An Excerpt From "An Unquiet Mind" by Kay Redfield Jamison

Actor Crush of the Day: Tom Selleck (Three Men & A Baby age)

The following I think to be a rather illustrative passage from this book, as it describes the sort of inner workings of my mind and certain types of behavior that really fit me, in certain manic states. The author is both bipolar and a psychologist, and her illness includes hallucinations and psychotic features, whereas mine does not. I am not comfortable with the term madness, as I do not experience those extreme features, but with that said, read the following:

My mind was beginning to have to scramble a bit to keep up with itself, as ideas were coming so fast that they intersected one another at every concievable angle. There was a neuronal pileup on the highways of my brain, and the more I tried to slow down my thinking the more I became aware that I couldn't. My enthusiasms were going into overdrive as well, although there often was some underlying thread of logic in what I was doing. One day, for example, I got into a frenzy of photocopying: I made thirty to forty copies of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, an article about religion and psychosis from the American Journal of Psychiatry, and another article, "Why I Do Not Attend Case Conferences," written by a prominent psychologist who had elucidated all of the reasons why teaching rounds, when poorly conducted, are such a horrendous waste of time. All three of these articles seemed to me, quite suddenly, to have profound meaning and relevance for the clinical staff on the ward. So I passed them out to everyone I could.

What is interesting to me now is not that I did such a typically manic thing; rather, it's that there was some prescience and sense in those early days of incipient madness. The ward rounds were a complete waste of time, although the ward chief was less than appreciative of my pointing it out to everyone (and even less appreciative of my circulating the article to the entire staff).