This is important for people to read. It explains exactly how people with bipolar people suffer: "And to do so, I ask you to imagine the unimaginable. To think the unthinkable. To experience second-degree emotional burns with third-degree prognosis. All you experience is pain, but with no cure. In fact, there is no viable treatment. You can attempt to salve it. Only death solves it. "But the medical community does not accept death as a cure. It asks us to continue to hang on and to continue to live, yet offers us no viable treatments. Trust me, it’s not that we don’t want to live. It’s that we don’t want to live ‘like this.’ Our illness is embedded in our physical bodies, our cells, we are prisoners there and our sentence is life.

This is an interesting article on alternatives or compliments to medication. Some people just don't respond to meidcation or have such terrible side effects that they're actually worse than the illness.