Bipolar Expeditions (42 page)

In an idealized, exuberant, manic state, a person is exalted, above the mundane, not likely to take notice of the ordinary. What is repressed in the image of dancing on the edge, and lies underneath the incitement for a manic leadership style, is that the destruction of lives, occupations, and livelihoods, not to mention communities, environments, and firms, which are a routine part of survival in the economy, can be ignored. In an ethereal but numbed state, a person is less likely to look over the edge and more likely to keep up his “animal spirits” unfalteringly, “without which, in Keynes' words, ‘enterprise will fade and die.'”
⁹⁵

There are some signs that “the edge” may now be poised above a deeper abyss. Some scholars have argued that terrorist acts by suicide bombers shifted the American cultural imagination in a particular way: what most grabs public attention now is a person who risks or sacrifices his life for a cause.
What
cause matters less than the person's willingness to give up his life in an act of excessive commitment. To be willing to die for a cause one must be excessively alive: extremes of living and dying seem inextricably linked. The official American response to terrorism—starting a war—pits Americans dying for a cause against terrorists dying for a cause, and by implication shows that Americans are as excessively alive as the terrorists are, or so it would seem in such a cultural scenario.
⁹⁶
The person with a manic leadership style and the person with manic depression both look over an edge into violence: their superabundance of life means they are always risking death, if not for themselves, for other people. Living on the edge of death in a time when national leaders demand that we demonstrate an excess of life makes the manic person seem precisely in tune with what all Americans are now called upon to be.

CONCLUSION

 

The Bipolar Condition

Tell me a story. In this century, and moment, of mania, Tell me a story. Make it a story of great distances, and starlight. The name of the story will be Time, But you must not pronounce its name. Tell me a story of deep delight.

—Robert Penn Warren, “Tell Me a Story”

I
t can be terrifying to face the darkness around forms of madness like manic depression. A person living under the description of manic depression is a threat to the conception of American personhood that has prevailed for centuries: a person with a central controlling principle based on the will, who is owner of himself and acts out of individual intention and desire toward rational ends. Manic depression, with its strong emotional cycles and multiplicity that interrupts the unitary individual, would indeed be a genuine threat to such a fragile understanding of personhood. But on another view, one I have promoted in this book, everyone's personhood—rational, irrational, or somewhere in between—is less built upon a unitary concept, fragile or not, than made up of a dense web of social connections with others. Even “mad” manic depressives, denizens of the irrational, are capable of being social persons. Even they can spark self-reflective, sometimes creative, and occasionally scintillating social interactions when connected to others in contexts like support groups. Even when connecting to those more powerful than they, as in medical rounds, the “mad” can actively wrestle with the terms used to define them. When taking drugs, they spin a complicated web of filaments between themselves and the drugs, com posed of ambivalence and fear, determination and hope. When some filaments break, they spin others, or perhaps they do not.

When the “darkness” of irrationality is considered in a social frame, it becomes a complex, in-between form composed of darkness and light at the same time. Robin Williams and his zany comedy, Dr. Morrison and his bow tie mania, entrepreneurs, explorers, and politicians with manic styles slip back and forth across the line between the rational and irrational. Just as important, when the “lightness” of rationality is looked at with a social lens, it also becomes a complex, in-between form composed of darkness and light at the same time. The manic and depressive swings of the market, the double-voiced pedagogy of the teaching video, and the skull and crossbones on the bottle of medicine in Janssen's virtual world all escape the strict definition of rationality.

Sometimes people living under the description of manic depression find their social webs inadequate to support life, and they fall into the abyss. Or perhaps they jump. Sometimes the safety net of a drug like lithium is enough to allow them to continue “living on the edge.” But often it is not. Sometimes even people who do not live under the description of any psychiatric disorder also wonder whether society's social webs are adequate to support life.
¹
There are no shortages of unspeakable horrors in the world we live in today. Is it only because I too am “mad” that I frequently contemplate the abyss? Is it possible to value contemplation of the abyss without condoning suicide? Will the use of drugs to optimize mania and eliminate depression allow us to contemplate the abyss without jumping into it?

In his dystopian novel
Brave New World,
Aldous Huxley portrays a dose of the ubiquitous drug
soma
as something that would raise an impenetrable wall between the “actual universe” and the mind.
²
The good citizen Lenina asks the rebel Bernard “why you don't take
soma
when you have these dreadful ideas of yours. You'd forget all about them. And instead of feeling miserable, you'd be jolly.
So
jolly.”
³
In contrast to this picture, I have argued that the drugs of today are meant to ease the social withdrawal of depression and the social extravagance of mania without putting any particular emotion in place. But even though drugs promise no specific content, they do promise personal development. Will the pharmaceutically enhanced person become in wardly turned, even narcissistically self-absorbed, and inured to the needs of others? Or will the person develop richer social relationships? These questions might be appropriate for me to raise, but they are hard for me to answer, participating as I am in whatever effects my multiple psychotropic drugs might be having.

Sometimes the contemporary cultural premium placed on the glory of mania's energy and the self-regenerative quality of the bipolar cycle of moods and motivations becomes a kind of safety net that, because it gives social value to a psychological condition, allows the “mad” to continue living. Ironically, it is the extremes to which the social fabric in the contemporary United States is being subjected, brought about by an environment in which powerful forces are pushing all social relationships to be mediated through the market, that places the animal spirits of the market and the energies of manic depression at a premium. Perhaps there is poetic justice when social value is finally conferred on an “irrational” condition, manic depression, only when the social fabric has been subjected to such “irrational” distortions.

