Living with bipolar disorder is difficult, even in these ‘enlightened’ times. Although the condition has nudged its way into public awareness, the stigma and the misconceptions persist. The little knowledge people acquire makes for countless lay-psychiatrists, innumerable armchair psychologists, and plenty of misdirected good intentions.
Terri Cheney lives with bipolar disorder. Her account of life with this condition is told in Manic: A Memoir. Her tale is unsentimental and unashamed. It does not seek to intellectualise, psychoanalyse, or even anesthetise the facts. It merely delivers an account of a life lived without greyscale.
The book is free of endless flowery rhetoric — though it is beautifully written — and this makes it deceptively easy to read. Even the non-sequential nature of the story fails to confuse. Bipolar is a bit like that anyway, like living life on shuffle. Hidden within these chapters are the triggers of many ill-remembered feelings. My copy of the book is festooned with sticky labels, markers of passages that resonate with me.
Cheney, on the electrification of the senses: “The little hairs loved hypomania: the world was suddenly all about textures and taste and sensations… until I felt like a blind man faced with too much Braille.”
On the merciless and thankless mood-housekeeping one has to endure to stay well: “…I ruthlessly pinpointed the moment on the mood scale, skewered it like a dead butterfly. Happiness management was a cruel science. It may have kept me safe from unexpected butterflies, but it killed all the flutter and delight.”
I could go on: the hypersexuality, drinking to polarise your mood in social situations, trying to work out who the hell you actually are after the mood disorder is taken out of the equation, and of course, the slow and hateful journey to acknowledgment that you are, by the layperson’s view, mad. My markers are not your markers, and you may find yourself drawn to completely different pages - but you will be drawn.
Article comments
1 - Pat
I read the review with much interest, as the Grandmom of a 6 1/2 year old who has had the diagnosis for 1 1/2 years. We struggle to learn all we can and to remain hopeful for this preciously gifted child. She sings at the drop of a pin and remembers exceptionally well.
2 - orchid
I did not like the book. Terri Cheney is completely self-absorbed and unsympathetic. She has added nothing to the genre. Obviously, she did not read Kay Redfield Jamisons, "Flights of the Mind." Now, that is an account of bipolar disorder worth reading. Cheney's book is shallow, distant, and leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I would discourage intelligent people from reading it. It's suitable for the stupid masses, but not for thinking adults. You'd stick to Jamison if you're smart.
3 - orchid
Excuse me. Jamison's memoir is titled, "An Unquiet Mind." I was confusing the titles of two of her books.
4 - coryluscontorta
I have read both, though it has been some time since I picked up Jamieson's. I read ‘An Unquiet Mind’ directly after my diagnosis, on the advice of my psychiatrist. I found her experiences to be distant from my own; they didn't speak to me of the chaos the illness creates around you. The flowery rhetoric was ultimately hopeful and hers is a story of a woman who goes on to recover her life and her success. The reality is that many sufferers lose so much; their dignity not least of all. My experience of bipolar was powerlessness as my life turned into a black cartoon, my job, my husband and my friends melted away along with my grip on reality. Even today I find my life compromised in order to maintain a euthymic condition and I have to choose who I tell for fear of being ostracised. That is why ‘Manic’ spoke to me in a way that An Unquiet Mind didn’t, but each to their own.
Given that the media image of the condition is still to demonise sufferers, anything which contributes to the debate and the volume of information for sufferers and non sufferers alike, must surely be positive. Both books contribute to the genre in different ways " one weightier, academic and ‘spiritual’ the other grittier and verging on sensationalist. My general advice to those who know nothing is to read one, read the other, but for gods sake, read something.