The Pound and the Fury

Posted on September 6, 2005 in Disasters Mania

I started writing an article about being bipolar amid Katrina, but found that I had nothing to say. Someone dug a gritty hole in the air using a leaf blower. The computer hummed in a blanketing, electronic sort of way. And in the face of all the righteously wrathful blogging about the catastrophe following the disaster, the words I found for my feelings were too steady, like a punt being pushed through a greenish bayou in a calmer season.

When you have a mood disorder, people like to say that it is all in your head. They’re absolutely right. The chemical imbalances that cause bipolar illness happen in the brain. They say that you shouldn’t be feeling like you do. A friend of mine likes to say “My psychiatrist agrees. That’s why he has me on medications.”

Excuses for bad behavior or willful neglect come easily to those who exist within the narrow parameters of “normal” moods. It has been with mixed feelings these past nine or ten days that I have watched as the bulk of Americans who have no clue what it means to live with a mood disorder have received a big taste of what it feels to be the utter thrall of your emotions.

My fellow bipolars may be doing many things at this time. Some cooly go about their lives, realizing that watching too much of the news — especially the doubletalk and outright prevarications of this maladministration — will only flick them into an episode. So they turn off their televisions and their radios. Others wallow in bed, too weak and tired to rise. They have stopped hearing the reports. They lie in darkness. Still others have jumped into mania — another common reaction to stress. Moved by deep feelings, they have joined in blood drives and given to the Red Cross. These behaviors may be driven by what some call “a sense of purpose” and what we who know them in another way “grandiosity”. Despite the pathological basis of the actions, they do good. As a voice of experience, I merely caution that they observe their moods and take time out for themselves.

Religiosity is another common symptom of mania. I have seen a few lambast FEMA’s response in terms suiting an Old Testament prophet such as Jeremiah or my namesake Joel. Yet what has been most disturbing is that the media has granted the most attention to those who attempt to cast the natural disaster into a biblical plague where God unleashed this storm to punish gays and lesbians. While no fan of the kind of hedonism — homosexual or heterosexual — that takes place in The Big Easy from time to time, I must righteously stand against the kooks who fashion every calamity to meet their own political ends.

Such talk is sly, corrupt, and wicked. A real prophet, I feel, would be joining those calling for justice for the poor. New Orleans was neither Sodom nor Gomorrah. Churches lined the streets outside of the French Quarter. If God meant to punish the wicked, He did one sloppy job because the bulk of the victims were the poor and religious — God’s especially beloved people.

Now I am lost because the wrath pushes me to the brink of my consciousness. The maps that turn Katrina into a rainbow storm, the pictures of bodies floating in Lake Ponchartrain, the stories of the fake food distribution stations conspire to file me down to a nub. What more can I add to the wails of indignation and anger? In the face of catastrophe, the failures of the Right present us with absurd reasoning. When we say that FEMA could have done better, they tell us that nobody could have stopped this storm. As if we rejected that obvious fact.

Psychotically, it is they who reject the facts: that FEMA failed to heed the warnings of Lousiana’s governor and New Orleans’ mayor; that National Guard units who could have been helping the victims were away in Iraq; that even though journalists were regularly shuttling in and out of the city, the federal response team kept telling us that there was no way in. And there is the big message coming out of the wacko Right: that we cannot expect any government to be able to help us in time of crisis. So we have to be able to help ourselves or we must perish.

We who suffer from mood disorders for years have heard similar words: that it is entirely up to us to fix our minds using only our powers of intellect. Some of us drink or take drugs to numb the feelings at the end of a long day so we can pretend to be stable the rest of the time. Others try to live through the feelings, endlessly enriching the publishing industry by buying self-help books. And yet, some of us don’t listen to the lies. We accept that it is through cooperation that we survive. Cooperation takes many forms: our medications, support groups, hospitals. If we are poor, we endure bad patient care from county agencies and drug prices which are beyond what we can pay. Now we watch the rest of America, unmedicated, tempted to surrender to the lies because they cannot stand the pound and the fury inside their heads. And, sadly, lithium won’t help them.

UPDATE: Five more disaster scenarios to worry about.

UPDATE #2: How New Orleans will be drained

MORE: I tend to see more liberals than conservatives in bipolar support groups. Yet in the media, I see plenty of examples of it in wingnut pundits and Fundamentalist preachers. My suspicion is that it pays to be bipolar and reactionary, that there are plenty of wealthy people willing to support the mentally ill when they are willing to act as apologists for the oligarchy. Liberals find themselves cast out simply because they are not politically correct. Only in politics, it seems, does codependency aid the codependent. For a short time.

MORE: I haven’t heard much news about the fate of patients in mental hospitals and psychiatric wards. Were they left to drown? Last spring I attended a conference here in Orange which talked about how FEMA planned to help the mentally ill in the event of a natural disaster. How many schizophrenics were left to talk to undines in the turbulent waters? How many maniacs were permitted to attempt to fly over the waves?