Mania

Mania creeps up on you. It has happened to me so often now that I still get suspicious of happiness. In my experience, it follows months of crippling depression – when there is nothing but a deep, existential angst; a pressing, persistent anxiety; and above all, no semblance whatsoever of any pleasure. Not the slightest hint of a smile, unless you find yourself running into an old friend on the street and have to politely force one, struggling to find something interesting, pleasant and polite to say. Life just isn’t worth living. Over coffee, Nick Allen once coined the ‘fuck it hypothesis’ of bipolar. Your back’s against the wall, you have nothing to lose, and you’ve been avoiding risks to no avail for so long that you’re probably better off taking as many as you can as soon as possible. So one morning, you wake up and suddenly find yourself going about your day with an unexpected spring in your step.

Every morning, your sense of engagement with the world builds inexorably upon the one before. You’re increasingly able to find simple pleasures in everyday things. You find yourself laughing at others’ jokes, and before long, others laughing at yours. New ideas spring to mind – different, unique ways of seeing things – and interesting projects to work on. Over time, you begin to wonder why you were so depressed to begin with. Life is replete with wonderful things. How did I think otherwise? People aren’t to be afraid of. They’re to be celebrated!

The world isn’t so bad after all. I’ve just been approaching it the wrong way. If only I could maintain this hypomanic state indefinitely, I’d be a genuinely happy man. You’re enormously productive. You wake up early, motivated by your various projects and ideas, and go to bed late, after everyone has fallen asleep, still working on them. By virtue of your newfound confidence, you step into social situations without a care in the world. Your happiness becomes infectious – among family, friends and strangers alike. In my view, this is as good as life gets. You’re intimately connected with your everyday experience, with your ideas, with others’ ideas, and with everyone and everything around you. You’ve regained a sense of purpose. Finally, everything seems to just click, like clockwork. And then, just when you’re beginning to get used to all this, it starts to unravel.

The first thing to note is the sheer energy of it. It felt like I was intrinsically on fire. After months of debilitating depression, you suddenly feel energised by an enthusiasm for life and other people and your own conceptions. I became obsessed with a philosophical principle that I thought I’d invented, called the Criterion of Propriety, based on Hegelian dialectics. It started off as a simple rule of reasoning, but in a week or so, I’d convinced myself that as a code of behaviour, I might even have cracked the key to world peace. This was a quiet thought, and at that point, I still had the presence of mind not to share it. In retrospect, though, it sparked the beginning of an increasingly hyperbolic sequence of self-referential delusions. I became obsessed with the same film and CD – watched and listened to them over and over again, reading into their hidden messages and becoming increasingly convinced that they were referring specifically to me. These were delusions of reference, of course, but at the time, I lacked the insight and nomenclature to identify them. Next came the delusions of grandiosity. I was unique. No-one else could possibly comprehend the depths of my understanding. Everyone was beneath me.

Things didn’t get really serious, though, until my delusions turned religious. Raised as a Catholic, this had great appeal to me, and in my next episode, it became a genuine belief that I was God. Of all my manic avatars, though, I kept erring back over the years to Lucifer, the Morning Star, the Light Bringer, who always seemed a lot more fun.

Then I ascended beyond my delusions to find the peak of psychosis in a single, persistent hallucination. It followed me everywhere, blinking in and out of existence. An all-seeing feminine eye – framed by trees and human constructions and sometimes watching me calmly from the sky. The eye of Gaia. Like the eye of a great, celestial cat, silently stalking me through the concrete jungle. (Bear in mind that I wasn’t on drugs. I was a puritan at the time and thought that drugs were a refuge for the weak of mind. I liked coffee. And alcohol. And chain smoking.)

In my first episode, my alter-ego of choice wasn’t nearly so grandiose. It was an innocent fusion between my childhood obsession with Jedis and ninjas in the form of the Urban Shinobi, who stalked the streets and assaulted people with unexpected acts of kindness. An agent of humanism, equipped with the skills and arcane knowledge of psychology and a harmless disregard for rules and social conventions. Naturally, not everyone responds well to unexpected acts of kindness, nor indeed breaches of social convention, which led to a few tense interactions with the public (not to mention the police). Meanwhile, all your loved ones can see that you’re not quite right, and they start to crowd in on you with unwelcome constraints and concerns. Conflicts start to mount – with family, friends and strangers alike – but I was sure that all of this was simply because they didn’t understand me. I’d ascended beyond the limits of human understanding, so how could I expect otherwise?

Meanwhile, you have all these other symptoms going on, which discombobulate things further. Confusion: at one point, I remember being paralysed by having so many options to act in different ways that I couldn’t chose between them, so I just stood there – in the middle of my lounge – torn between all the different actions I could take and achieving none of them. A dizzying flight of ideas: passing by so fast that I’d be concentrating on one, before being distracted by the next, before I could hope to finish the first. Irritability: I became frustrated by how slowly people thought and the fact that they couldn’t keep up with what I was saying. Thought disorder: one moment, everything in the world suddenly fit together in a single, harmonious instant that made me feel like an idiot for doubting its majesty in the first place; the next, I was crippled by uncertainty and self-doubt. And worst of all, a mixed affective state: here, I was laughing maniacally with tears streaming down my cheeks, replete with happiness and the joy of new awakenings; there, I was collapsing, sobbing hopelessly on the floor, without knowing why. From existential bliss to total despair.

The first time mania struck me, I called my mother in Tasmania, told her that I was happy for the first time in my life, but she could tell straight away that something was wrong. That day, my best friend and I went out on a spontaneous adventure to the beach, drifting aimlessly from place to place to drink and laugh in the sun, but when I came back home, after the sun had fallen, I found that my folks had flown interstate and landed on my doorstep, my mother inconsolable, with concerned police and flashing lights. The next thing I knew, they’d bundled me into the back of a paddy waggon and whisked me off to hospital, where I ended up pinned down by the extremities by four security guards while a fifth had his arm across my throat – spitting ‘shut the fuck up!’ in my face – when a man in white rushed in and stabbed something sharp in my butt. They manhandled me down a dark corridor and threw me unceremoniously into a stark white room and slammed and locked the door. A stainless-steel toilet seat, a thin, hard mattress bolted to the floor and a buzzing fluorescent light that wouldn’t shut the hell up. A black window. I asked whether anyone was there. I asked again. Can I have a cigarette? I asked. And asked. And asked.

It struck me then. What if I was a butterfly who’d just woken up from the dream of being a man? Maybe this was it. Just me. Forever and completely alone. Spinning endlessly through the Void in a stark white room with a buzzing light and no cigarettes and no human interactions ever again . . .

This cured my lifelong terror of death. By comparison, oblivion seemed like a welcome relief. At least that way, I could rest in peace. Then to add insult to injury, the medical fraternity in all its wisdom and commitment to patient care had robbed me of the single liberty that I can always rely on in a crisis. A cigarette. (I learned this well over my next few trips to hospital – whatever you do, avoid High Dependency! If you end up there, they’ll only feed you one smoke an hour, from your own packet, which they’ve locked away in a cabinet on the other side of the Perspex. Then, you have no choice but to save your filters in your coin pocket so you can scrounge up dirty butts from the smoking-room floor to jerry-rig a cigarette. Yeah, thanks medical fraternity . . .)

Incidentally, I caught sight of one of those security guards from the High Dependency Unit about a week later – when, thank god, smoking was still allowed in such places. I walked up to him, shook his hand, and thanked him.