Joe Kraynak

New Bipolar Blog on Psych Central - Bipolar Beat

July 16, 2008 on 12:31 pm | In Uncategorized |

Anyone who knows me well is aware that my family has been living with bipolar disorder for nearly a decade. My wife, Cecie, was first diagnosed in 1999 and has had quite a journey trying to discover the right combination of doctor, therapist, and medications to stabilize her moods.

When I first heard the term “bipolar disorder,” I did what I normally do when I’m totally ignorant of something I need to know about - I headed to the bookstore, purchased every book I could find on the subject, and spent every spare moment reading them. I learned a great deal, but none of the books provided me with everything I needed to know about bipolar disorder and what I could do to help.

I thought I could write something better, so in 2005, I pitched the idea of doing Bipolar Disorder For Dummies to an acquisitions editor I knew at John Wiley & Sons, Mikal Belicove. He proceeded to search for and find a suitable co-author for me - someone infinitely more qualified than I was to hand out advice about bipolar - Dr. Candida Fink MD (FinkShrink.com). She had plenty of experiencing diagnosing and treating bipolar disorder in her patients and had already co-authored a book on bipolar disorder in children and teens called The Ups and Downs of Raising a Bipolar Child. She also grew up with bipolar disorder in her family and has a great sense of humor.

A couple years after Bipolar Disorder For Dummies arrived in bookstores, we decided to do our own blog to promote the book. On June 18, 2007, we launched our Bipolar Blog. Now, as anyone in the publishing biz knows, waiting two years to start promoting your book is kind of dumb, but we had a “better late than never” philosophy and figured that our new blog would help us deliver fresh information to the bipolar community and give us a head start should we ever have the opportunity to do a 2nd edition of the book (or some other project).

Recently, John M. Grohol, Psy.D., CEO & Publisher of PsychCentral.com, “discovered” our blog, liked it, and appreciated the way we handled the topic of bipolar disorder in Bipolar Disorder For Dummies. He was in the process of recruiting qualified professionals to blog on specific mental health related topics on his Web site and offered us the opportunity to create and host Psych Central’s bipolar blog. We accepted the offer and have chosen to call our new blog Bipolar Beat. Here, we will be posting articles and insights on topics of interest to those in the bipolar community – people with bipolar disorder and their loved ones, physicians, psychiatrists, therapists, and anyone else who’s interested in learning more about bipolar disorder.

While readers of Bipolar Disorder For Dummies and visitors to our blog are no doubt on their own bipolar journeys, Candida and I have had our own journey of discovery related to both bipolar disorder and blogging. We invite you to explore what we’ve discovered by visiting Bipolar Beat and Bipolar Blog and to share what you discovered with us and with the community we are working to build.