Tristimania (5 page)

The intensity of both the highs and the lows altered time, so each day felt like a week in its passing, while if I glanced backwards a month had gathered its meanings and stories and was a life's journey. In manic-time, one travels at high speed while everyone else seems to be going very slowly in comparison. Accordingly, when you're racing and over-capable and wildly energetic, any ordinary human speed looks like lethargy and feeds, I think, the irritability which many people feel in mania and hypomania. This speed is part of mania's hyper-connectedness, because the manic mind wants to connect everything in a flash; it wants instantaneity, a fabulous explosion of nowness.

In depression, time is disconnected from the time of others. The schedules don't fit. Everyone else is going too fast. Days sag without spine or recognizable time. No nature, no time passing, no verbs. Art has its face to the wall. Fresh food is stale by the time it is on the plate. There are fruit flies like baboons. You'd need the strength of Atlas to bear it. You have the strength of a sick kitten.

Depression can have its own awful now, when the anguish of a lifetime seems to be felt in the aggregate, as if time is not
linear – nothing has passed, nothing is over – but as if everything is hideous with intensity so even the future seems to fold backwards and lean its illimitable, impossible weight on this moment. In depressed hours, all the times of my life pooled in me and all my past was black water circling inexorably, bearing down on me, in a whirlpool, a gyre of centripetal pain.

Depression is a Black Hole consuming time, both containing it and negating it. The graveness of depression feels like ‘gravity's relentless pull', as scientists describe a Black Hole. It sucks an entire human life into itself; nothing can withstand its pitiless tug into sheer black nothingness, a force field of pure negativity. In what is called ‘gravitational time dilation', an object falling into a Black Hole appears to slow down as it approaches the event horizon, taking an infinite time to reach it. At the centre of a Black Hole is a ‘gravitational singularity'. In the depressed psyche, everything relates – singularly – only to itself. The deadly disconnection. The closer the psyche steps towards the event horizon, the closer it is to being sucked in. Nothing, not even light, can escape from inside. Wholly hollow, yet containing everything that was once a life, depression is a hideous anti-pregnancy, a gross reabsorption of life, a swallowing of vitality so nothing is born or can be. No light, no life, no joy.

What does ‘psychotic' mean?

There are some words (and this is one) whose very definitions seem to depend on their being applied to other people. ‘Psychopath', ‘murderer', ‘sadist', ‘psychotic': Other, they suggest. Terrifying and inexplicable.

Since I was at this point taking antipsychotics, I could (and had to) assume it might mean I was psychotic. I, not Other. And not terrifying either, since even in my deepest madness I was
unaggressive. Was the word inexplicable? Is there ever a word you cannot gently hold in your hand, smoothing out its folds like the frown line on your own forehead, and in it find – aha! the clarity – the explicated? I took out my dictionary. I looked up the definition. I saw that ‘psychotic' meant suffering a severe mental derangement, especially when resulting in delusions and loss of contact with external reality. I could see it was quite reasonably applied to me, since I had been hallucinating.

I put away my dictionary.

I am psychotic.

Impossible.

I took out the dictionary again, like revisiting a dauntless friend who will keep telling you the truth you need to hear.

The definition fits.

I put the dictionary away again.

I am psychotic.

Impossible.

Begin again, Michael Finnegan, begin again.

Beckettian.

I could understand psychosis better if I cast my nets otherwise, so I found out more about the antipsychotic I was taking, and read that it worked for psychosis by correcting the balance of the neuro-transmitters, the chemicals that control the function of nerve pathways in the brain. The message system had gone awry. The terrain of the tricksy messenger. For in those nets I cast, I pulled in that lovely quicksilver fish: Mercury or Hermes, the messenger, Trickster of the ancient pantheon. The brain's heft and weight were toys in his hands: careless with gravity, feckless with the import of things, turning weight to slightness, Mercury was playing tiddly-winks with my sanity.

– Why write about that terrible year? a friend of mine asked me recently. How can you want to revisit it?

– Why would you climb the mountains of the mind? Because they are there, my friend, because they are there.

Because manic depression seduces, like mountains do, and kills, as they do. Because, too, it is survivable with skilful help.

