Bipolar disorder and the Achilles myth of the Iliad are linked for more than one reason. I would start from the famous Achilles heel. Bipolar disorder is often rejected as a diagnosis because its fundamental component, ie excitement, is seen by the brain as a strength, and not the source of the disease. Evil is recognized and isolated in the depressive part, while the excitatory part is typically pursued, solicited and regretted as a moment of normal energy, good ideas, potential and renewal.
Precisely this “syntonic” view of maniamakes people with bipolar disorder vulnerable, and their vulnerability is present when excited more than it is present when depressed. Depression inhibits initiative and isolates, excitement makes people expose and take initiative.
Easy, in these circumstances, that they become generous, that they trust strangers, that they become naive in their belief in promises, mirages, fake stories and bragging rights of characters who enter their lives. Easy both for a superficiality given by excessive optimism, and for the feeling of being able to “seize” good opportunities, sent by providence to change one’s life. In this falling in love with news, with opportunities, in this impetus towards the unknown but rich in prospects future, in this rebellion towards a new life, the bipolar subject has his moment of vulnerability.
Excitement strips one’s defenses, and therefore is not a moment of extreme strength, as it seems to the wearer, but a moment of extreme vulnerability. The scams, deceptions and risks faced by the subjects in the manic phase are extremely banal and evident to the eyes of those who look from the outside, because the difference is made by the so-called “feeling” of reality, for which the person in the euphoric phase it does not take into account the negative, as long as people indulge or exalt it with promises and favorable prospects. In short, the bipolar subject in the manic phase is a victim more often than he is the author of damage.
For example, it is striking that in New York about 30% of those killed had cocaine in their blood at the autopsy. Cocaine, which reproduces an excitement by its typical effect, makes us risk leaving our skin in various kinds of clashes, rather than making supermen. The bipolar subject is also so extroverted and impulsive that he can provoke the reactions of others on himself, but precisely because immersed in a dimension in which he does not foresee organized and negative reactions against himself, he does not take precautions and believes himself able to manage even the risk. He runs towards the fire, he does not run away from the fire, he ignites the nearby fire.
Thus Achilles, at the height of his warfare, is simply annihilated because in his being a demigod he could not avoid having a bare heel, hitting which would have died. The heel is uncovered, sensationally, Achilles protects with his shield, helmet and armor other parts of his body, but not the vulnerable one. He doesn’t feel vulnerable, he wears armor as an ornament and not as a defense. Yet he had been warned by the oracle that he would take a big risk in the Trojan War, maybe he would never come back. But like the manic patient, he almost brags about the risk and goes, and he doesn’t care to protect his heel. Going back in history, Achilles begins his tragedy with a depression, for trivial reasons, the quarrel over the possession of a slave, of which he is at pain,
Then, shaken by the death of his friend Patroclus, who dies in his place wearing his armor, to scare the enemy, he suddenly returns to fight, and in full excitement he exterminates the enemies and rages on the corpse of the enemy leader, assassin of Patroclus. This is his “wrath”, Achilles’ wrath which is the central moment of the Trojan War in Homer’s narrative. This “anger” in Greek is nothing other than “mania”, or rather fury, angry and hostile excitement. Achilles survives depressed closed in his tent, and dies at the height of mania, for having forgotten to protect his vulnerability as a man, which at that moment he no longer felt.
