Even before the (noticeable) development of my BP symptoms, I’ve always had an interest in anything related to the mind.  One of my many career interests growing up was to become a criminal profiler (very much inspired by The Silence of the Lambs, and the show Profiler).  Anyhoo, I was lucky enough to take a few classes in the history and philosophy of science in undergrad and have maintained an interest in the subject ever since. 

Anyhow, I went to my local library for the first time since moving to the Bay area in October of 2006 and was so happy to get a library card for the first time in years (I think I was going through a very mini-hypomanic episode and chose to expend my energy on being all excited about the library and borrowing lots of books rather than spending my non-existent money).  While browsing through the aisles looking for self-help books on bipolar disorder, I cam across this tiny book called Madness- A Brief History by Roy Porter.  According to the slipcover, the author was a professor of the social history of medicine before his retirement. 

The book is a very short review of how different societies (mainly Western) viewed and treated what e call today “mental illness.”  The book is quite a bit shorter than I would like but provides a good introduction to the topic.  Another great book, that I read quite a while back while an undergraduate student was Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization.  I’d recommend that one as well.

I just came upon these couple of paragraphs which, to me, sums up nicely what the experience of being bipolar is like, although I have to admit that even with my most manic moments, I have yet to go through a clearly psychotic break (knock on wood).  But I have definitely gone through most of the things she has described.  Especially poignant is the way she describes the dratted drugs that are part and parcel of effective treatment of bipolar disorder.  The following passages are taken from a chapter called “Flights of the Mind.”

 There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness.  When you’re high, it is tremendous.  The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones.  Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty.  There are interests found in uninteresting people.  Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible.  Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one’s marrow.  But, somewhere, this changes.  The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overhwelming confusion replaces clarity.  Memory goes.  Humor and absorption on friends’ faces are replaced by fear and concern.  Everything previously moving with the grain is now against-you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind.  You never knew these caves were there.  It will never end, for madness carves its own reality. 

It goes on and on, and finally there are only others’ recollections of your behavior-your bizzare, frenetic, aimless behaviors-for mania has at least some grace in partially obliterating memories.  What then, after the medications, psychiatrist, despair, depression and overdose?  All those incredible feelings to sort through.  Who is being too polite to say what?  Who knows what?  What did I do?  Why?  And most hauntingly, when will it happen again?  Then, too, are the bitter reminders-medicine to take, resent, forget, take, resent, and forget, but always to take.  Credit cards revoked, bounced checks to cover, explanations due at work, apologies to make, intermittent memories (what did I do?), friendships gone or drained, a ruined marriage.  And always, when will it happen again?  Which of my feelings are real?  Which of the me’s is me?  The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one?  Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed and tired one?  Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither.  Virginia Woolf, in her dives and climbs, said it all: “How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground?  I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?”  

I just recently took up reading again, in an effort to focus my mind on an obsession other than adding new animals to my ever growing collection.  Went on a bit of a book buying binge and got some books about various infectious diseases, including books on yellow fever in the US, influenza and other related topics, including a book suggesting a novel disease as the cause of the Black Death in the medieval ages.  But, for my current reading pleasure, I decided to pick up a book I had purchased during a prior book collecting spree.  The title is An Unquiet Mind, by psychiatrist and fellow bipolar disorder sufferer, Kay Redfield Jamison.  I’ve only started the book, but it has been an interesting read so far.  It’s nice to read the words of someone with both a scientific basis of knowledge of the disease as well as someone who has intimate experience with it.  From a description of her episodes, it sounds like she had a more severe form of mania than I have had, but it is still chilling for me, since I realize that it’s a thin line between here and there.

 Anyhow, back to the purpose of this post, here are some quotes I’ve come upon in my reading that I’ve taken a liking to.  (I used to be a real sucker for quotes, as an obsessive/compulsive kid, I used to keep journals filled with quotes that I fancied for one reason or another.  Thank goodness for computers!  It makes writing so much easier and quicker!

 Ok, here are a couple quotes:

I doubt sometimes whether a quiet & unagitated life would have suited me-yet I sometimes long for it.   - Byron

 To be sure, I appear at times merry and in good heart, talk, too, before others quite reasonably, and it looks as if I felt, too, God knows how well within my skin.  Yet the soul maintains its deathly sleep and the heart bleeds from a thousand wounds.”   - Hugo Wolf