That's the trouble with manic depressive disorder. Keeping people on the meds. They level you out so you don't feel the lows.... and unfortunately you don't feel the highs either. Actually, you don't feel anything. It's a really crappy way to live. So they go off the meds and then it all starts again. Any type of mental illness is usually exacerbated by alcohol and recreational drug use. Like Al said, it's trying to self-medicate..... to make the bad $hit go away. What a sad thing.
Mental illness is the big unknown still today, in the medical world. And the way it is approached and managed is even worst than the lack of understanding over it.
Of course psychiatrists won't admit it, as they're making a living numbing the depressed, bi-polar, and schizophrenic with tricyclic antidepressants, monoamine oxidase inhibitors and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, which are all providing zero help towards curing these conditions, other than inducing a zombie like state and shutting off your appetite in most cases.
We've come a long way as far as isolating the different areas of the brain and their correlations with the central nervous system, but we still don't know much, if anything about the chemical reactions within.
Consequently, the management of these patients is very ill advised and misguided, and often shameful when looking at some of these "institutions" out there....
The complex nature / mechanisms of these mental illnesses and the fact that almost nothing is understood of them, contributes to casting a dark stigma about them, and this negative bias doesn't help in approaching them openly.
It is also why so many just choose to ignore their existence, or even worse, laugh about it.
I'm not laughing. Maybe because I've been hit by one of these "depressions" that stayed with me for the better part of four years.
Glad I was able to shake it off and regain an interest in living, Robin (and so many others including a cousin of mine, diagnosed with schizophrenia, who killed herself at age 53) wasn't that lucky.