Mania: Why I Thought I Was Faster Than Usain Bolt and His Eight Olympic Gold Medals
During a prolonged episode of severe psychosis where at times I experienced the manic side of bipolar disorder, I lost a lot of faith in the current treatment models
It was another long, boring day in 10 building. Ten building was constructed likely some time in the 1970s and it was the quintessential place to hold patients, staff and visitors in an institutional setting. There were four wards in the hospital, each mirror images of each other, aside from the personality of mostly the recreation therapist who would occasionally task patients with putting up rudimentary art on the walls. I recall in another building I was given a page from a fairy tale book to colour, and instead of colouring in golden hair for Rapunzel, I made her hair brown, which was the hair colour of a young woman I had delusions about from my childhood. I will never forget feeling the humiliation of going from a full academic course load in high school to sitting on a locked psychiatric ward having my parents ask me which colouring page on the wall was mine and trying to explain to me why I got it wrong.
As far as my Olympic feats of speed and agility go, I was on what is now the harshest ward to put someone on in ten building. It was 10-2, lockup. I spent more than five months there and many of those days were spent in isolation. But what I wanted to talk about wasn’t more whining about all the hardships I endured while some incredibly well educated people tried to help me out of a load of problems I had made for myself, I wanted to talk about mania.
I think I might be in a state of mania right now. A lot of activity and a lot of caffeine will often be enough. It is past 1:00am, which for me is the time when my brain always seems to want to turn itself into overdrive and create some grand thing. To give a bit of background, this morning I was 3,000 miles away from my comfortable easy chair where I have decided to consume a novel from the Dune series before going to pick up my brother in the morning to take him for groceries. All this is after staying up most of last night and crossing a strange city on foot then flying thousands of miles. A lot of times, I get these ideas of performing superhuman feats and soon after I give up on them. Stick the bookmark back in the novel, vacuum my futon to get rid of a day’s worth of food crumbs, and often take a half a milligram pill of a drug called Rivotril, classed as a hypnotic. Basically it is an addictive sleep aid that has the added effect of tranquilizing me through the next day up to when it is time to take it again.
I don’t know if I am going to take a sleeping pill today, but I did want to write a page or two while I am in this state of mania, I think there is a lot to be learned by doing it. I will start by going back 24 years to 2001 when I was in/on the lockup ward in ten building. All the wards in 10 building have a long hallway, intended to be one end for females and the other end for males. Most of my physical activity came from walking up and down the halls. This was also one of the few ways to have a private talk with one of my fellow inmates. One day, thinking back to when I was 18 and a long distance runner, I decided to run at full speed all the way from the end of the male hallway, past the nursing station in a blinding flash, and then all the way to the end of the female section. It was dangerous, the halls were narrow and most of the staff members strongly preferred us to sit, heavily medicated, watching TV and smoking. I was told to stop running, but I replied:
“I just broke a world record!”
It is embarrassing to think of being so deluded as to actually believe that, but one has to understand the power of living with paranoid schizophrenia PLUS a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, with anxiety mixed in just for fun.
One thing I have found interesting is that there have been some high achievers in this world who had bipolar. Lincoln, Churchill. I had heard once that Churchill had to work so hard and do so many things that were critical to the outcome of WWII that if he hadn’t had bipolar disorder we might all be wearing cheesy little square moustaches and speaking German (no offence to Germany, from what I understand it is an incredibly beautiful country and I have nothing but the greatest respect for Back and Beethoven. I even heard that there are more castles in Germany than the USA has MacDonald’s restaurants).
The rumour was that Churchill never slept much. He would close his eyes now and then for a 10-15 minute nap but that was about it. I am sure someone with more knowledge of Churchill will tell me otherwise, but I do find it makes a lot of sense.
To read more about Churchill and bipolar disorder, visit here: Churchill Bipolar
When I travel, (I just spent 3 days and 2 nights in Ottawa, my trip ending about 4 hours ago) I tend to stay up all night rather than risk missing a flight. I did get a few hours of sleep last night, but I also fell asleep in the boarding area of the Ottawa airport, and I think I fell asleep on the plane. These are not horrible things to do, except when you know you have a snoring problem so serious you often wake yourself. Somehow though, I think possibly because I have successfully lost about 50 pounds from my heaviest weight that my snoring has decreased.
Mania is such an odd thing. It can be very hard to fall asleep, even for days, and when you do rest, sometimes you are so tired that your mind takes over, making it nearly impossible to wake up, just so you are able to get desperately needed rest and recuperation time. As a result, you end up sleeping a lot more than you wanted. I forget if I mentioned that when I was in grade 12 I was drinking a lot of coffee or tea and staying up late studying or watching TV. One day I went to take a short nap before school and slept in for a final exam that I was supposed to write for my Law class. Law was my career goal at the time and missing the exam took me from a young man with a bright future to a student who could hope at best to get into a community college. This is an example of how important it is to get your 8 hours of rest each night at a regular time, but also about how critical it can be to have an illness like bipolar properly treated as soon as possible. But if you struggle with sleep, it can be critical to get professional help and advice. I had opportunities to get help for all the things that were going on in my head as a troubled teen. My mom had tried to get me to see her psychiatrist. I was struggling with a lot of things as a but I kept holding to the 80s axiom, “no pain, no gain.” I believed that if I never experienced the crippling depression I was going through that it would take away from genuine joy and pride of accomplishing something difficult.
