Dear Doctor, I was so impressed with the article that I sent you a patient from Salerno. I am an Italian-English bilingual and I would suggest translating “magnify” as I did on fb, that is: “a lens capable of amplifying and intensifying perception …”. I found the article particularly interesting (and I sincerely thank you for letting me know because I recognize myself in it, and I add that despite the bipolartita enhances my creativity since the diagnosis I have always been “compliant”) because I am a bipolar type 1, with strong genetic component and consequently, as my doctor, unfortunately passed away, of great humanity, Anasthasios Koukopoulos, explained to me, and as confirmed by recent studies, “treatment resistant” to almost all drugs. I take lithium, Depakin and Rivotril from the first diagnosis (after trying Lamictal, Tolep, Tegretol, Keppra and Neurontin), 1995, coincidentally the year in which Jamison’s wonderful “An Unquiet Mind” came out – below my translation of part of the epilogue). Despite taking these stabilizers, I have intense hypomanic episodes (or perhaps manic but without delusions and psychosis) about every 2 years, lasting 4-5 months. The only drug, given to me by Athanasios, that helps me sleep is Seroquel. A single orodispensable tablet of Zyprexa (precrypted to me by an irresponsible person from CSM Salerno (one who mistreats and offends patients) who did not know the circular of Prof Duff of Cambridge, head of the UK drug commission, available on the website of the Ministry of Health, in which warns of the serious risks of taking Olanzapine and Risperidone by the elderly, especially those with senile dementia, patients with cardiovascular problems and heavy smokers, I cause a terrible leukocytoclastic vasculitis (just type in pubmed “olanzapine + vasculitis”). I walked like a cripple for months, with feet and ankles covered with edema and reddish spots and excruciating pain.
Here is the passage, criticized by many of his colleagues, but in which I completely recognize myself (apart from the lack of delusions and hallucinations, luckily for me, in fact an English psychiatrist has defined my mania as “lucid”). I add something written by me.
The most beautiful words ever written about “mania” (my translation: the official one is “flat”):
I have often wondered if, having the choice, I would choose to have depressive mania. If lithium was not available, or if it didn’t work for me, the answer would be a simple no… ..but it would be a no steeped in terror. But lithium works, so I suppose I can ask myself this question. As strange as it may sound, I would choose to have this disease. It is difficult to explain …
[describes the horror of depression – I skipped it because it was more obvious]
So why would I choose to have this disease
Because I believe, in all honesty, to have, thanks to it, perceived, felt, felt more, with more depth and intensity; I have lived more experiences, and I have lived them more intensely; I have loved and have been loved more; laughed more just for crying more; of having kept death like a sheath; to have understood it – death – and life itself better; seen wonderful qualities but also dark sides, terrible in the people I met, and slowly I learned, my business the values ​​of sincere and caring affection, loyalty and living with courage to the end. I saw the immeasurable breadth, the most hidden, deep core of my mind and heart and I also realized how fragile my mind and my heart are and, in the end, unknowable. Depressed, I crawled on all fours to cross a room, and I did it for months and months. But when my mood was stable or manic I ran faster, thought faster, loved faster than most people I know. And I think this is largely due to my illness – the intense light it sheds on everything and the way I see the world it has imposed on me. I think it forced me to test the limits of my mind (which, despite being “defective”, stood the test) and the limits of the way I was raised, my environment, my family, the education I I have received, and some friends. And I think this is largely due to my illness – the intense light it sheds on everything and the way I see the world it has imposed on me. I think it forced me to test the limits of my mind (which, despite being “defective”, stood the test) and the limits of the way I was raised, my environment, my family, the education I I have received, and some friends. And I think this is largely due to my illness – the intense light it sheds on everything and the way I see the world it has imposed on me. I think it forced me to test the limits of my mind (which, despite being “defective”, stood the test) and the limits of the way I was raised, my environment, my family, the education I I have received, and some friends.
