Bipolar Expeditions (32 page)

But mania is not usually experienced as the simple opposite of depression's confining dependence on others: in mania one is still connected to others, buoyed by the positive opinions of others, and pleased by every form of heightened social engagement with others. In mania people are said to spend money recklessly, start new businesses, and engage in excessive amounts of activity. This manic activity may be frenetic and somewhat self-absorbed, but it is highly social, too. Kretschmer described this sociability eloquently: in hypomania (a state just short of full-blown mania) a person feels “the overwhelming joy in giving presents and causing pleasure to other people. This hypomanic self-feeling is not an abrupt setting up of the individual's own personality against an outside world, which is regarded with hatred or indifference, but a ‘live and let live,' an evenly balanced swimming in comfort for one's self and the world, an almost ludicrous conviction in the value of one's own personality.”
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As we saw in
chapter 1
, the emotions are constitutively linked with sociality; mania's sociality in turn is strongly connected with emotions. It follows logically that the socially engaged character of manic depression, its “evenly balanced swimming in comfort for one's self and the world” or its eliciting of a high “empathic index,” is linked to its emotionality. In contrast, the socially removed character of schizophrenia would seem to be logically linked to its emotional flatness. What manner of creativity could manic depressive people produce, given their heightened sensitivity to social norms? Because they are so attuned to social expectations, are they less apt to break the bounds of convention creatively than to produce—albeit energetically—within the confines of convention?

In an important critique, Louis Sass questions the current assumption that manic depression is linked to creativity. He argues that this assumption is based on a narrow and historically specific definition of creativity, which became prominent in the Romantic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The kind of creativity the romantics prized involved the ability to escape from self-consciousness and to liberate the powerful forces of emotions. Poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge are prime examples.
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By this specific definition, the traits we have just seen are often associated with people living under the description of manic depression—a sense of unity between the self and the world overflowing with emotional energy—would indeed seem to point toward creativity. But, as Sass makes clear, other definitions of creativity are possible. In fact, contrary to current assumptions, schizophrenia may point toward a more profound form of creativity than manic depression. Because they are socially removed rather than constantly socially enmeshed, people diagnosed with schizophrenia could be capable of a more radical creativity that is less attuned to social norms.
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In comparison, Sass concludes, “Perhaps mania and melancholia should be seen, then, not as a source of radical innovation so much as of a heightening and subtle transmutation of modes of perception that remain reasonably familiar to the majority of other people in the culture.”
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In the rest of this chapter, I describe the conceptions of creativity that people associate with manic depression in popular culture and in support groups. These conceptions will help us understand what happens when the particular form of creativity that is unleashed in mania takes hold in a culture where markets dominate much of social life, a topic I turn to in
chapter 9
.

Manic Depression and Creativity Today

Since the 1990s, accounts of manic depression have been virtually flooding the press, the best-seller lists, and the airwaves. Manic depression has fueled the plot of a series of detective novels (A
Child of Silence
and others by Abigail Padgett), a prison escape novel
(Green River Rising),
a southern novel
(Sights Unseen),
movies
(About a Boy, Pollock),
and plots of television programs
(The X Files, ER, Six Feet Under).
Manic depression has been featured in specials on MTV (“True Life: I'm Bipolar”), A&E (“Biography of Margot Kidder”), and PBS (“A Brilliant Madness”); it has played an important role in several memoirs (Patty Duke's
A Brilliant Madness,
Katharine Graham's
Personal History,
Jane Pauley's
Skywriting: A Life Out of the Blue,
and Spalding Gray's
Life Interrupted: The Unfinished Monologue)
.
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Certainly the frequent presence of manic depression in the media does not tell us much about the public's attitude toward it. But part of manic depression, the mania, clearly has a positive gloss. In daily life today, the term mania can be paired with almost anything or activity that people ardently desire. Among the fifty-three million uses of the term “mania” a standard search engine recently found on the Web are innumerable inventive forms of mania: “cicada mania,” “monster mania,” “muffin mania,” “calculator mania,” “cursor mania,” “pop-omania,” and “beer coaster mania.” Walking through my neighborhood in lower Manhattan, I easily came upon other examples: Cheeze Mania (a snack food), Egg Mania (a computer game for children), Automania, Perfumania, CONDOMania, and Shoemania (retail stores).
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The term “mania” also figures more and more prominently in advertising campaigns: for athletic shoes (“It's my mania” by Adidas), perfumes (“Mania” by Armani for women and for men), jewelry (“Talismania” by Lladró), and luxury linens (Hermàs and Garnet Hill). These uses of the term “mania” suggest it is regarded in a positive light.

8.1. Lladró advertises a collection of fashion accessories called “Talismania.” Reprinted with permission,
Gotham
4, no. 3 (2004): 93. Copyright © Lladró Commercial, S.A.

Manic depression is in the process of redefinition from being simply a disability to being an asset. This new way of looking at manic depression ignores as much about manic depression as it illuminates; however, it is still important to ask why the claim is being made so frequently at the present moment. In many books and Internet sites there are lists of famous and influential people (often including Jamison's examples) whose diaries, letters, and other writings indicate their manic depression played a role in the enormously creative contributions they made to society.
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In support groups, I found that references to celebrities who have identified themselves as manic depressives were common. In Orange County, where the entertainment industries are a major employer, it was not uncommon for support group members to have had direct experience with these larger than life manic depressives. At one California support group meeting, I had just described my surprise at how calmly a small group of my colleagues had taken the news of my own diagnosis. George, a large-bellied, tall, exuberant man wearing shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, said he would tell the other side of the story—how the condition can also be stigmatizing despite its association with famous people.

