Pitch perfect description of mania

Re-reading Kay Redfield Jamison's "An Unquiet Mind" and was struck by how this description of mania was absolutely accurate and pitch-perfect, as if Dr. Jamison had conjured up the ghost of manic episode past as she wrote this passage:

"There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's 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; overwhelming 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 those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality."

The Truthfully Maddening Dilemna of John Nash's Story

John Forbes Nash Jr. was a brilliant mathematician and a suffer of something, depending on whom you ask, in the neighborhood of schizophrenia and manic depression. Nash, who died in a car accident with his wife a little more than a week ago, was, first and foremost, a Nobel laureate, whom, like many mathematicians, made his greatest discoveries in his 20s (As G.H. Hardy wrote in 1940, of “all the arts and sciences mathematics is the most remote” and “no mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than an other art or science, is a young man’s game”). Knowing that history and those peculiarities of mathematics and mathematicians, strange behaviors –extended solitude, writing equations on walls, a frenetic pace to develop solutions, mumbling to themselves in public – probably did not seem so far outside the norm among his brethren at Princeton University. But, according to a 2010 edition of The Princetonian , the daily newspaper at Princeto...

The Gift of Fear (or the Gift of Intution in Protecting Yourself and Lie Detecting)

A friend was recently on the phone with me walking down a New York street and she noticed a man starring at a street pole, and it didn't make her comfortable. Now, as the boys at Matchbox Twenty would put it, this is from a woman who makes friends with shadows on her wall, hears voices telling her that she should get some sleep, takes to herself in public and dodges glances on the train. What, on Earth, could bug this woman out? After first she dismissed her reaction. Could it be because the man was black and she racial stereotyping was making it worse? No. She lives in New York, and sees blacks all of all ethical and moral stripes and sizes every day. Could it be the neighborhood? Nah. It was familiar too her. Maybe something was different about the street lights? That could be it. Eventually, I said, "Who cares, why? If it doesn't feel right, just move, move." Gavin de Becker, a personal security professional, received acclaim for his book "The Gift of Fear...

Down the Road from McLean

My fascination with the sprawling 240 acre campus of McLean Hospital , in Belmont, Mass., and what was done there, began in 2003, the year I lost my job at The New York Times and days later found myself 270 miles south, at Silver Hill Hospital , in New Canaan, Conn., a premiere hospital that rivals, and in some estimations, is stronger than McLean . There, I was treated to my first experience in an acute, inpatient locked ward where I was evaluated for the first time by a psychiatrist and quickly diagnosed with a mood d isorder that later turned out to be bipolar disorder. Over more recent years, especially when I struggle to maintain my stability, I think back to that place and wish, for a minute, that I could come up with some reason to return to its 60 acres, complete with a social worker who spends the day checking in on you, the constant psychiatric care, the intense medication management, the priest who comes, if you so choose, to pray with you and the buildings full of fellow ...

Jayson Blair

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