In its severe forms, depression paralyzes all of the otherwise vital forces that make us human, leaving instead a bleak, despairing, desperate, and deadened state… Life is bloodless, pulseless, and yet present enough to allow a suffocating horror and pain. All bearings are lost; all things are dark and drained of feeling. The slippage into futility is first gradual, then utter. Thought, which is as pervasively affected by depression as mood, is morbid, confused, and stuporous. It is also vacillating, ruminative, indecisive, and self-castigating. The body is bone-weary; there is no will; nothing is that is not an effort, and nothing at all seems worth it. Sleep is fragmented, elusive, or all-consuming. Like an unstable gas, an irritable exhaustion seeps into every crevice of thought and action. [2]
Jamison is well known, too, for her research on the link between bipolar disorder and creativity, which leads me to my conclusion:
To know what it “feels like” is to know the qualia, the phenomenological experiences, a bipolar person encounters which an unaffected person does not. I don’t think there are many of these. Going berserk, being creative, having an awful temper, not being able to trust my own emotional reactions: these have a certain weight when I list them out, discuss them as individual tragedies; they can even sound unique.
But everyone loses it; everyone has their moments of charisma, creativity, success, strength, achievement; and everyone struggles with themselves. You may not hallucinate, but I bet you can understand what it’s like for your mind to misbehave, react insanely. If you haven’t yet lost control of yourself in life, wait.
We bipolar people have a tendency to comfort ourselves by saying that our more intense experience of typical phenomena constitutes an election: we are elite, more alive, deeper! Jamison’s own excellent research on bipolar artists has amplified this: the popular Western conflation of insanity, artistic talent, and melodrama permits a kind of sentimental self-regard: Yes, I’m crazy, but I’m also probably in some difficult-to-establish-way deeply brilliant!
Perhaps this is true for some, but it seems mostly to me to be a consolatory story, the sort of inversion that Nietzsche describes as resentiment: to say this illness is really a kind of health, a kind of deeper seeing, is a lie. I like my life a lot, but I am uncomfortable with this persistent meme, largely because I’m sometimes confused into believing it myself. Indeed: one of bipolar disorder’s chief symptoms is often that a patient confuses herself with an artist.
(Or more generally: an exception. Mondimore notes that throughout history, “grandiosity” has changed in its expressions. An important symptom of bipolar, grandiosity was once expressed by women saying they were pregnant with kings or the messiah, men believing they were kings or the messiah; presently, our insanity is less monarchical and religious; we all instead believe we special exceptions of one sort or another).
Last: I’ve been in treatment now for almost twelve years, on the same cocktail of medications for years and years. For me, the most enduring way that bipolar “feels” different is in how I cannot trust my reactions. When someone says something to you and you recognize it as an insult, as abuse, your reactive anger is appropriate and you can commit to it; or you can make some determination based on your values, your reason, and choose a different course of action. I can’t even trust that the person insulted me. I can’t trust my emotional perceptions or reactions.
That’s the strangest thing about how it feels, after the dust of the actual disorder settles, a decade in: the open insanity has abated and visits only briefly, the idea that I’m a secret artist is absurd, and what’s left is a more or less normal life in which I have to emphasize “mental hygiene” (prioritizing regular sleep, for example) and in which I always feel doubt about what I think and feel, as we all probably should anyway.
Can you fight bipolar disorder without medication?
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