I’ve been accustomed to mysteries, holy and otherwise, since I was a child. Some of us care for orphans, amass fortunes, raise protests or Nielsen ratings; some of us take communion or whiskey or poison....

Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind...

He doesn’t have anything like wisdom of age or hindsight. He’s a biased historian of self, an emotional revisionist. We all are, for the most part.

[ ] manic sex isn’t really intercourse. It’s dicourse, just another way to ease the insatiable need for contact and communication. In place of words, I simply spoke with my skin.

You know how most illnesses have symptoms you can recognize? Like fever, upset stomach, chills, whatever. Well, with manic depression, it’s sexual promiscuity, excessive spending, and substance abuse – and that just sounds like a...

When you are mad, mad like this, you don’t know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else’s reality, it’s still reality to you.

One of the things that baffles me (and there are quite a few) is how there can be so much lingering stigma with regards to mental illness, specifically bipolar disorder. In my opinion, living with...

I didn’t realize there was a ranking.” I said. “Sadie frowned. “What do you mean?” “A ranking,” I said. “You know, what’s crazier than what.” “Oh, sure there is,” Sadie said. She sat back in...

I don’t existmetal pressed to pagesspilling blood, inkin vein each thought ragesSunlight shootingthrough a forest of pinesblack top windingand yellow dotted linesI am not hereonly a deep aching,a lightning flashand a tree trunk breakingSheets once...

Her parents, she said, has put a pinball machine inside her head when she was five years old. The red balls told her when she should laugh, the blue ones when she should be silent...

I know the empathy borne of despair; I know the fluidity of thought, the expansive, even beautiful, mind that hypomania brings, and I know this is quicksilver and precious and often it’s poison. There has...

When I am high I couldn’t worry about money if I tried. So I don’t. The money will come from somewhere; I am entitled; God will provide. Credit cards are disastrous, personal checks worse. Unfortunately,...

I now know for certain that my mind and emotions, my fix on the real and my family’s well-being, depend on just a few grams of salt. But treatment’s the easy part. Without honesty, without...

It took me far too long to realize that lost years and relationships cannot be recovered. That damage done to oneself and others cannot always be put right again.

Compared to bipolar’s magic, reality seems a raw deal. It’s not just the boredom that makes recovery so difficult, it’s the slow dawning pain that comes with sanity – the realization of illnesss, the humiliating...

Once a restless or frayed mood has turned to anger, or violence, or psychosis, Richard, like most, finds it very difficult to see it as illness, rather than being willful, angry, irrational or simply tiresome.

Depression is a painfully slow, crashing death. Mania is the other extreme, a wild roller coaster run off its tracks, an eight ball of coke cut with speed. It’s fun and it’s frightening as hell....

the intensity, glory, and absolute assuredness if my mind’s flight made it very difficult for me to believe once i was better, that the illness was one i should willingly give up….moods are such an...

It’s difficult. I take a low dose of lithium nightly. I take an antidepressant for my darkness because prayer isn’t enough. My therapist hears confession twice a month, my shrink delivers the host, and I...

I’ve got to that point in life when there’s very few thrills and lots of pills seems we all end up this way. As we wait for our final day. But there’s one thing about...

In our family “whim-wham” is code, a defanged reference to any number of moods and psychological disorders, be they depressive, manic, or schizoaffective. Back in the 1970s and ’80s – when they were all straight...

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between…I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like...