- Hi Greg
I need to ask you a HUGE favour. The favour is to keep what I'm about to tell you totally confidential. AND, please do not get alarmed - this is only a precautionary measure from one who has been down many paths:
If, for some reason I land up in a psycho ward in the next 2 months, please tell somebody with influence that will understand, that I was TRULY, TRULY onto something.
Cheers
Chris
Email sent Saturday 28 May 2005
Greg is my cousin and living in England and we’ve been corresponding by email, on average once a week, for at least six years now.
Greg knows about the paths I’ve been down. He is well aware that I am a sufferer of BiPolar Depression (Type One). But in all the hundreds of emails that have crossed the Atlantic, this one was cause to sit up and take note. Sure, there had been plenty of emails about depression, indecision and the screwed-up world in the past six years. There had even been the odd email that Greg has learnt, over time, to discern as manifestations of mild mania. But this latest email was different.
For the past twelve years I have been relatively well. Let me rephrase that – I haven’t been well, but I’ve managed to keep myself out of hospital. Hospitalisation only occurs on the extreme Ups, not the Downs. And since Greg and my emails began, there have been plenty of Downs (way too many) but a terrible drought of Ups.
That’s what BiPolar depression is all about – extreme mood swings. Usually the downs are far more common and last longer. In fact, Type 2 BiPolar sufferers (the more common type), seldom hit the extreme highs, which is what differentiates them from Type 1 sufferers, who do. It is the extreme highs, called “mania”, that can develop into full blown psychosis – a condition where the sufferer is described as no longer being in touch with reality. That is why BiPolar Depression used to go by the better known label of “Manic Depression”.
It was in 1984 that I had experienced my first bout of severe mania. Nobody saw it coming – least of all me. In fairness, I had been a problem teenager. When I got to High School I suddenly developed an intense allergy to all forms of authority – Dad, the School, the Apartheid Government. I fell in with a group of heavy dope-smokers, and lost all interest in academia and community life. When I say heavy dope-smokers, I mean heavy. We used to smoke dope every day, sometimes even at Big Break. And it wasn’t just joints we’d smoke, it was pipes, bottlenecks, bricks, apples, bongs, hubbly bubblies; anything that could be conceivably construed as having a bowl and a stem.
Unlike my ganga partaking brethren, my academic U-turn caused great consternation. I had started High School at the top of the A class. Routine IQ tests had also triggered titters of excitement amongst my teachers – clearly this was a pupil that had great things in store. So when my marks plummeted, stabilising just above the failiure mark, and my friends switched from the future Dux of the school (now a Professor at MIT), to guys who had been expelled, I attracted a fair amount of focus. When I was finally caught for bunking and forging my Dad’s signature on the sick note, I was sent off to see a private clinical psychologist. We only had one session, but in my last two years of High school my parents also dragged me along to a drug counsellor a couple of times. But none of them suspected BiPolar depression, serious family problems - yes, weird behaviour - yes, but mental illness – not yet.
At the age of seventeen, I left home, managed to support myself financially and cut back on the dope. Two years later, despite my best attempts, I found myself in a brown uniform, with brown boots, brown underpants, a brown bible, on a brown parade ground in Bloemfontein getting screamed at by a large Afrikaner with a monstrous brown moustache. The sentence : two years of compulsory conscription into the South African Defence Force.
Surprisingly, I manged to keep pretty level-headed during my first year of “National Service”. I got fit, curtailed the dope, and generally kept my head beneath the radar. Towards the end of the year I even did a 3 month stint in Angola, detesting the barbaric racists surrounding me, but plodding along regardless.
Then 1984 came along. I guess 1984 always harboured an ominous fate. George Orwell’s classic by the same name had been a set work at High School. The year started the best way that it possibly could. Having returned from the Border, I put together an elaborate and intricately manoevered request for a transfer to Natal Command, the army camp in my hometown Durban. Actually Natal Command could harldy be desrcibed as an army camp. Between the odd admin duties, the “troops” inhabiting this little oasis on the East Coast managed to go surfing at day, and partying it up in town until the wee hours of the morning. “Blue Waters Extension” it was known as, the “Blue Waters” being a Beachfront Hotel across the road from the camp.
