I've had vivid dreams all my life - long, clear, and so detailed I could write them out as bizarre stories. These are rarely nightmares, but I have those, too, on occasion. My nightmares most commonly revolve around the fear of falling. For example, more than once I've dreamed I was in an elevator with a central pillar, and suddenly the floor turned to rubber and detached from the edges. The only real safety is to hang onto the pillar, but I'm never alone, so several of us are going for that pillar, while others clutch the edges of the heavy rubber sheet as it bends down into the shaft.

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Adjunctive therapy is, put simply, the addition of one treatment to another for the same condition. The goal may be to increase the effectiveness of the first treatment, to reduce the side effects of the first treatment, or to supplement the first treatment. Adjunctive therapy is very common with medications, but there are other forms as well - for example, chemotherapy after cancer surgery.

For more examples and additional information, see Adjunctive Therapy.

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Suppose you ask me, "What one memory comes to mind when I say 'shopping mall'?" I'm probably going to say, "I hate shopping at malls, because my feet get so tired." That's a wrong answer - it's general rather than being a single memory as was asked for. A specific answer would have been, "I remember when the Younkers store burned at Merle Hay Mall in Des Moines."

A simpler example: for the cue word "joyful," someone who answers, "I was joyful when my son was born," is recalling a single memory, while the person answering, "I'm always joyful at our family reunions," has retrieved the general memories of many occasions.

Research has found that people who have depression tend to call up memories in general more often than specifically. This phenomenon, called "overgeneral memory" or OGM, appears to be interrelated with clinical and bipolar depression, and may even lead to new treatments for depression.

Read about Blurred Memory Function and Depression

Image: Chad Baker / Getty Images

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Carrie Burr has Bipolar I disorder, and her history with the mental illness included two extensive hospitalizations. Yet she and her husband were able to adopt two children from foster care and raise them with love, courage and joy. I can attest to this: Carrie is my cousin.

In this series of articles from 2000, Carrie tells the honest truth about her bipolar disorder, the process of deciding to adopt, and the adoption process itself - including what she needed to do and say regarding her mental illness.

Adoption With Bipolar Disorder

• Part 1: I really want a child, but...
• Part 2: Look before you leap
• Part 3: My story, my children (2 pages)

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