Bipolar Expeditions (51 page)

15. Sass traces critically and with care the use of this definition of creativity by Kay Jamison and in psychology generally. See Sass, “Schizophrenia, Modernism, and the ‘Creative Imagination,'” 59, 65–67.

16. No one has done more than Louis Sass to elucidate the specific phenomenological features of the schizophrenic condition, such as “unworlding.” See in particular Sass,
The Paradoxes of Delusion.

17. Sass, “Schizophrenia, Modernism, and the ‘Creative Imagination,'” 70.

18. Gibbons,
Sights Unseen;
Padgett,
A Child of Silence;
Willocks,
Green River Rising;
MTV “True Life: I'm Bipolar,” July 2002; PBS special about Lance in the
American Family
series; Duke and Hochman,
A Brilliant Madness;
Graham,
Personal History;
Gray,
Life Interrupted;
Pauley,
Skywriting.

19. A rough indication of the rise in frequency of mania as a term in ordinary life is a count of the incidence of the term in
the New York Times
from 1870 to 1999. The
New York Times
printed the term “mania” about a thousand times per decade from 1870 to 1979. In the next two decades, the rate increased threefold, to about three thousand times per decade (ProQuest Historical Newspapers index and ProQuest New York Times index).

20. A particularly useful list is provided in the Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_believed_to_
have_been_affected_by_bipolar_disorder
.

21. In my fieldwork with pharmaceutical marketers and representatives, I learned that such gaps are not uncommon. Messages developed at one point—say by a firm to whom a pharmaceutical corporation subcontracted a marketing account—might be lost by the time the materials and their imagery were in the hands of sales representatives. But at the 2000 APA meeting, another pharmaceutical company, Abbott Laboratories, distributed a special compilation of classical music on a CD as a gift. The CD included music by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Mozart, and other composers often listed as artistic geniuses who suffered from manic depression. I spoke at some length with the Abbott representative who gave me a copy of the CD, as we stood surrounded by glowing posters that advertised Depakote's advantages for the treatment of manic depression. Looking at the musicians included on the CD, I asked him if they were included because they had all had manic depression. He looked surprised: not only did he not know, but he said he had never thought of the possibility.

22. Schiff, “Poor Richard's Redemption.”

23. Ser Vaas, “The
Post
Investigates Manic-Depression.”

24. Busfield and Campling,
Men, Women, and Madness,
122.

25. Lunbeck,
The Psychiatric Persuasion,
149. C. Lutz provides a useful overview of the associations between emotions and the female in American culture (“Emotion, Thought, and Estrangement”).

26. Lunbeck,
The Psychiatric Persuasion,
149. Charles Nuckolls writes about nineteenth-century cultural stereotypes of the “independent” male and the “dependent” female that were congruent with and affected the development of other psychiatric diagnoses—the antisocial personality and the histrionic personality (“Toward a Cultural History of the Personality Disorders”).

27. Schnog, “Changing Emotions,” 99.

28. Lunbeck,
The Psychiatric Persuasion,
150.

29. Goodwin and Jamison,
Manic-Depressive Illness,
168.

30. Jamison,
An Unquiet Mind,
122–23.

31. Ibid., 122.

32. Corrigan,
Business of the Heart,
243.

33. Ibid., 241–43.

34. Pfister, “Glamorizing the Psychological,” 190.

35. Walser, “Deep Jazz,” 274.

36. Ibid., 274–75.

37. Cardinal,
The Words to Say It,
39.

38. Morrison,
Playing in the Dark,
vi, viii.

39. Rack,
Race, Culture, and Mental Disorder,
113.

40. Ibid., 115, 116.

41. Ibid. Elizabeth Lunbeck's history of early twentieth-century American psychiatry details the relationship between the race theory of the time and psychiatric diagnosis. By and large, these early psychiatrists accepted the notion of racial differences in temperament, but did not use racial differences to impute pathology. Racial stereotypes were used instead to describe individuals—an alcoholic Irishman or a nervous Jew—as normal for their race (The
Psychiatric Persuasion,
125–26). Baldwin,
Notes of a Native Son,
53, and Fanon,
Black Skin, White Masks,
126ff., provide some classic articulations of the cultural link between black men and out-ofcontrol emotion.

42. “Famous People Who Have Suffered from Depression or Manic-Depression.” This extensive list includes Jim Carrey but not Eddie Murphy.

