This started out as a linkdump for bipolar depression and fatigue but there’s also a discussion of why I no longer trust the Huffington Post’s health section, too.

This person really gets bipolar fatigue and has some things to try

This article was a bit more general but there are things I haven’t tried here that might combat fatigue (and some here that I’ve tried for insomnia, ironically, so I guess I should try and do all the things that didn’t work to fix my insomnia).

Forum discussion with no real answers but more people experiencing the same thing… which makes me feel like less of a failure at life right now.

This interesting article outlines the actual stages of bipolar depression and how the lack of energy progresses.

This article has some basic information about bipolar disorder and energy levels, which is something I had inferred but not seen information on anywhere else.

And the Huffington Post has started losing the plot (and any credibility it may have had) by posting badly researched articles written by people who might have credentials, but who don’t actually know what they’re talking about.
In this article, an MD claims Lithium is an antidepressant with anticholinergic properties. It’s interesting because he also omits promethazine, a classic and popular anticholinergic, and acrivastine (an antihistamine which I don’t think has anticholinergic properties but I’m not sure), from any of his long lists of drugs. I can only conclude this article is aimed at sensationalizing and scaring people into booking a doctor’s appointment for a medication review. Remember, boys and girls, your pharmacist knows more about drugs than your doctor and their advice is free.

The other bipolar-related article that was very badly written in the Huffington Post’s health section was this one. I don’t know if the author wrote that book review and convinced someone with HufPo credentials to post it for her, or if Huffington Post just lets anyone write for them these days, but the way this article was written, like the person hadn’t actually read the book but was still trying to sell it to me — badly — really bugged me. Especially annoying were the same-sentence repetitions of redundant adjectives, making the descriptions grating and unhelpful.

I got to the end of this review of “The Other Side of Bipolar” with no real sense of whether the book was any good, and I realized that, amidst all the PR freebies and samples sent to writers and bloggers, something very important has been lost from reviews; critical open mindedness. It used to be that bloggers and journalists would look at the pros and cons of something, that is actually the point of writing a review, and nowadays, they just seem to be reams and reams of description that don’t really tell you what’s good or bad about the item. They’re just more adverts.

When I find a news source or blog that writes balanced, FAIR but critical articles, I subscribe to them and I read and trust what they say. When I read a blog that only focusses on the good or the bad points of any given object or event or person, every single time they write, I don’t like reading it because the writer’s bias prevents me from getting the information that I’m looking for. The Huffington Post is now firmly in this camp. They polarize things too much and they never used to, but now I no longer trust them to write informative and authoritative articles on bipolar disorder — or anything else.