NO MEDS MANIC

Many manic-depressive people refuse to take medication because it kills their highs and dulls their lows. The high of mania is a wonderful experience, but it tends to be forgotten that the exploration of the dark passages of the mind can be an equally memorable experience. In the high, you are full of energy and bursting at the seams with the stuff that interests you. For the creative person, ideas flow in a bountiful flood almost too abundant to keep up with. The danger and excitement is to be almost overwhelmed and to drown in the surge. You must swim madly to keep up with the current. Who would want to give up this state of maximum adrenaline rush? I certainly didn’t.

In the down, you are drained of energy and have become almost inert, and paralyzed as you slide slowly in the dark crevices of your mind where everything is negative. Yet there is a certain comfort in this doom as if one were becoming buried alive without fear. You are joining the world of the undead, the vampires and ghouls. Would he or she who has in the altered state hated life and played with death want to give this up? This is the universe of Hieronymus Bosch, where the mind crawls with strange apparitions. Pallid forms emerge from an underground nightmare landscape. It is fascinating to slither and writhe in the self inflicted pain of transportation to this place, where return may not be possible. Medication dulls this experience. As one bipolar teenager described it “the medication make him feel sleepy, altered and controlled” The art he makes, which reminds me of Bosch, would loses it potency if medicated altered and controlled. The way I described how the medication made me feel was that I became a round rock.

I became a round stone like every other round stone at the edge of the shore. I was just one more dull smooth gray rock in a long series of rocks stretching the length of the shore for miles in a wide band. I no longer had any interesting jagged edges, points or protrusions. Nothing made me separate or different. When the water flowed over me, it barely caused a ripple, but when water flowed over the faceted rock, or was blocked by its jagged edges, it was roiled and foamed. The water was turned into swirling currents and wild eddies. The rough rock created something in the world. It was not passive. It tumbled and rolled with the tide and current. It moved or was moved. It was worn or worn others. And although in the end some long time in the future the rough rock would become the smooth rock, I could enjoy creative phase of the newly blasted rock and not the old age of the eroded slowly controlled stone.

The problem of course is not mania for many people, except where the mania is psychotic or leads to issues like uncontrolled spending, gambling, or sex addiction. The problem is the depression. The dark side of the mood disorder can be so dark as to lead to suicide or the inability to function at all when in this state. This was how it was for me. After the periods of maniacal energy, I would fall into weeks of total stagnation where I was almost unable to do anything at all. I could not get out of bed. I could not go to work. My brain would not function to do the most menial tasks. I would lie on my bed in the dark and wish I were dead, contemplating suicide. I called these periods “Attacks of the Black Brain.” These downs were horrible, and I did compare them to a roller coaster ride.

I have used this analogy before as have so many others, but I wonder if it is correct. Do we really ride up to a high and glide down to a low? Kyle Boganwright, an 18-year-old aspiring artist and winner of an Alliance for Young Artists and Writers Scholastic Award who has bipolar disorder, describes in an article in The Columbus Dispatch his hand “moving up and down as if it were following the tracks of the world’s tallest roller coaster. Turns are sharp and plunges steep.” He describes the same roller coaster. Maybe what Kyle and I are describing in the mood change of mania to depression is more like being in an airplane when one hits an air pocket and the plane suddenly drops several hundred feet in altitude. There is no gentle transition from one mood to the other, or even a rapid descent , but rather a cataclysmic drop from one state of mind to the other with no way to prepare to for the change. I often felt that the one mood had sneaked up on me and caught me unawares. I was never prepared for it. I was never able to say. “Oh I have crested the high point of the roller coaster and I am on my way down.” I was never able to say “Oh I am through the worst of the low and I am on my way up.”

The conundrum for me was difficult. Manic-depression led me to near suicide, and I decided I would take the medication. The medication made me feel lethargic, dull, and uninterested in life. It was only through experimentation with my psychiatrist on the types of medication and the dosages that after a time we were able to find a cocktail that preserved my creative energy while preventing my severe depression. I admit that my mania is not what it was. I do not get as high as I used to. I no longer stay up for days on end, writing, drawing, sculpting, and painting. I admit the ideas flow more slowly now. They don’t come in great torrents like they used to, but that is OK. I accept this as a price to pay for not having “Attacks of the Black Brain.” Kevin Boganwright never explains what his low moods are like, whether he thinks about suicide or not, we are only shown his amazing drawing of ghoulish figures, which look like giant frogs a la Bosch. Perhaps he is too young at eighteen to ride really deeply into that nightmare landscape from which there is no return. Yet all the statistics show that young males are the most vulnerable to suicide. From the newspaper article about Kevin you would think Bipolar Disease is a walk in the amusement park not a deadly disease. For me, I am glad the only way I experience the deadly nightmare place any more is on the walls of the museum and the pages of the art history books.