43. Jamison,
An Unquiet Mind,
213.

44. Jamison,
Touched with Fire,
105.

45. Goodwin and Jamison,
Manic-Depressive Illness,
23.

46. Jamison,
An Unquiet Mind,
80.

47. Mark Micale shows how the style of hysterics was extended as an aesthetic form into the theater in late nineteenth-century France (“Discourses of Hysteria in Fin-de-Siècle France,” 76–77).

48. This last scenario may not be mere speculation. See Baard, “The Guilt-Free Soldier.”

49. Grigoriadis, “Are You Bipolar?”

50. Ibid.

51. For a Canadian news story, see Evenson, “Is ‘Soft' Depression Price of Greatness?” This article quotes a Canadian psychiatrist saying that people with hypomania are “highly functioning people. They're effervescent, energetic, optimistic and charismatic. There are people who get lots done; they are of tentimes artistically gifted as well and are major contributors to society.”

52. Grigoriadis, “Are You Bipolar?”

53. Kluger, Song, and Simon, “Young and Bipolar.”

54. Carlson, “Mania and ADHD,” and Klein, Pine, and Klein, “Debate Forum,” question the extrapolation of adult criteria onto children. Bowring and Kovacs, “Difficulties in Diagnosing Manic Disorders among Children and Adolescents,” 613, raise the difficulty of identifying psychotic thinking in children with active imaginations.

55. One epidemiological study estimates the lifetime prevalence of bipolar disorders among young American adults at 1.6 percent. Jonas et al., “Prevalence of Mood Disorders in a National Sample of Young American Adults.”

56. Kluger, Song, and Simon, “Young and Bipolar,” 43.

57. Braun, “The Challenge of Being Young, Creative and Bipolar.”

58. “The Storm in My Brain.”

59. “Treating Bipolar Disorder Takes Understanding,”
New York Times,
October 26, A21, October 31, A7, November 1, A15. This ad ran at least eight times between October 26 and December 7, 2005.

60. For some of the press coverage of this genre, termed “a new critical genre that likens society to a mental patient,” see Lacher, “In New Book, Professor Sees a ‘Mania' in U.S. for Possessions and Status,” 7.

61. Jamison,
Exuberance,
289.

62. Gartner,
The Hypomanic Edge.

63. Whybrow,
American Mania.

64. It follows that existing and forthcoming studies of the different meanings given to psychological states and psychotropic drugs across cultures are crucial additions to our understanding of mania and depression in Western societies. For classic studies, see Crapanzano,
Tuhami;
Kleinman,
Social Origins of Distress and Disease;
Levy,
Tahitians;
Wikan, “Public Grace and Private Fears.” For recent or forthcoming studies, see Good and DelVecchio-Good, “Why Do the Masses So Easily Run Amok?”; A. Lakoff,
Pharmaceutical Reason;
Wilce, “Madness, Fear, and Control in Bangladesh.” See also Michael Oldani's Princeton dissertation, “Filling Scripts.”

65. Anscombe,
Intention;
Hacking,
Rewriting the Soul,
235.

66. Hacking,
Rewriting the Soul,
237.

67. Ibid.

68. Of course, earlier conceptions of multiplicity also had a history: “[T]he whole language of many selves had been hammered out by generations of romantic poets and novelists, great and small, and also in innumerable broadsheets and feuilletons too ephemeral for general knowledge today” (Hacking,
Rewriting the Soul,
232).

69. In a more recent publication, Hacking softens his criticism of retroactive diagnosis, still finding it academically incorrect but allowing that it is sometimes nonetheless able to yield insight. People called “fugueurs” (mad travelers) at the end of the nineteenth century may share something with contemporary people who suffer from what is now called “disassociative fugue,” for example. See Hacking,
Mad Travelers,
87.

70. “Ron Chernow, Author
Alexander Hamilton.”

