Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax
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Category: Mania
Manic Introversion
Posted on June 15, 2010 in Hope and Joy Mania
The excesses of impulse that characterize most manias do not apply to me most of the time I am in episode. Thoughts stream through my head. Incredible schemes surge across the two hemispheres of my brain. I keep these to myself, sure that if others see them they would prevent me from realizing my dreams. I know that I mad but I am curious to see where it will take me. It exalts. It enthralls. It feels better than any narcotic I have been prescribed and superior to alcohol and marijuana. I call this secret state of mind my manic introversion.
Corrolary to this is this principle: the fewer people I feel accountable toward, the better I feel. I don’t feel the pressure of Brahma with his many faces — a nexus of truths and lies calculated to protect my vulnerability.
The lying isn’t sociopathic but an impulse to conceal that I am dashing off set, hiding from the inquisitions of those around me. Trusted people can make me admit it, even when the mania rages. It’s best to hide during my episodes so I don’t have to be Brahma the polymorphous deva of creation or the madly dancing Shiva, Lord of the Beasts — just a man.
Lithium and A Big Head
Posted on June 9, 2010 in Mania Psychotropics
Descriptions of mania done by the performance artists we all turn into when the waves of emotion overwhelm us can include hands going to our temples with the cry “It feels like my head is going to explode!” Theatricality reveals truth if we observe what researchers have discovered in the course of revealing why lithium works to bring us down:
Inflammation in the brain, like other parts of the body, is an important process to help the brain combat infection or injury. However, excess or unwanted inflammation can damage sensitive brain cells, which can contribute to psychiatric conditions like bipolar disorder or degenerative diseases like Alzheimers.
It’s believed that lithium helps treat bipolar disorder by reducing brain inflammation during the manic phase, thus alleviating some of the symptoms….rats given a six-week lithium treatment had reduced levels of arachidonic acid and its products, which can contribute to inflammation.
In addition, they also demonstrated, for the first time, that lithium treatment increased levels of a metabolite called 17-OH-DHA in response to inflammation. 17-OH-DHA is formed from the omega-3 fatty acid DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) and is the precursor to a wide range of anti-inflammatory compounds known as docosanoids
I doubt that I ever told any professional about the sense of puffiness or bloating that I felt when I was manic. My head felt like a balloon. My emotions drafted up on winds of madness. Pressure in the temples and at the back of the skull marked the episodes, pressure that was without pain. I did not experience head aches, but I often wondered if there was a tumor growing. Would the sutures of my skull hold against this force? There was always a sense of living just before a great pop. I had to get thoughts realized, I had to display the great zepellin of my imagination before it was too late. That Hindenburg of consciousness was always aware that there would come a precipitous meeting with the docking tower, a ruin of my mind in depression.
If I am not imagining this, then I have discovered for myself an important, physical sign of mania.
Epiphanies from the 2010 DBSA Conference
Posted on May 3, 2010 in DBSA Support Groups and Conferences Depression Mania Pointers PTSD
I wondered if I suffered from bipolar disorder at all, so well had my meds been working lately. The wash of mania seemed a dream fixed to an offshore rock.
What do you do all night when you are in mania?
Posted on April 16, 2009 in Mania Skribit
I waste time. But not in the same way that I usually do it. I’m always up nights, twittering, reading, working on recent photos. My day ends somewhere between 3 and 4, at which point I go to bed, which alerts the cats to begin their trills of demand for food from my softhearted wife. I use a cocktail of Xanax, Benadryl, Doxepin, melatonin, and my nighttime anti-psychotics and mood-stabilizers to stall my brain into torpor. I sleep well and I sleep deep until about noon or one o’clock in the afternoon, an unconventional hour but one that I can manage thanks to my unemployment and insistence on afternoon appointments.
If I am manic, I forget to take the meds until a later hour and do not feel their slowing until after Lynn has gone to work at nine. I lay in bed, staring at the pockets inside the sheets, groping for rest. Mania purposes me to a different set of activities, First, reading is impossible. My eyes fly over the words, ignoring the middles of sentences and barely noticing the presence of paragraphs. I have missed whole scenes and whole characters when I am in this state. For this reason, as my condition advanced in the late twentieth century, I read less and less. Volumes I wanted to peruse stood on my shelf for years, unopened and stinking of dust. There was no accomplishment during this time except as resulted from my strange habit of digesting dictionaries.
Forget, too, the learning of languages and despair for the reworking of photos because I don’t have the interest required to take them in the first place. I loiter in chat rooms until talk of politics and the inspid, incessant chatter of bored minds rile me to perpetual wrath.
