What a Manic Episode Really Looks Like

THIS is the only video I've ever seen that portrays bipolar mania even half-convincingly. When I first posted it on my old blog, I WAS manic and didn't see anything very extreme about her behaviour, which, if it's representative of her behaviour throughout the entire course of that day, seems to me like what a doctor would probably call a moderate level of mania (or severe hypomania) crossed with a strong desire to let off steam (she says she was going on a long road trip in a few hours time).

Most of the depictions of mania you'll see on TV tend to accentuate the grandiosity, high spirits and irritability of the condition but will totally ignore the extreme distractability, pressure of speech and thought/speech disorder (perseveration (repetition), tangientiality, "flight of ideas") etc which are the hallmarks of the manic state.

Watch this and you'll see why I'm scared of ever behaving like this in public. I once got taken to a mental hospital emergency reception when I was so manic I was yelling the alphabet at the top of my voice, throwing hand sanitizer up in the air and propelling myself on a swivel chair pretending to fly. I did most of this behaviour out of sight of the nurses. And nobody really gives a flying crap how any mental patient behaves in a mental hospital, as long as they're not making Hard Work for the staff. I went away with a long report written out against my name and a prescription for sleeping pills. I saw a consultant just over a week later, when that wave of mania was already waning (it came back and back and back again over the weeks)....

Anyway THIS is why I write posts I never post. Because I'm traumatized at how crazy I got nearly 18 months ago. And behaved such that I could clearly see the fear in other people's faces. I was far more deranged than the woman you see here. But I don't get it at all.

 I don't understand WHY WHY WHY.

PS if you're wondering what happened to the star of this Youtube show, she gassed herself in her garage some years later. Suicide. I find it hard to believe the risk of death in bipolar depression is only one in five (double the rate in ordinary depression), but that's what the statistics say.

By the way I'm not manic now. More depressed, if anything. Memories of the manic state come back to me in flashbacks. I feel compelled to make some kind of sense out of them...






LINK: TRISCH LI ON MYSPACE