I took Thorazine once when a schizophrenic friend insisted I find out how debilitating it was. I couldn't function, and had to go to bed for 24 hours. It was horrible. Maybe it's better than paranoid schizophrenia and thinking you are being eaten by demons. Bipolar disorder doesn't often present the extreme collapse of connection to reality that schizophrenia does, but it can be accompanied by a fugue state in which the manic person becomes amnesiac and sometimes violent, although that is rare.

Fortunately, bipolar disorder can be controlled with little or no loss of "normal personality" or attachment to reality.

You have to be tough to face some of those problems, and to get through them. Many don't make it. It's not their fault, it's the hand they were dealt at birth.