So, having no television, I turn to computer games, which I play on a laptop at the foot of our bed, occasionally waking my wife with my anger and despair at ever winning. Lynn gets a nervous look on her face whenever I turn my attentions to the entertainments aisle at Fry’s Electronics. Subliminally I know what it means: the restless, endlessly disturbed nights mosh in her head. My bouncing on the mattress and my screams at an imaginary routine that I call “the cheat circuit” ((The cheat circuit works in various ways. It ignores keyboard commands. It crashes when you are about to deliver the death blow to the computer-mounted forces. The timing of these events seems just too calculated for my accelerated mind to accept as mere chance.)) grieve her. She doesn’t like this for good reason. But I ignore her and buy the sugar-acid pleasure anyways.
Games do little for my ability to sleep. They lead to the long nights and short sleeps that I have previously described. Wars of conquest and the building of fabled towns interrupt my dreams and make for a shallow sleep. In a few short hours, I burst into consciousness and resume my fruitless, solitary liveliness.
This blogging was inspired by a question asked on Skribit. To take part, click on the suggestions tab on the right or scroll down to the Skribit window in the right hand column. You can also vote for your favorite suggestion.
The Hardest Part
Posted on March 19, 2009 in Mania Writing/Darkness
The hardest part of mania is the grandiosity, the overconfidence in your brilliance. Of course, it doesn’t feel so bad at the time.
Falling
Posted on March 17, 2009 in Class Journals & Notebooks Mania Spirituality and Being Writing Exercises
Mania is a long fall, sometimes so high it’s an orbit.
The Rabbit-Hole Library
Posted on March 10, 2009 in Mania Poems Writing/Darkness
I have to read each one
Synchronous to the others.
Excessive Cheerfulness
Posted on March 6, 2009 in Body Language Mania Partnership
Every time I confess my limitations, I worry. There are the people who, when we get in a fight, lash out by saying that ~I~ am the one “losing it”. Mental illness is an instant defeat in their book. It can, if you look too narrowly, appear as if you are losing the respect of the whole world. The truth is that when people know you, they care for you and cut you breaks.
Last week I needed a few hits on my asthma inhaler. Consequently, my mood ramped up so high that on Saturday night people on Twitter complained about my excessive cheerfulness and loquaciousness. Early Sunday morning I ran a scan to see how fast I was going: during the first one and a half hours of March, I discovered, I had tweeted 148 times, just missing tripping the governor that stops you at 100 tweets an hour. I had set this off earlier in the week. I had not known that such a control existed ((I do not call for removing it. Some of us need a warning of that type. I wish I could set my speed – for example, asking it to stop me after 75 tweets instead of 100 so that I get an earlier warning of my manic outbursts.)) .
Later I woke my poor wife up at 3 in the morning to read something that I had written in response to a comment. I knew then that I was running hot and might make a mistake in judgment such as calling my opponent some foul name or accusing my antagonist of a dark purpose that existed, quite possibly, in my mind alone. No remorse accompanied my actions: I felt great. That is why I needed checking. I laughed at my barbs but removed them at Lynn’s suggestion before I published it.
My now former therapist might have questioned why I needed to respond in the first place, but I scoffed at the idea of silence. She might have questioned why I needed Lynn to check my work. For someone who claimed to have experience tending people who have mood disorders, she showed great ignorance of the disease and the need to monitor one’s behavior at all times. She thought it demeaning to me, for example, to place our financial affairs in Lynn’s hands – as if my wife were going to rob me or strip me of my dignity. We do the bill thing as partners. I can look anytime at the financial records if I choose. But I know that it is better that I don’t and by not doing so, I preserve my self-respect by not plunging the household into financial chaos brought on by my grand designs and panics.
I see this as a practical answer to the problem of my lapses into freespending. Looking at the money matters of our household upsets me and pushes me towards episodes. I run the risk of either thinking we have money to spend (when there is actually a large amount that had already been budgeted) or that we are on the verge of financial collapse. I can be induced either to pay out large amounts on worthless items or go on a binge of parsimony in which I starve myself. My therapists didn’t get these clear and present dangers and the importance of keeping to certain habits even if you are feeling well. Keeping them always makes me less likely to break them in times of crisis, you see.
Lynn has certain plans in place just in case I go over the top. For example, she can report my credit card lost or stolen if it seems that I am going into a manic phase. There’s not a lot she can do when I am feeling sad – force me to spend against my will She’s left with the recourse of spending the money herself. This is why I have her pay the bills. I have been known to think I am too poor and withhold money because I believe I am running out of it. No spending on food, clothing, rent, etc. all because of this belief that afflicts me. These things are always there, stalking my peace of mind. You never get cured of this disease. You must always be on your guard. That is what my last therapist – with all her years of experience – didn’t seem to get. Some therapists say to themselves “I can cure this poor man of his delusions”. But they keep coming back just when I think things will be fine — if only I can do something about the wheezing in my chest….