Anybody would have been happy at cracking such a prized transfer, but my happiness started taking on a life of its own. Everything was just going so well for me. My short hair and lean military body seemed to attract the girls, of which there was no shortage at the clubs and bars in Durban. I was managing to get lots of windsurfing in. The phone never stopped ringing with friends eager for a party. My bank account was still flush with Danger Pay. Hey, I’d even enrolled to study towards a Bachelor of Commerce degree by correspondence.
Keeping all of these interests going at full tilt required loads of energy, but for some reason (which I was only too happy not to question), energy was a resource which I seemed to have a never-ending supply of. The drunken parties on the town didn’t allow for much sleep, but sleep was something I no longer appeared to require. Others had begun to notice how continually up-beat I was, and if anybody wanted a really good party they would just phone Green. At one point I partied every night for sixteen nights on the trot, not getting to bed before 2am once, and believe me, these were not sober affairs. This whilst successfully conducting three simultaneous romantic liasons, a good deal of windsurfing and even the odd University work session. I was raving all right, but in a chillingly literal sense, not appreciated by today’s clubbing set. Life was too good to be true. Again : Literally.
With what I know now, I can see that by March 1984, I was in a full-blown mania. All that awaited was a final trigger to set off the psychosis. And one Friday evening the trigger arrived. It had been the most frenetic week of the lot. I was enjoying the ride so much that I had started gulping a third of a bottle of BioPlus energy tonic every morning, figuring that if I could cut the sleep from five hours to four, I could cram even more in. Things were speeding up and I was pushing every boundary that I could.
It was about 7pm on that Friday night when we puffed the first joint. By now I was more of a whisky drinker, but still partook in the odd joint, and that particular night, having hooked up with some of my old high school friends, a joint seemed approriate. And that’s what triggered it.
Within 48 hours I was admitted into Natal Command’s little on-site medical ward. Twelve hours later I was transferred to the psychiatric ward at Addington Hospital, and five days after that, to the psychiatric ward at 1 Military Hospital in Pretoria. The teams of psychiatrists, doctors and psychologists that had seen me by now, unanimously agreed on my diagnosis: Paranoid Schizophrenia. Not surprising since I had announced to them that I was Jesus Christ, the returning messiah who had come to save the world from its impending takeover by the Beast. The really worrying part about the announcement was my incessant ongoing belief in my claim despite all arguments and evidence to the contrary.
***
The psychosis resulting from BiPolar Type One is often at first mistaken for the psychosis resulting from Schizophrenia. Both illnesses tend to initially manifest during late teenagehood (I was nineteen at the time), and once you reach a certain level of detachment from reality it is very difficult to categorise anything. It is only usually a year down the line (after your first “breakdown”), that a proper diagnosis can be made. With Schizophrenia you never really recover 100%, and can, in fact gradually get worse. BiPolars, on the other hand, tend to bounce back to their former selves, the breakdown appearing as a lone blip on a radar screen.
Thankfully, I fell into the second category. I stayed in the military psychiatric ward for two months. My war with the Beast became more and more intense. Eventually, after six sessions of Electro Convulsive Therapy (Shock treatment), a semblance of normality returned and I was given an “honourable” discharge from any further military duty, along with a gigantic bottle of pills to be taken at any time I felt shaky.
For the next six months the most terrible depression descended upon me and I slouched, dazed and totally debilitated in its unyielding grips. But by the end of the year things started turning and by the time of my twenty first birthday I was well and truly back on my feet, successfully running my own business, a lucious live-in girlfriend, and cracking distinctions in Accountancy and Economics on the distance University course that I had resumed.
***
I tell you all of this background so that you will be in a better position to judge the import of what I was “truly, truly onto”, in my email to Greg. You need to know that I am not a"normal" rational being, and you will need to view my discoveries in this light.