71. In anthropology there has been only a modest amount of recent interest in the implications of Wittgenstein's thought for the understanding of cultural processes. This interest is not entirely new—Clifford Geertz's work has long been informed by Wittgensteinian understandings—but it is a welcome sign. See Das, “Wittgenstein and Anthropology.” Also, Michael Lynch has recently developed some implications of Wittgenstein's views of language for science studies in his “Representation Is Overrated.” By the accident of being in graduate school at Cornell during the years when the faculty in the philosophy department were undergoing a kind of conversion experience as they contended with the unpublished writings Wittgenstein left there before his death, I was swept along in their enthusiasm. I took courses from Max Black, Georg Von Wright, and Bruce Goldberg. Many of my early publications were attempts to see anthropological problems, or dissolve them, with the aid of insights I had gained from this work. In returning to these concerns here, I want to signal the richness of Wittgenstein's thought for anthropological accounts of culture.

72. Wittgenstein,
Zettel,
2e.

73. Ibid., 8e. Emphasis in original.

C
HAPTER
9

1. J. Chaffin, “How Brokers with the Blues May Add to Market Miseries.”

2. Kaletsky, “War against Terror Can Be Fought on the Spending Front.”

3. Samuelson, “For the Economy, Mood Does Matter.” Emphasis added.

4. Roper, “Consumers Anxious but Ads Bring Some Comfort.”

5. Kaplan, “Study: Consumers Anxious but Ads Bring Some Comfort.”

6. World Mood Chart.

7. Up until the fall of 2004, Benrik's chart plotted the world mood against the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The software was not working properly, so that feature was removed (e-mail correspondence, September 4, 2004). The moods of investors are at least as important as the moods of stockbrokers, CEOs, and consumers. In 2003, State Street Associates launched a global investor confidence index that measures the “sentiments” of institutional investors by tracking the percentage of their portfolios that they place in high-risk assets. The basic idea, according to the firm, is that “the more of their portfolios that professional investors are willing to devote to riskier as opposed to safer investments, the greater their risk appetite or confidence.” State Street Investor, “State Street Investor Confidence Index Summary.”

8. Havens,
Making Contact,
21.

9. In Andrew Solomon's eloquent description of the slowing that accompanies depression, “Depression minutes are like dog years, based on some artificial notion of time. I can remember lying frozen in bed, crying because I was too frightened to take a shower, and at the same time knowing that showers are not scary. I kept running through the individual steps in my mind: you turn and put your feet on the floor; you stand; you walk from here to the bathroom; you open the bathroom door; you walk to the edge of the tub; you turn on the water; you step under the water; you rub yourself with soap; you rinse; you step out; you dry yourself; you walk back to the bed. Twelve steps, which sounded to me then as onerous as a tour through the stations of the cross” (The
Noonday Demon,
52–53). Karl Jaspers, a brilliant clinician of the twentieth century, describes the immobility of depression in connection with the fear of economic loss:
“Pure depression
is the opposite of this [mania] in every respect. Its central core is formed from an equally unmotivated and profound sadness to which is added a retardation of psychic events, which is as subjectively painful as it is objectively visible. All instinctual activities are subjected to it. The patient does not want to do anything. The reduced impulse to move and do things turns into complete immobility. No decision can be made and no activity begun. Associations are not available. Patients have no ideas. They complain of a complete disruption of memory. They feel their poverty of performance and complain of their inefficiency, lack of emotion and emptiness. They feel profound gloom as a sensation in the chest or body as if it could be laid hold of there. The depth of their melancholy makes them see the world as grim and grey. They look for the unfavourable and unhappy elements in everything. They accuse themselves of much past guile (self-accusations, notions of having sinned). The present has nothing for them (notions of worthlessness) and the future lies horrifyingly before them (notions of poverty, etc.)”
(General Psychopathology,
2:597).

10. Denby,
American Sucker,
7–8.

11. Zürn,
The Man of Jasmine and Other Texts,
43.

12. Behrman,
Electroboy,
80.

13. Cramer,
Confessions of a Street Addict,
92, 124.

14. Bandler, “Can Your Workers Carry a Bowling Ball with a Rubber Band?”

15. The theme of deliberately inducing mania has also been picked up at the grassroots level. On the Web site of the Icarus Project, a forum for people living under the description of bipolar disorder, there is a thread within an online discussion forum that is devoted to inducing mania. The discussion covers possible methods—sleep less, increase caffeine, alter diet—interwoven with plenty of caution about trying to induce mania at all. The Icarus Project was founded to “provide a place to discuss and connect around the paradox of ‘navigating the space between brilliance and madness.'” The specific link to the discussion thread is
http://www.theicarusproject.net/community/
discussionboards/viewtopic.php?t=5048
.