Bush Blog I: Planning, Plodding, Imploding.

The author at his job. Photo credit P Douglas.

Introducing the blog: a space for me to easily share news, progress, thoughts, and stories. This first entry covers important news regarding a change of speed and direction for KindBipolar in 2019 and 2020.

Blog from the Bush

As some of the readers might know, KindBipolar is a passion and a calling for me, but my day job is in conservation ecology. This means that I am often working in remote, wild, and stunningly beautiful landscapes far from home. At times the wilderness locations I work in can prevent me from progressing KindBipolar due to a lack of internet or computer access. To manage this I try to do ‘planning’ in the wild and accomplish the ‘plodding’ (i.e. actually producing content) when back in civilisation.

The first half of 2019 has seen me spending more time in the wilderness than last year, which has sometimes made me feel like I am ‘imploding’ from a lack of opportunity to work on KindBipolar. On the positive side, I have had a lot of time to think and plan. KindBipolar exists to be useful. I am always trying to think of the most useful contribution I can make to the global conversation on mental illness. The conclusion I have reached is that I currently don’t have anywhere near enough ‘free’ time in my week to contribute everything that I want to on the topic of bipolar disorder.

In acknowledgement of the current situation I make the following announcements:

KindBipolar will become my full time work in 2020. The only way to get more time is to make more time. In the first half of 2020 I will transition into working on KindBipolar full time. This will increase the productivity of the website tenfold and enable high quality research and development. Readers will notice an increase of publication from once every 2-3 months to once every 1-2 weeks. It will also enable me to produce more location-specific resources like podcasts and videos.
The rest of 2019 will be used to plan a sustainable transition. KindBipolar needs to be useful, productive, accessible, sustainable, and kind. We cannot increase productivity without dedicating more time and money. To meet this challenge we will be spending the remainder of 2019 developing a sustainable business plan and funding model. Accessibility will be at the core of this model so we are planning to attract outside investment to meet our financial needs.
KindBipolar has begun investment into research and development. We are working on a daily diagnostic tool for bipolar disorder. You can think of it like a GPS for mental health. To do this we have partnered with a couple of wonderful (and extremely clever) software developers to make it a reality. This is the first significant R&D partnership that KindBipolar has undertaken, so it is very exciting.

Views from the wilderness of Aotearoa. Photo by the author.

KB 2017 to 2020.

I made this website in 2017 to develop ideas and experiences for a book about living with bipolar disorder. But the more I thought about life with bipolar the more fascinated I became with possibilities to treat the illness. I think there are six broad avenues for increasing bipolar wellness: medication, psychotherapy, education (including management strategies), technology, environment (including culture), and relationships (especially the one we have with ourselves).

Our goal is to develop education resources, bipolar management strategies, and digital tools to increase wellness. Our focus is on: reducing the severity of bipolar symptoms, relapse prevention strategy, and high-quality decision making during a bipolar episode. The theory is that there are more things people can do for themselves that will increase their mental well-being. Two examples of this from my own life are ramping up from depression and bailing out of mania. Techniques like these can be complementary to current treatment, leading to better outcomes.