David Denby's exuberance over trying to win a million dollars on the stock market by year's end occurred at a time when the headiest days of growth and profit taking of the 1990s were already in the past and people were expressing anxiety about the economy at every turn. Since then, after September 11 and the entrenchment of a neoliberal regime, experiences of fear and anxiety have struck people in the United States in new ways. Fears of a general collapse of the economy or destruction of a region of the country—these fears are as serious as the fears of personal obliteration that some people living under the description of manic depression have expressed in the pages above. Will these new experiences at the level of the whole country extinguish the cultural potency and charisma of mania and manic markets? In the shock of recent terrorist attacks, new doubts about survival have arisen. Shortly after the attacks in the United States in 2001, there were expressions of doubt that U.S. capitalism could continue in the same form: “It is hard to predict the effect a prolonged campaign against terrorism will have on a form of capitalism built around risk-taking, technological advances, lightning fast reactions and a willingness to let goods money and people move freely.”
⁴
The nation was attacked in its “central ner vous system,” which is sure to remain “jittery, if not depressed.” The effect of the attack was felt more acutely precisely because of our economy's strength: “Technology has allowed businesses, investors, and consumers to spot change even as it is occurring and to respond almost instantaneously. Such speed is usually a good thing. But sometimes, Mr. Greenspan has suggested, it blows our economic circuits.”
⁵

From among my interlocutors there were efforts to join hands across the divide between the “mentally ill” manic and the Wall Street manic: a newsletter for manic-depressive people described how “the terrorists” who attacked on September 11 know what bipolar people have found out through long experience: “Our brains are fragile as glass, delicate as timepieces, and reliable as the operating systems on home computers. No one is immune. Because we who suffer from depression or Bipolar are among the most vulnerable, we are effectively on the front lines in this new war on terrorism … over the years our brains have been through the equivalent of countless Omaha Beach landings. We're seasoned.”
⁶
At about the same time, however, there were tales of precedent-setting heroism in “carrying on regardless”: Bradley Jack, the head of Lehman Brothers' investment banking division, “was so keen to get back to work that he hired a bus to drive himself and his colleagues back to New York from a conference in San Francisco. The bus stopped for just one sit-down meal, at a steak house in Nebraska, and on his return Mr. Jack commandeered the entire Manhattan Sheraton hotel for use as temporary offices.”
⁷

There are other signs that the hyperenergized, competitive fearlessness expressed and extolled in the cultural symbols I have been discussing will actually be intensified: an op-ed in the
New York Times
characterized the post—September 11 era as “a new century and moment of mania,” after a line in the Robert Penn Warren poem, “Tell Me a Story,” excerpted in this chapter's epigraph.
⁸
As early as a few weeks after the terrorist attacks on New York, market forecasters noted “bursts of cheer,” “a babbling brook of glad tidings,” and a “shamefully upbeat” Alan Greenspan.
⁹
We have entered, they say, a “post-mania mania in the stock market.”
¹⁰
In the next couple of years, the fierce competition in the air was reflected in advertisements for corporations and for institutions of higher education that made overt references to Darwinian-style survival of the fittest. Workers and students were exhorted to evolve or be killed off.
¹¹

Pessimism and fear, while pervasive in the lives of people trying to keep body and soul together in the American workforce, seldom receive a sympathetic ear from those who set the national drumbeat calling forth the optimistic American spirit.
¹²
On the eve of the 2004 election, those who expressed somber thoughts were accused of being pessimistic or depressed, found morally culpable, and even unpatriotic. Neoconservative spokesmen like David Brooks were almost eager to articulate the belief that individual
will
can determine both mood and wealth. In an editorial in the
New York Times,
Brooks derided liberal assumptions that more money would reduce poverty rates as outmoded and wrong. Liberals, he said, wrongly assume that “economic forces determine culture and shape behavior…. In reality, culture shapes economics. A person's behavior determines his or her economic destiny. If people live in an environment that fosters industriousness, sobriety, fidelity, punctuality and dependability, they will thrive. But the Great Society welfare system encouraged or enabled bad behavior, and popular culture glamorizes irresponsibility.”
¹³
Even as Brooks blamed people on welfare for their poverty, and for the character traits he believes cause their poverty, he extolled and held up as a model the “manic energy” that drove the leadership of Teddy Roosevelt.
¹⁴
One could not wish for a more concise description of how neoliberal ways of imagining human sociality valorize the intense motivation of manic states.

Brooks ignores the powerful structural forces flowing from an economic system that
requires
a certain degree of unemployment and that systematically de-skills and underpays work. He ignores the effects of persistent racist, classist, and sexist attitudes on the part of employers, police, educators, and bureaucrats, among others. He ignores the factors that weigh heavily against poor women and people of color: lack of universal health insurance, lack of a living wage, lack of adequate childcare, lack of adequate free education, and lack of adequate elder care, among other things. However, there is a certain fit between his claims and the claim discussed in
chapter 7
that those remaining on the welfare rolls might suffer from depression. For Brooks, the cause of “bad behavior” is popular culture and the welfare system itself; for advocates of screening for depression in TANF offices, the cause is states of the brain. Both views fail to contend adequately with the impact of poverty and its attendant constraints.

These social ills constitute hidden damage, damage that, though it may be displaced onto others, returns to plague social life. Max Weber looked to a guardian “daemon” who he imagined could “hold the fibers of our lives” in order to call forth our passion for a vocation in the face of deadening rationalization.
¹⁵
“Daemons” were the good guardian spirits of Greek and Roman times, the
eudaemons,
whose name is also given to the Greek word “eudaemonia,” for human flourishing.
¹⁶
However, eudaemons necessarily came along with bad daemons,
cacodaemons,
who created all manner of mischief. This potent combination of beneficence and malignance at play together might be preferable as a guiding image to the blandly smiling faces in pharmaceutical ads. For surely beneficence and malignance are both at play in the contemporary world, at every level.