Don’t poke the Bipolar Bear

Remember I wrote about that ginger lassie the other day who had a total social media strop against a guy who interviewed her? You know.. the mash up of Toyah Wilcox and Mrs Merton?

Well… this is Olivia Bland (not Booth as above), this is Olivia Bland on Twitter, and this Olivia Bland on her own website.

At first, I couldn’t believe it was the same woman, but her site links back to the twitter account that was used to shame the company director guy.

The other day I wrote:

Here we have a 22-year old who is a fledgling self-publicist and the epitome of Generation Snowflake…. Everyone in her life so far has told her what a wonderful, fabulous, talented person she is, but she is a delicate, hypersensitive flower with low self-esteem, who is traumatised by any challenge to her egocentric world view, and she lashes out, vituperatively, vindictively and short-sightledly.

Today I see that on her own site, we can learn that Olivia is bipolar. She takes Sertraline and Quetiapine for her brains. In October 2018, she wrote a blog post about how she had moved to Brighton and needed to tell everyone how fab Brighton is, accompanied by a thrilling eulogy to the cheap tat she bought to equip the place.

I’m guessing she no longer had her boyfriend by the time she moved to Brighton, probably because he couldn’t cope with this:

Recently, my boyfriend’s house has been subject to my endless interior design desires, and I’ve been slowly introducing new pieces into his bedroom (including two little guinea pigs called Max and Minnie, but of course they’re not decorative) that he seems to be liking too.

I wonder if this is the ‘abusive’ ex-boyfriend that her ‘traumatic’ interview reminded her of.

One of her six great things about Brighton is:

Since I moved to Brighton, I’ve binned off bras, makeup (except for special occasions), and regular shaving. Because the thing is, nobody here cares. 

That is the most unintentionally brutal and accurate reviews of Brighton I’ve ever read.

Note that in January 2019 she is applying for jobs in the north of Manchester, where she’s from. I guess those 6 things about Brighton just weren’t enough.

We also know that she has body image issues.

Basically, she’s as mad as a box of frogs and medicated to the eyeballs to control her brain’s tendancy for spontaneous trampolining.

Yet none of the media who reported on her most narratively virtuous blow-up at the guy and his company on social media and the national news, seemed fit to mention or even consider this at all? Do they not have Google? Her website is her name; http://www.oliviabland.com for god’s sake.

Isn’t this enough to warrant at least questioning her narrative, and her fitness to pronounce across the media on matters that could have a serious impact on people’s lives and jobs?

She wrote about ‘coping with side effects’ of her drug regimen.

For those of you who don’t know, I take Sertraline and Quetiapine, which both come with some pretty nasty side effects. For the first couple of weeks of taking them, I felt like I had every side effect on the list. Most of them died down after a few weeks, but some of them stuck around.

Some of the serious side effects of Sertraline are:

• Suicide attempts, acting on dangerous impulses, aggressive or violent behavior, thoughts about suicide or dying, agitation, restlessness, anger, or irritability.
• An increase in activity or talking more than normal
• Serotonin syndrome. This condition can be life-threatening. Symptoms can include:
  • hallucinations and delusions, agitation, shakiness – literally shaking!

For Quetiapine things are even worse than that.

This information is right in front of anyone who cares to look. Does no-one at all in the media think that by her own words she has condemned herself as an unreliable witness?

I suppose it would be hideously naive to suggest that the mainstream media have a duty not to magnify the irrational and poisonous rantings of someone who is suffering from, amongst other things, being her own worst enemy.

Oh but there’s more. Olivia had a tumblr, as I predicted, which is linked from her website. Sadly, that Tumblr is now closed, but the internet remembers. The Tumblr account points to another blog site.

The archive of that’s just chockablok with tales of ordinary – utterly mundane – teenage woe, and advenures with anti-anxiety drugs.

It’s all a bit pitiful really – she’s put herself out there in the glare of the media, and precipitated a Twittermob against this guy and his company. And yet with 3 minutes of internet digging, you can find all this fist-chewingly awful soul-baring from a gawky kid who clearly doesn’t know her earhole from her arsehole.

I think that Olivia is, at some point in the very near future, going to spend a long weekend sitting in a wardrobe with her cat and a box of crispy kremes, crying and wishing she hadn’t done what she has done this last week. And that the media hadn’t amplified her like they did.

AJ