The innumerable hypomanias, and mania itself, at its peak, have all, without exception, given my life a feeling, thinking, perceiving of a different level from the “normal” one. Even in the throes of the most profound psychosis – hallucinations, delirium, frenzy – I realized that I was able to find ever new hidden spaces, never known before, in my mind and in my heart. Some of those nooks and crannies, those hidden spaces were incredible and of such beauty that they took my breath away, took my breath away, to the point that I felt that I could have died there, in that moment, and those wonderful images would have kept me afloat . Some of those corners of the mind and heart were horrible and grotesque and I would have preferred not to know they existed, nor to have to see them again. Yet there were always those new corners,
– Kay Redfield Jamison “An Unquiet Mind” (1995)
NIGHTFLYING – AT NIGHT THE MIND FLIES (THE MANIA AT ITS APEX)
Full night and the brain still runs fast … the poignant passion notes of U2 penetrate every fiber of my body … where the streets have no name .. where the streets have no name .. the most beautiful .. impetuous … every embankment collapses in front of the force of this music … “I want to tear down the walls that keep me imprisoned inside me. “.. sings Bono .. (i want to tear down the walls that hold me inside) … (I can’t stand still) … I want to reach out and touch the flame hand and touch the flame) … I am Michelangelo’s Adam in the Sistine Chapel, God stretches his hand towards me, hands touch each other for a moment, but that moment is enough for God to imbue me with the sacred divine fury …
… pure passion … I want to be born, die, be reborn again, hate, love, caress the heart of a soul in pain, fly, sink, kill, resurrect, heal, rock a child until it falls asleep, run faster than the clouds , chasing the setting sun and forcing it to come back with me, dive off a cliff, make love, run again, stop, recite poems never heard before, sing with the angels and then … keep quiet, and look straight into the eyes of someone who loves me with my same intensity until I dive into his soul, die and then be reborn in him and then be one with him, cry with joy and pain, tell my mother how much I love her as she doesn’t Did I ever say, I would like to tell him when he was 18 and I wasn’t even a distant project, when he was like me,full of romantic dreams cut off by cruel parents, I would like to return as a fetus and console her from within and gently caress her with my still unformed hands, and kiss her and give her back even a thousandth of the love she gave me … and all this I would like to do in a second … this is the mania .. I understand it now …. the depression lasts for years .. the mania for months .. time is running out … you have to feel live try love hate at a very fast pace because it soon calms down the curtainyou have to feel living, trying to love, to hate at a very fast pace because the curtain falls soonyou have to feel living, trying to love, to hate at a very fast pace because the curtain falls soon
“A poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage … asnd then is heard no more” “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”
“[life is like] an actor who he squirms and struts for his brief hour on the stage and then disappears into thin air “” and like the disjointed tale of a madman, full of bombastic words, without any meaning “[Shakespeare – Macbeth’s soliloquy after the death of his wife
] U2 …. yes the streets where I wander at night intoxicated by the nectar of the gods have no name … they are in my mind
“I want to tear down the walls that hold me inside” .. but I have knocked them down!
“And when i go there i’ll go there with you..it’s all i can i do
“I’ll show you a place high on a desert plain where the streets have no
name
” and inject into him a little of the divine fire of the crazy chemistry of my brain and make him fly with me on that plateau where the wind blows hard and the air is pure and crystalline
THE AGONY OF THE MANIA THAT
GOES OUT THE HEART SHRINKS
The heart shrinks
The heart becomes small small until it almost disappears
A deadly lull
A deadly flat calm
Like a shadow
Like a shadow
Hangs over
It falls leaden
The brain
On the brain
No longer No longer
Lively
and raging
Vital like a child and steeped in divine fury
“Rage, rage
Curses, fights relentlessly
Against the dying of the light
Against the dying of the light
Do not go gentle
Do not go quiet, without resisting
Into that good night
In the sweet night “[Dylan Thomas]
A divine partnership
A divine communion
Has been
broken
The angels stare
Even the angels
In disbelief
look in disbelief, horrified
Their mouths gaping
their mouths open in a silent cry
Their wings drooping
The limp wings
He who dared to tread
That being that had dared to venture
Where only angels ventured
Beyond borders that only angels dare to cross
Is only a pale recollection
That man is now only a pale memory
Normality
Daily normalcy
With all its horrors
Con all his horrors
Lurks just round the corner
He’s lurking around the corner, ready to grab his soul
(6/11/2005)

Previous articleThe earth trembles in Emilia, a second earthquake felt between Modena and Reggio Emilia
Next article10 books to be read in November 2021