Jul 29 2008
Bi-polar Mania Continues…
“On July 5, 1996, my daughter was struck mad. She was fifteen and her crack-up marked a turning point in both our lives. ‘I feel like I’m traveling and traveling with nowhere to go back to,’ she said in a burst of lucidity while hurtling away toward some place I could not dream of or imagine. I wanted to grab her and bring her back, but there was no turning back.”
So, I’m bi-polar, but I’m sooooo happy that I’m not Michael Greenberg’s daughter, Sally’s, bi-polar, which is to say, bouncing between psychotic and manic most of the time. In fact, the term “bi-polar” is only mentioned briefly, so maybe that’s not really what the dignosis ended up being, but my heart was in shreds–shreds–for these people, this girl, only 15 when she experienced a psychotic break. The experience is the subject of a new, possibly not-yet-released memoir called Hurry Down Sunshine by Greenberg, a freelance writer and columnist for the Times Literary Supplement (London). Where the novel I wrote about in my previous post seemed unfocused, this account stays the course, told from the father’s perspective. At the time, he was married to his second wife, the first living out of state in Vermont. He was barely making ends meet, had no health insurance, lived in a crappy, rotting apartment, and was totally unprepared for the sudden sharp turn in his daughter’s demeanor–not that anyone is prepared for that sort of thing. At first the assumption was drugs—bad drugs, too many drugs–but that would have been the easy answer, as it turned out. Sally would be hospitalized many times, medicated in many ways, and, sadly never really very effectively. We hear a lot about people who “go off their meds” or “refuse to take their meds” but there are a lot of people for whom the ”right” meds simply can’t be found, maybe don’t exist, or, for some unknown reason, stop working after a time. This is how I imagine hell on earth.
The book shows in brief the sometimes entertaining array of patients and professionals that passed through the writer’s life, the different perspectives of family and friends, and is, at its best, a simple look at a simple family coping as best it can with the completely unknown.
