father went to high security prison for a home invasion and drug dealing / growing pot, biological mother lost access to her children for a good deal of time due to her wayward lifestyle. I ended up being charged with drug trafficking myself, and only just avoided a sentence when the charges were dropped due to the police's illegal methods. I have a couple of assault charges up my sleeve. I've experienced several 6 month periods of injecting methamphetamine 4 days out of 7, and longer periods of lesser usage. This one time I stayed awake for 6 days, my housemate was awake for 7 days. I have seen my own child a handful of times since it was born.

I've always made it a point to be very careful who I talk to about my internal experience, you don't want to reveal that sort of thing to the wrong sort of people and end up on a court ordered medication program. Ordinarily I'm quite normal and well behaved.

Through a set of pretty terrible circumstances I've moved away from the city I lived in, stopped contact with almost everyone I knew, and now live in a smaller city where I've had a stable well paying job for nearly 3 years, have had pre-approval for finance to purchase a house, and just put in an offer to buy a place. I would hope that, rather than end up on medication, or in a cycle of treatment and poverty, I become that ominous house up the road - I think that would be a better outcome for me. But perhaps I can live a relatively normal life if I make the enough of the right choices enough of the time.

I'm lucky that, given regular sleep, good nutrition, and plenty of exercise, and having avoided all of the doctors medications, and never spent a day in psychiatric care or prison, nor suicided, I can maintain my composure fairly indefinitely, I hope.

I'm not very good at intimate relationships, they seem to be a trigger for, or lead to a set of circumstances where I become unhinged, and having written all of this down for the first time I think I'm going to make a commitment to stay out of them.