Because this condition can be seen as a form of illness, but it is not only an illness; it also hurls the mind into a world of metaphor, and to regard it solely as a medical issue is to devalue it and to demean it.

Because this condition is a bittersweet privilege, a paradox of insight and madness; because it breaks your heart wide open and cuts you to the quick, yet there is honey on the razor's edge. Because this condition is often portrayed as simply one of emotional highs and lows, but there is far more to it: it alters how one hears music, sees art and reads poetry, and I want to explore the psyche's accents and alterations.

Because manic depression seems to me a misunderstood condition, and I want to describe it for those who have never experienced it but who perhaps know someone with it. Inevitably, I must portray
my own experience, but it is an illness with considerable commonality and I want to describe my journey through it for those who have experienced their own journeys, because what is individual can speak to the general, and if this book can befriend just one person in that terrifying loneliness, it will be worth writing.

Because, at the heart of it all, I lost my words and found them again with a gratitude and a devotion which any writer living in service to their art may understand. Language and literature are the longest loves of my life and in their signs I saw my way. If this book leans on them – on etymology, on poetry and on precise and precious words, it is because I know nothing wiser, I love nothing so much and I trust nothing more than the truths of language, the greatest artwork ever made, created over thousands of years with the signatures of millions.

How to describe this crazed state? What are the words which capture manic depression, in particular in its mixed-state form? What are the terms through which one feels understood and by means of which other people could understand? ‘Tristimania' – coined by eighteenth-century American psychiatrist Benjamin Rush – tells it true to me. Rush may have meant it as a precise shading of melancholia, but it works perfectly for the
tristesse,
the distress coupled with mania, which a mixed-state bipolar episode provokes.

The Old English term
wōd,
meaning ‘mad' or ‘frenzied', was replaced by the word ‘mad' in Middle English. ‘Mad' denotes the crazy state, but it connotes little.
Wōd
, though, carries connotations and etymological links which give insight of a whole other order into the madness of manic depression. The Indo-European root is
wet
– to blow, inspire and spiritually arouse.
Wet
is the source of the Latin
vates,
meaning ‘seer' or ‘poet', and also source of the Old Irish
word
faith,
meaning ‘poet'.
Wōd
is linked to Old English
woþ,
meaning ‘sound', ‘melody', ‘song', and cognate with Old Norse
όðr,
meaning ‘mad, frantic, furious, violent'. (As a noun,
όðr
means ‘mind, wit, soul, sense' and ‘song, poetry'.)
Wōd
is linked to Odin, too, god of war and wisdom, shamanism and poetry. The Roman historian Tacitus considered that Mercury was the chief god of the Germanic tribes, almost certainly because he saw in Odin the qualities of Mercury. Odin, like Mercury, was a ‘guide of souls' and was said to have brought poetry to humankind.
Wōd
also gives us
Wōdensday,
Wednesday, the day of Mercury, and – appropriately – this was the day of the week when I had been at my most
wōd.

Some people find manic-depressive breakdown a form of spiritual experience, offering a sense of divine insight. Many people with manic depression create (or need) music and poetry. With the word
wōd,
everything links and the savage beauties of this madness become more eloquent. Looked at one way, it is medical. Looked at another, it is spiritual. Looked at a third way, it is poetry. Or, indeed, love.

In medical terms, like most people with manic depression, most of the time I have no symptoms. Also, like many people with it, I can see a genetic pattern. An episode of manic depression can be seen to have a medical or psychological aetiology including being affected by lack of sleep, stress, alcohol and psychological trauma (particularly involving humiliation), or loss. Psychologist Richard P. Bentall writes of studies which show that there is a high rate of ‘intrusive' events in the weeks preceding psychosis, including unwanted sexual propositions. People with manic depression also have an increased sensitivity to light and, according to Bentall, sleep deprivation may provoke mania; he also notes that before the advent of modern lighting, when people were more accustomed to longer
nocturnal darknesses, the full moon would have had more of an effect on insomnia, and there would surely have been a greater link between the lunar and the lunatic.