In all honesty, I find it so important to have set, clear goals in my life that I’m working towards. This is something I am also starting to demand of the people I choose to share my life with. Lately, I have started to treat my closest friends and even family members who use drugs or alcohol differently. This is something I just can’t allow myself to slip back into. Even at the conference I just attended, aside from the part where people with lived experience of mental illness spoke about what they went through and how they recovered, I was reminded of a man who had a son who was so sick his parents had no more ideas about what to do with him. He listened to a psychiatrist give a presentation about dopamine and neurotransmitters and the man, exasperated said:
“Right now our house is on fire and you are trying to tell us about the chemical composition of the paint.”
It just seemed so alienating to be a person with a mental illness who has real and immediate needs to listen for an hour to a lecture at a conference on how to categorize lectures at a conference.
But I don’t say this because I don’t feel conferences are useful. There were some great minds there who were proposing some amazing things. But sadly it is almost as though there are many communities in the mental health field that never interact outside of an office or examination room. On one side is the professionals who work together and play together who are responsible for medication and treatment plans, and on the other side are the patients who only know the staff and doctors for a few minutes when they report the effects of their newest drug or how they are managing their most pressing issues. The other community consists of nursing staff who often only interact with patients for the ten seconds it takes them to administer the pill.
Earlier in my adult years, I was a leader at a ten day Christian summer camp for children, an adventure I will never forget. The people who were going to lead the group of children spent about 3 days before the children arrived, mostly just bonding and getting to know each other. It was such a wonderful experience that I feel if patients and staff would spend more time bonding and developing working relationships (with boundaries of course) not only would the patients benefit, and likely get better faster, but it would take a huge load off the nursing staff of psychiatric wards and hospitals and allow them to grow far beyond their current working environment which all too often seems to be just to do the bare minimum required to not get fired and hope to collect a pension for many years after they have put in their time.
Of course, there are many problems with doing such bonding. It would start to take away from the authority of the staff members, which at times is desperately needed. Also, if you make a hospital a place where a person connects, makes friends and learns about themselves through others, people would either never leave hospitals or constantly find ways to be committed again.
One of the funny things that makes me think of changing the focus of hospitals in that way comes from my own work in hospitals. I had a job for a few years teaching creative writing and poetry to patients in the hospital that once had me locked up for six long months. I was employed by a nonprofit that sent teachers out to work in many places where they were needed, but not necessarily able to pay for teaching services. My boss was a strong believer in a book called “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed” which details how beneficial it can be to turn “The banking system” of teaching we know in North America where the teacher knows everything and fills the students up with his interpretation of knowledge, to a system where the teacher and the student work together and each learns from the other.
But to get back to mania for a bit, it can do some strange things to a person. Through my teen years, I often snuck down to watch TV after my parents had gone to bed and sat snacking all night and working out while watching black and white shows from the 50s and 60s. Although there were positive benefits to watching these (The Twilight Zone was one of them) like me being able to write stories where the world is turned on its head, it left me a complete wreck during school the next day.
One thing I learned once from a high school student was that teenagers in primitive times were often tasked with things like keeping a fire lit and protecting the rest of the group they belonged to during the night, then the older humans would take over during the day. The teenagers would often sleep late, then take up whatever needed tasks again in the afternoon. This kind of struck me because I honestly feel if I were allowed more time and space as a teen to work when I wanted and sleep when I needed to, I could have completed school on time and had a much easier go of life than I did. But who knows? My mania, triggered by caffeine, became insomnia and insomnia became dangerous at later times in my life when my daily routine made me so exhausted in the mornings that it wasn’t uncommon for me to struggle to stay awake if I drove in the mornings.
All I really can say is that there was something seriously wrong with me during my teen years. Bouts of mania come with bouts of depression, and it is common for them to lead to psychosis (loss of contact with external reality). In my case I suffered from bipolar for a few years and out of nowhere it developed into schizoaffective disorder, bipolar subtype with anxiety.
For anyone who sees this resonate with someone they love, or even themselves, I would like to leave you with some simple advice. There are organizations in most first world countries to identify and treat psychosis as early as possible. I wrote an article about the Edmonton Early Psychosis Intervention Clinic, or EEPIC. They serve youth ages 15 to 35 and they have proven their efforts have amazing results. A psychiatrist yesterday said to me that the way mental health treatment goes, the earlier you can intervene, the better the outcome. If you are a parent of a teen who is struggling, say they have stopped showering, they have lost pleasure in things they used to enjoy, they struggle socially, or they experience my situation where at times they are bouncing off the walls and then go through periods of being sad or depressed for no apparent reason, go to your family doctor, explain everything as honestly as possible, ask for a referral to a psychiatrist, and look into the possibility of connecting with an early psychosis intervention clinic like the one described.
Read my article about EEPIC in Urban Affairs Magazine Here:
This is the link to the article
Stay tuned, there is more to come. I am hoping to write at least two blogs a week and make at least one podcast. Take care good readers!
Leif, your honesty and transparency is such a breath of fresh air. These little missiles will reach the right people. Don't forget you are the Little Engine that Could. I am so proud of you, and your advocacy and of course, your writing gets better and bolder.