Rip Van Gledwood Manic-Depressive

I AM TURNING into Rip Van Winkle for sure. Between Friday and Saturday I slept about 27 hours in the space of 33 hours (ie a lot of sleep). I woke up 2 or 3 times, for 3 hours at a time. Then thought "what's the point of being awake anyhow?" and went back to bed. I have no idea how I can possibly sleep so long. The only drugs I was on were the miniscule 19 or 20mg of methadone I'm on (which does nothing except stop me being "sick") and 300mg quetiapine (Seroquel) taken all in one go around 10-11pm every night. I don't take quetiapine in the day precisely because I usually do NOT want to sleep then.

Anyway after this 27 hour sleep marathon I promptly went to bed AGAIN and spent about three quarters of the remaining weekend fast asleep yet again!! Usually excessive sleep is tied to depression. But I started feeling manic when I was awake. Not really manic. Just a little bit hypomanic. My mind lit up like a Christmas tree, my body still knackered.

I decided to get up at nine o'clock on Monday in case I spend the rest of my LIFE in a coma. WHY DOES THIS HAPPEN? I'm not complaining, by the way, just BEMUSED by it all.

Oh and by the way, hypomania is usually associated with markedly diminished "need for sleep" (not insomnia). I would beg to differ. I have spent days on end as a manic insomniac. Needing to sleep, yet by no means able to.

Emil Kraepelin explained it all in his worthy tome Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia, when he said ALL the symptoms of the "disorder" cycle separately. Which means one's sleep might be drastically affected, while the mood stays relatively normal. Manic and depressive features are wont to intermingle (which throws the label "bipolar" on its head, implying as it does that the disorder is always marked by phases of absolute opposites). In actuality, the old term "manic-depressive psychosis" describes it far better.

And to the people who say "bipolar disorder is not crazy" ~ what kind of bipolar do you actually have? Severe mood swings are inherently crazy. It's true only 15% of type 1 manic-depressives are said to hallucinate, but about 65% of bipolar 1 sufferers become paranoid or delusional (typically with delusions of grandeur about having stacks of money, ruling the world, or having some special relationship with God). Being as God is the source of all energy and manic people tend to have excess energy by the cart-load, there is a grain of truth in this. Also mania has long been linked with creativity or even genuis.

During the hours that I was awake, I mused on the miserable fact that nearly everything I think or feel or do, in other words nearly everything in my life can be construed as a symptom. I no longer spend the day in a good mood; I'm "hypomanic" (and do have the symptoms of hypomania; I wouldn't just use the word irresponsibly). When I'm down it's called a "depressive episode". When my mind feels more awake I have "racing thoughts and/or "thought-insertion" (that is, the sensation that alien thoughts fly into the mind from outside ~ you can point to the direction they come from). There is no absolute frontier between "inserted thoughts" and "hearing voices" which counts as an auditory hallucination. When I was severely manic I also had visual hallucinations of great beauty and splendour. Incidentally, although the doctors seem fixated on whether I "hear voices" when I'm really mad what I've heard far more is really really weird noises and distorted sound-effects. Eg the cars passing down the street whoosh several times over through some psychotic echo-chamber. When I run down the stairs I see huge words coming out of the walls in capital letters, and the stairs exclaim "oink oink oink doink doink". I'm not mad now, by the way, just reminiscing.

And that's another thing. I get frequent flashbacks to manic psychosis. And yet I have never been friends with anyone who was actively bipolar. (Everyone I've known who was mad was schizophrenic, usually paranoid schizophrenic.) So I have nobody at all to talk to. Other people with other diagnoses envy the elated mood, but don't understand how horrendously intense a manic epside can get. When I was most out of it, I had daily out-of-body type experiences. My body felt like it was turning from matter into spirit, or at least pure energy. When the mania started to wear off, I had a distinct and weird feeling that my feet were back on the ground. I had been so out of it I became impervious to cold. I had the windows wide open in late January and only noticed the chill when my hands seized up at the computer. All these weird things. I feel a great need to make sense of them.

Maybe you can never make sense of nonsense. But what sounds nonsensical to you seemed extremely meaningful to me as it happened.

And that's just about all there is to say on the subject...


PS: if you're wondering why all the Madonna videos, it's because I post stuff up to listen to. If you happen to like it, that's just an added bonus.

Here's a good one. Sorry about the weird aspect-ratio:~~~~~

THE MAMAS AND THE PAPAS (ED SULIVAN SHOW): CREEQUE ALLEY


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