A Nervous Fellow’s Strange Interludes

Posted on May 5, 2006 in Mania Reflections

Alas! it has never entered Mitya’s head to tell them, though he remembered it, that he had jumped back from pity, and standing over the prostrate figure had even uttered some words of regret: “You come to grief, old man — there’s no help for it. Well, there you must lie.”

The prosecutor could only draw one conclusion: that the man had jumped back “at such a moment and in such excitement simply with the object of ascertaining whether the only witness of his crime were dead; that he must therefore have been a man of great strength, coolness, decision and foresight even at such a moment”….and so on. This prosecutor was satisfied: “I’ve provoked the nervous fellow by ‘trifles’ and he has said more than he meant to.”
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

During a period of — just what was that state? — I took it into my mind that I had to be stalker. I guess it sprang from shyness and from a peculiar event in my life. I met a girl at a party. The next day, I called her every half hour on the hour until my roommate persuaded me to stop. I realized what I had done quite quickly. And I never repeated it. I went to the opposite extreme. If I felt a woman didn’t like me, I disappeared, fast. First it was only one phonecall. Then it was no phonecall. Women picked me up. I was lucky to meet my wife and ask her to marry me.

The worst incident of avoidance happened the year I spent at Duke University. I had met this woman at College Year in Athens. She was matriculating at Duke the following autumn. I was only there for half a year, on a program with Pomona College. When I returned, my adviser pressed me to apply at Duke. I was accepted and given a fellowship.

Wild thoughts splashed across my consciousness. What if this young woman thought I was following her? I didn’t see her for a few weeks and when I did — I ignored her. I flunked out that year, but I kept up my pretension for the entire four years I was in North Carolina! If I saw her, I walked on by or crossed the street or hid. What went through her head? That I was stalking her? Perhaps. Or maybe that I was just being brazenly weird? That fits me most accurately.

I mark this as a interval of flashing manias, triggered by seeing this woman. My episodes are affected by incidents in my past. Shame plays a big part. I often felt the burning coffee ground mixed manias from my childhood on. Strange that no therapist ever caught on to me — all except one psychological intern who urged me to seek treatment — but then I didn’t tell anyone but her what happened in my head. She heard my odd and unique paranoia, she observed the delusions that cramped me into a small space.

For the longest time, I couldn’t really explain to anyone else why I did this. I liked women better than men. I craved their company — not as sexual partners but as conversationalists and confidants. Yet my behavior caused me to put up a wall against the very people I liked. Some say it had to do with my mother. Others call it low self-esteem. I agree, but add that my illness — unmedicated as it was — wrapped up all these elements in a gigantic burlap sack, added a healthy dose of guilt bombs and confusion, and dropped the whole mess on me. Because of the disease, I could not step out of the way. I waited there, again and again, for the sack to pummel me.

The Brothers Karamazov has been my bedside companion for the last two weeks. Nearly everyone in the family strikes me as a sufferer of bipolar disorder. I see myself most strongly in Ivan, the depressive intellectual who writes “The Grand Inquisitor” sequence. Yet there is something of me in the rampant Dimitri or Mitya. I think especially of my strange interlude in North Carolina. Both of us act bizarrely, running to hide from our delusions straight into our delusions. I am no murderer like Mitya; I recognize, however, his confusions as a matter of process when I am in a manic state.

Those looking at us bipolars from the outside must realize that trying to turn our words and our actions to suit a pet theory doesn’t help us. The prosecutor in The Brothers Karamazov is so proud of his command of psychology that he neatly shoves Mitya’s testimony into the cannon barrel that he will fire at the trial. Think of the rare bipolars who kill not realizing that they are doing so. Juries cannot buy their stories because they don’t understand the cognition. Prosecutors who advance their careers by convictions allow these disoriented culprits to be treated and then, when they are stable, try them as if they were sane all along.

The sane believe that we live by the same rules they do. (Which suggests that they are corrupt and dangerous indeed!) I have told my story of my strange stalker delusion to others. It nearly always demands persistance on my part to get through to them what was happening in my head and how I acted on it. More than a few amateur psychoanalysts have jumped to the conclusion that I really was stalking these women. I never sought their address or phone number. I disappeared when I saw them. That is not a stalker’s modus operandi. But when given a glance at an opposite, the unafflicted will often conclude it is the familiar expectation.

We pride ourselves on being able to tell black from white. Witness, however, how in the eyes of some, the War in Iraq has been given the colors of peace. The patient is never served by the analogues to the belief that he is a weapon of mass destruction. My case demonstrates that we are endlessly creative in our delusions, our paranoias, and delusions. The therapist, the family member and the friend must learn to listen to us, so that we are helped rather than shoveled to the side. I often hear that there’s no help for it, that I am overtaken by trifles that have no bearing on my actual diagnosis. People think that I have said more about myself than I realize, but often what they think what is happening in my head is dead wrong.

Dr. Deborah Serani talks about another kind of pigeonholing, the over-use of the term “addiction”.