The Bipolar as Hindu God

Posted on September 14, 2006 in DBSA Support Groups and Conferences

I found myself wishing that Tom Wootton would come clean on the issue of medication. But I didn’t have the nerve to ask him in front of all the other people just what was his stand on the drugs we bipolars take.

Wootton has written a book and constructed a seminar called The Bipolar Advantage. To put it simply, Wooten wants his listeners to reassess their symptoms and see them as a set of upper hands bipolar sufferers have over ” normals”. I liked what he had to say, but lurking in the back of my mind was a vision of a Hindu god named Grandiosity. Just when did a symptom start being an advantage? Wootton had plenty of answers for that. What he did not cover is when an advantage turns into a detriment.

I’m naturally skeptical of rampant optimism. Telling me that my manias are a good thing causes me to pull back. Yet Wootton did make a reasonable case: if we think a little faster than most, why not use that power to come up with more ideas? Captains of industry, he mentioned as an example, spend too much time analyzing. The concept of brainstorming is beyond them. They must analyze each information bit before they accept it as usable.

The bipolar sufferer, on the other hand, lets loose. In experiments that Wootton conducted during his seminars, participants were asked to list as many items they could get in a grocery store inside of five minutes. Where bipolars came up with an average of 48, corporate executives could only list eight. (And I don’t buy the argument that they don’t know because they never go into grocery stores. Certainly they can make a noteworthy list of fruits and vegetables.)

Does this make for an advantage? It depends on where you draw the lines. If you are setting out to just list a lot of potential ideas without analyzing their value, then the bipolar does have the advantage. If you are measuring the worth of every item as you list it, then the corporate approach might be superior.

What has happened, of course, is that many bipolars end up poor because their brains run all over the place (myself included). Yet I do not think we are completely lost or worthless to society. We have contributions that we can make.

We are, as Wootton argues, creatures of extremes. We have seen heaven and hell. The experiences our disease fosters take us places that most normal people never go. This is why so many of us have turned out great works of art, philosophy, theology, etc. The edges are where it is at. We warn, we encapsulate, and we liberate by discarding the irrelevant. This is what we can bring to the world and in this I agree with Wootton. All these flights of madness must eventually end and when they do, we can look back at heretofore undiscovered material, analyzing and selecting from it for the consumption of others.

I would not stay in rarefied places for long, however, and I would not extol the worst of my misadventures as visions either. This is a disease that needs to be corraled and channeled. I would not have my thousand hands in a thousand places. The meds remain an important part of my recovery. In its foulest light, Wootton’s call tells us to just be insane.

I’ve seen that in others as well as myself and I am not impressed with its fruits. I hope he doesn’t mean that.