One maddening thing that keeps happening in the wake of last Saturday night’s event is that people keep asking me “Are you OK? Are you OK?” as if I am ready to doff my clothes and go hitchhiking nude down the freeway. One fellow who I knew in Partial Hospitalization told me that he was on the phone one night laughing at some jokes his friend was telling. His father hovered just around the corner. “Are you all right? Are you all right, son?” “Dad,” he told him. “I’m allowed to laugh.”
Book Review: Soaring and Crashing (Mostly Crashing)
Posted on February 2, 2009 in Mania Reading
The difference between me and Hollans is that I never trusted the miracle workers.
No Rollercoaster
Posted on October 16, 2007 in Crosstalk Mania
Here’s a charming piece from McMan’s Depression and Bipolar Web about the real character of bipolar disorder:
The last roller coaster ride I was on, in fact every roller coaster ride I’ve been on, and there have been plenty, has been a blast! Clackety- clack on the big old fashioned wooden ones, round and round on loops, up the hills, down into the troughs with your stomach 100 yards behind you, through Space Mountain with R2D2 and C3PO, the whoosh of cool air and mechanical noises, up the Matterhorn in toboggans run by helpful lederhosened Disney employees, past the Yeti, round the bend where centrifugal force keeps you in the sled, then another whoosh! Down the mountain, through the water, and out. OUT. Controlled, hysterical fun, and then OUT.
Let’s look at it this way: If manic depressive illness were like a roller coaster ride, there would be people lined up around the block for it. They would spend a fortune trying to get it, rather than trying to get rid of it, and there would be an adorable kiosk on the corner selling ice cream and souvenirs rather than a pharmacy selling lithium. Manic depression being likened to a ride on a roller coaster is about as accurate as a heart attack being compared to heartburn.
I wonder to what degree has our perception/memory of our mania’s have been influenced by the common folk description. Many people have told me “oh I know how it must feel. It’s really good when you’re in mania, right?” No, it sucks in mania just as it does in depression but for different reasons. My mouth is flapping at a mile a minute, my body is shaking, and my temper is gunpowder spread on the floor of a smoking car of a railroad. I don’t like being manic because I know I will crash, repeatedly. The only thing to do is to hide in my room so that I don’t make a fool of myself, to pull all my energy together and act like a six foot four mouse who only squeaks in response to questions because he doesn’t want to appear insane.
Maybe some people feel the whoosh, but I am not one of them. As for the supposed crash of depression, I wouldn’t describe it as that at all. You just find yourself in it. It’s more like closing the blinds on acid-bright sunshine. You feel like your head has turned to jelly and it’s sticking and dragging on the floor.
The disease ain’t no theme park. It really is a sickness.
The Hurdle
Posted on August 21, 2007 in Mania Sorrow & Regret
For me, it’s the forgetting of all the shames. Those irritate me more than the times when I was misunderstood and villified for no good cause, when I was made to take more than my share of the blame for a social conflagration. All the times when I shot my mouth off and bewildered people make me ache. My therapist reviews these with me and concludes that I hurt no one, but I continue to dread the feelings I left in other souls, the misapprehensions about my states of mind and motives. I have seen myself maligned and diabolized for things I said when I wasn’t in mania, so it seems natural to stand aghast of what dark fantasies the mind that is not mine can invent based on the confusions of my manias.
I have lived for nearly fifty years. For forty seven of those, I went undiagnosed. My conscience takes on many guilts, each engraved in lead.
[tags]bipolar disorder, mania, shame, guilt, sorrow & regret, sorrow, regret[/tags]
At the End of Mania’s Hook
Posted on August 8, 2007 in Mania
Thought: the root problem with mania is sensitivity to suggestion not impulsiveness. We often use another term such as grandiosity or paranoia to describe our states of mind. We look at the shopping cart filled with lamb chops and say “It was an impulse”. It’s part of the issue, but where does the impulse come from? All those items dressed up in their pretty packages. They are placed to make people buy them and the people the sellers are looking for are us.
Be mean or cast a strange face and we become paranoid. Give us a self-esteem book and we believe that we can be anything we want. So we choose to be God. (I never liked being God. All that is screwed up in the world is because of You.) Say a prayer within our hearing and we grab our bibles and begin preaching from them. Or let us smell the slightest waft of incense and we shave our heads and become monks. Our impulsivity comes from our suggestability. We’re suckers, pure and simple.
[tags]bipolar disorder, mania, impulsiveness, impulsivity, conspicuous consumption, grandiosity, religiosity, paranoia[/tags]
