Notes on Manic-Depressive Illness, 2e, by Goodwin & Jamison
Volume 1. New York: Oxford UP. 2007.
p. xix “Manic-depressive illness magnifies common human experiences to larger-than life proportions.” [Living large. Yay.]
xix “manic-depressive illness is the most common cause of suicide.” [Ergo, I think people who bully the mentally ill are attempting murder.]
xxiii “The high mortality associated with this illness cannot be overemphasized.” [So will you assholes stop acting like it’s no big deal?]
xxiii “The age-old link between ‘madness’ and creativity has been studied with increasingly sophisticated methods in recent years. Research has demonstrated that it is not schizophrenia but manic-depressive illness, especially its bipolar forms, that is more often associated with creative accomplishment.” [Normal brains produce normal thoughts, which are advantageous in… some… situations.]
3 “Aristotle, who differed with the Hippocratic writers by seeing the heart rather than the brain as the dysfunctional organ in melancholy, introduced the notion of a ‘predisposition’ to melancholy.” [Hey, you mean it’s not just a phase?]
4 “Deliberations on the relationship between melancholia and mania date back at least to the first century BC…” [Looks like it’s not just trendy after all!]
5 “The period that followed was, in retrospect, a dark age, when mental illness was generally attributed to either magic or sin or possession by the devil.” [Maybe the horror community wants to keep up the stigma to sell books?]
5 “The explicit conception of manic-depressive illness as a single disease entity dates from the mid-nineteenth century.” [oh those clever pathologizing Victorians]
12 “Current data indicate that manic-depressive spectrum conditions… may be found in 5 – 8 percent of the population” [never said I was a unique snowflake, asshole]
15 “significantly more manic-like symptoms in their bipolar depressed patients–especially irritability, racing thoughts, and distractibility–than in unipolar patients.” [bipolar depression borrows some of the crazy from our other pole]
15 “bipolar-II depressed patients have been noted to have less stability and uniformity of symptoms across episodes than unipolar patients” [my bipolar depression is different from regular-brand depression]
21 “…within the broadly conceived cyclothymic temperamental domain there are ‘dark’ and ‘sunny’ types. Although family history for bipolar disorder is equally high in both groups, in clinical practice bipolar-II associated with the darker core cyclothymic temperament is more likely to be diagnosed as a personality disorder.” [I come from a Southern Gothic family]
30 “Despite the shortcomings of language and the highly personalized vocabulary often used by patients in describing their manic-depressive illness, certain words, phrases, and metaphors are chosen time and again, forming a common matrix of experiences. Often these images center on nature, weather, the day-night cycle, and the seasons; often, too, they convey unpredictability, periodicity, violence, tempestuousness, or a bleak dearth of feelings. Religious themes and mystical experiences pervade the language, conveying an extraordinary degree and type of experience–beyond control, comprehension, or adequate description.” [Me & Virginia Woolf!]
31 “As we shall see, ‘pure’ affective states are rare: mania is often complicated by depressive symptoms, and conversely, depression, especially the bipolar form, usually is accompanied by at least one or more symptoms of mania… far from being a ‘bipolar’ disorder, with the assumption of clinically opposite states, the illness is characterized by co-occurrence of manic and depressive symptoms more often than not.” [so please no more Jekyll/Hyde jokes, which is a misreading of the novel anyway]
