A friend is in pain. I'm not sure he know the cause, though its effects are all too real to him and those he loves.
He's fearlessly creative on cavas, and claims a total freedom for himself on the page, splashing words recklessly. Images emerge so fresh and surprising they make you gasp. And when he's well, he's warm and gregarious, full of talk and ideas and love for the world.
But at times he curls into himself, unable to face the world, swamped in depression. Everyone disappoints, no-one measures up. If disturbed, he hits out, throws words like rocks - knowing exactly what soft targets to hit, how to maximise the hurt.
I know it is not him talking, but the illness.
Does he know the thing that afflicts him has a name?
I don't think he does.
Does he know that there are others who suffer and have suffered in the same way? I don't think so. Yet
a roll-call of fellow sufferers would sound like a Who's Who in the arts: Blake, Plath, Oliver Goldsmith, Coleridge, Byron, Mary Shelley, Keats, Samuel Johnson, Robert Lowell, Virginia Woolf, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Ivan Berlin, Jackson Pollock, van Gogh to name but a few. It has been estimated that 50% of poets suffer from it, 38% of musicians, 20% of painters, and large proportions of those in other creative fields.
But to romanticise the illness is very wrong. It may be a spur to enhanced creativity (oh, and how we envy that, the pedestrian lumpen rest of us eking a little courage from our petulent muse) but unless you suffer from the illness yourself you cannot understand the darkness of the flip-side (I try but know how badly I fall short). And the risk of suicide is great. 15% of all sufferers die by their own hand, and up to 20% in untreated cases. He thinks about it too.
Made a decision yesterday that I had to tell him. Sometimes knowing the name of the demon you face helps you to begin to banish it, or at least put it in its place. I've met it before in several others and know a little of how they deal with it, their personal struggles. And I've read. There is no cure, but medication might work for him. Or at least the knowledge that he does not need to be alone with this nameless thing. I wanted to move conversation gently to this point, but it never has worked that way. I'd rather tell him tactfully, face-to-face, but I cannot find spaces between his floods of words, or else he shuns communication.
So I've send him my copy of Kay Redfield Jamison's book An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness through the post. Jamison writes a most moving account of her own journey through manic depression, and she became Professor of Pyschiatry at John Hopkins school of Medicine and one of the world's most foremost authorities on manic-depressive illness. Jamison talks of her own coming to terms with the illness, and sees it as more of a blessing than a curse in her life:
I have often asked myself whether, given the choice, I would choose to have manic-depressive illness. If lithium were not available to me, or didn't work for me, the answer would be a simple no... and it would be an answer laced with terror. But lithium does work for me, and therefore I can afford to pose the question. Strangely enough, I think I would choose to have it. It's complicated... I honestly believe that as a result of it I have felt more things, more deeply; had more experiences, more intensely; loved more, and have been more loved; laughed more often for having cried more often; appreciated more the springs, for all the winters... Depressed, I have crawled on my hands and knees in order to get across a room and have done it for month after month. But normal or manic I have run faster, thought faster, and loved faster than most I know.
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