Bipolar Village
Together at the Poles

A New Start: “Bipolar Today” Becomes “Bipolar Village”

Published March 31, 2013 | By Daniel Bader, Ph.D.

I haven’t had a lot of time to work on the site in this last school year, and so I spent some time thinking of what I wanted to do with Bipolar Today. I decided that, in the end, I wanted to transform the site into something new.

Simply put, having the site take off on Facebook like it did last summer radically changed the site from being one where I was writing into the ether, to one where a thousand people were reading what I was writing each week. This certainly affected the kind of effort I put into the writing. More importantly, though, the site started to morph into a community, with people developing relationships, contributing, and supporting each other and me.

Truth be told, I wasn’t ready for the transformation. It was a rough summer to begin with, and I knew I was going back to school in the fall. When the summer ended, I put the site on hiatus.

Village Sidewalk

Dreamstime

However, the more I thought about it, the more I think it’s definitely the natural place for Bipolar Today to go…turning into a community of people with bipolar disorder and their supporters. More than anything, the wonderful (and somewhat scary) changes of last summer showed me that an online community can be something very helpful, and it is something to which I wish to contribute. Now, of course, I’ve got the entire infrastructure for this in place.

So, now that the school year is over, I thought I’d work directly on this. This summer, what was “Bipolar Today” will be more focused on being a community effort with artwork and guest posts and, I hope, eventually member editorship and moderation. This will, I think, really bring out the strongest parts of last summer’s changes; it can be a place to which we can all contribute and share.

To honor all of this, I decided to retitle the site to “Bipolar Village.” I’m a grass-rootsy type, and the idea of a “village” really strikes me as the best way of thinking about a community: people who spend their time together, co-operate with each other, but haven’t instrumentalized each other. It really captured everything I like about peer movements, and so I decided to use the name.

All the old blog posts have migrated over here, along with the gallery and the guest posts, of course. The old news section, since it doesn’t fit with the new identity and was out of date anyway, is gone. There’s a new email for submissions: submissions@bipolarvillage.com, and I have a new email as well: daniel@bipolarvillage.com.

I have one major mea culpa, however, which is that I’m simply never going to be able to catch up on my old correspondence. I was getting over 60 emails per day near the end of summer, and I simply will never be able to get to those hundreds of emails. If you sent me an email, and what you sent me about is still pertinent, please contact me again. I apologize to everyone whose correspondence I missed; I simply ran out of time to respond to everyone and, eventually, anyone.

However, I’m back and ready to work. I had a great summer with you all last year, and I look forward to having another great one with you in this new home.

Related posts:

Michael Ligtenberg with CameraMichael Ligtenberg: Bipolar At 47, Part One – Before School PlaygroundSchool: The Bipolar Way Lion in ZooCaging the Lion: Identifying and Managing Bipolar Triggers Michael in HatMichael Ligtenberg: Bipolar at 47, Part Two – After Carrie MathisonBipolar Disorder in the Mainstream: “Homeland” Season One *Spoilers* David's Dream CoverGuest Post: "David’s Dream" – How a Documentary About Bipolar Disorder Made a Dream Come True Sick in BedManaging Bipolar Disorder Versus Muscling Through It: Lessons From a Recent Episode Alone in a CrowdThe Fine Art of Hiding Bipolar Disorder and Why It Kinda Sucks

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Counselling from Daniel
Daniel Bader, Ph.D., RSW, CCC
Daniel Bader, Ph.D., RSW, CCC is a Registered Social Worker and Canadian Certified Counsellor with a private practice operating out of Kitchener, Ontario. He provides in-person counselling in Kitchener and email, video or telephone counselling within Canada.

To find out more, please visit the website for his private practice, Bader Mediation & Counselling Services.
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