Lovesickness was once considered to be a medical illness. Its symptoms included loss of appetite, headache, fever, palpitations and insomnia. Some medieval writings describe lovesickness in terms of symptoms which today would be seen as those of bipolar disorder: so a person diagnosed as lovesick may display rapid mood swings from manic laughter to the anguished weeping of depression.

The electricity of mania coursing through you does predispose you to fall in love and, yes, in the months of recovery, I did ‘fall' in love. Or, rather, slip up on a banana skin; daftly, inadvertently, unrequitably, mistakenly, serio-comically, as the guy in question was completely off limits.

This particular unrequitable love wasn't in the slightest bit sad. I didn't mind. In fact, I quite liked it, because it was one of the ultimately safe love affairs, like my other grand passions for Rupert Brooke, Michel de Montaigne, Dafydd ap Gwilym and (life-long) Shakespeare. The thing about love is this: I love being in love. I love loving people and animals, words, flowers and jokes. I love the way love courses through the spirit, how it brightens everything around you, how it inspirits you, lifts the drooping head of aquilegia, raises the downcast expression, brings more colours to the rainbow. This is what manic depression does, too. In the throes of it, I feel an incandescent sensitivity by which everything is only too much alive and calling. My nerves are exposed: the world is ferociously present. In love with mania as I was, falling in love with a person was something of a misattribution.

Various anthropologists have argued that, although our society
interprets certain psychological conditions as a medical issue, other cultures have construed exactly the same states of mind as shamanic, divinely inspired wisdom, and those possessed of such insight may be honoured. Professor of psychiatry Richard Warner, noting the work of Mircea Eliade and Black Elk, describes how ‘In non-industrial cultures throughout the world, the hallucinations and altered states of consciousness produced by psychosis, fasting, sleep deprivation, social isolation and contemplation and hallucinogenic drug use are often a prerequisite for gaining shamanic power.' As Mircea Eliade writes, mental illness reveals a shamanic vocation, and shamanic initiation is equivalent to the cure: ‘The famous Yakut shaman Tüspüt (that is, “fallen from the sky”) had been ill at the age of twenty; he began to sing, and felt better . . . he needed to shamanize; if he went for a long time without doing so, he did not feel well.' (An Icarus, by any other name, would fly as high and fall as steeply.)

Dr Orhan Öztürk, a Turkish psychiatrist, writes: ‘A person may be hallucinated or delusional, but as long as he is not destructive or very unstable he may not be considered insane . . . Such a person may sometimes be considered to have a supernatural capacity for communication with the spirit world and may therefore be regarded with reverence and awe.'

The medieval historian Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales) describes a phenomenon which would most likely be understood as mental illness today but which in his own time was taken as prophecy:

Among the Welsh there are certain individuals called Awenyddion who behave as if they are possessed . . . When you consult them about some problem, they immediately go into a trance and lose control of their senses . . . if you listen carefully to what they say
you will receive the solution to your problem . . . They seem to receive this gift of divination through visions which they see in their dreams. Some of them have the impression that honey or sugary milk is being smeared on their mouths; others say that a sheet of paper with words written on it is pressed against their lips.

American anthropologist Ruth Benedict describes how Siberian shamans ‘are individuals who by submission to the will of the spirits have been cured of a grievous illness . . . Some, during the period of the call, are violently insane for several years; others irresponsible to the point where they have to be constantly watched lest they wander off in the snow and freeze to death . . . It is the shamanistic practice which constitutes their cure.'

In the time of Plato and Socrates, the gods were thought to communicate with poets and priests through inspired madness and
enthusiasm;
the passion of the god within,
en-theos.
‘Madness comes from God, whereas sober sense is merely human,' according to Socrates, in
Phaedrus
: far from being stigmatizing, ‘Madness, provided it comes as the gift of heaven, is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings.' Dionysus, meanwhile, subject to great agony and equally great ecstasy, is the god in the grip of this wildness. Robert Burton, author of
The Anatomy of Melancholy,
wrote of Aristotle's view that melancholia caused men to experience ‘many times a divine ravishment, and a kind of
enthusiasmus
. . . which stirreth them up to be excellent Philosophers, Poets, Prophets, etc.'