A while ago I told a couple of guys I work with about my manic depression. I thought I could trust them with the information, but I was wrong. They started nudging each other, making remarks. I felt I could do nothing, because whatever way I showed my anger, it would be laid at the feet of my manic depression. Later I was telling a friend about this, and he said, “Do you mind if I do something?” I said, “No.” So my friend took one of the first two guys out in the alley and beat him black and blue. I have to admit I felt only the smallest qualm over the incident.

After describing how important this friend's loyalty had been to him, George remembered something else he felt gave strength to people like himself: “Do you know both Robin Williams and Jim Carrey have said they are manic depressive? I heard Robin Williams say it himself, on the movie set. I was there because I also work for the [entertainment] industry.” Hearing successful movie stars name their manic-depressive diagnosis openly gave George hope that the kind of stigma he had experienced might one day be eliminated.

Other people told me they felt that persisting negative images of mental illness in the media could be offset by media accounts of manicdepressive heroes. Ann complained to her support group that after her diagnosis two years ago, she had seen four different TV episodes in one weekend that depicted manic depressives as homicidal, suicidal, or worse. She observed, “This is what is behind the fear of the mentally ill, when really we're not that different.” But at the county-wide support group picnic a couple of weeks later, I told Ann I was interested in her discussion of television coverage. She and a few others began an animated conversation about both positive and negative images in the media, which she summarized.

Jim Carrey—you can just tell he is bipolar. I read an article about him that mentioned he is taking Prozac, so I suspect he is bipolar. All these famous people should come out with the truth about their condition. It would really help everyone else.

In the meantime, famous artists from the past said to have had manic depression can be enlisted to help overcome stigma. At a NDMDA meeting, a speaker exhorted the audience to tell others that we work in a civil rights movement for the mentally ill: “We should say this at cocktail parties and put stickers saying ‘mental health advocate' on any name tag we wear. Whenever we meet a possibly helpful contact, we should send a thank you note on cards with art by Vincent van Gogh, Abraham Lincoln, or Georgia O'Keeffe.”

The association between artistic creativity and the diagnosis of manic depression also saturated professional psychiatry meetings I attended. At the 2000 American Psychiatric Association meetings, Solvay Pharmaceuticals sponsored a major dinner symposium, with speakers on manic depression including Kay Jamison and her coauthor, Fred Goodwin. The poster for the event, widely displayed, showed an illustration of a tortured Beethoven, one of the musicians cited as a genius manic depressive in Jamison's work. Music by Beethoven played during the before-dinner appetizer and wine service. At the same meeting, the extensive exhibit area for one major psychopharmaceutical used in the treatment of manic depression featured a real, live artist who worked on a painting throughout the conference. As I describe the scene in my field notes,

Randy Cohen was installed at the Zyprexa exhibit. He occupied a large (20' × 30') area with a canvas (about 8' × 10') in the middle of the Lilly Pharmaceuticals exhibit, which occupied about 1000 square feet. He worked on a collage during most of the days of the meeting. On the floor in front of the canvas was a welter of materials: papers, glues, paints, fabrics, and fibers. There were also brochures about his art, and a poster on an easel describing his work. He himself was sitting on a high stool taking a break. We chatted. He is taking Zyprexa and it has helped him a great deal. At his first appointment with his current doctor, the doctor said that all his bipolar patients are taking Zyprexa as part of a double-blind study. So Randy agreed, signed up to participate in the study, and ended up getting much better. He agreed to pose for a photo next to his collage.

By the time of the 2002 APA, the level of display in the pharmaceutical exhibit area was greatly diminished in a response to growing criticism of extravagance in the face of rising drug prices. By this time, an exhibit as elaborate as the one that included Randy Cohen was only a fond memory, and a representative from another pharmaceutical company told me he missed seeing Randy because it had been gratifying to witness the improvement in him as he took Zyprexa over several years. Less overt references to the link between manic depression and creativity were still apparent. Posters showing successful treatment by antidepressant Celexa showed mellow women painting pictures in domestic settings. And even in the face of an agreement to reduce expenses in marketing, one pharmaceutical company, Organon, had an enormous pile of sand trucked into the convention hall, out of which craftsmen sculpted a life-sized replica of Benjamin Franklin. This sculpture intrigued me. I understood the obvious reference to Franklin's role in the history of Philadelphia, the location of the 2002 APA.

But whereas the link between Randy Cohen's artistic creativity and Zyprexa was unmistakable and explicit, the link between the sand sculpture and the convention, not to mention Remeron, the particular antidepressant whose name was sculpted into Ben Franklin's pedestal, was mystifying to everyone I asked. I do not know if anyone was aware that in the popular literature on ADHD, Ben Franklin was at the time being used as an example of success by virtue of his manic and hyper temperament. That literature frequently attributed the success of people like Benjamin Franklin, Winston Churchill, Bill Clinton, and Thomas Edison to the “Edison Effect,” which correlates creativity with such a temperament.
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A few years later, on the occasion of Benjamin Franklin's three-hundredth birthday, there were prominent statements about his “hypomania,” based on his “bold curiosity, brash risk-taking, raw ingenuity.”
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