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By Root 523 0

although I did not know it at the time, she later survived several breakdowns and hospitalizations. Somehow, in the strange state I was in, I knew that the poem had meaning for me; I understood it totally. I gave it to the residents and interns as a metaphorical description of the psychotic process and the important possibilities in a subsequent renewal. The residents, unaware of the internal flurry that propelled the readings, seemed to respond well to the articles and, almost to the person, expressed pleasure in the break from their regular medical reading.

During this same period of increasingly feverish behavior at work, my marriage was falling apart. I separated from my husband, ostensibly because I wanted children and he didn’t—which was true and important—but it was far more complicated than that. I was increasingly restless, irritable, and I craved excitement; all of a sudden, I found myself rebelling against the very things I most loved about my husband: his kindness, stability, warmth, and love. I impulsively reached out for a new life. I found an exceedingly modern apartment in Santa Monica, although I hated modern architecture; I bought modern Finnish furniture, although I loved warm and old-fashioned things. Everything I acquired was cool, modern, angular, and, I suppose, strangely soothing and relatively uninvasive of my increasingly chaotic mind and jangled senses. There was, at least, a spectacular—and spectacularly expensive—view of the ocean. Spending a lot of money that you don’t have—or, as the formal diagnostic criteria so quaintly put it, “engaging in unrestrained buying sprees”—is a classic part of mania.

When I am high I couldn’t worry about money if I tried. So I don’t. The money will come from somewhere; I am entitled; God will provide. Credit cards are disastrous, personal checks worse. Unfortunately, for manics anyway, mania is a natural extension of the economy. What with credit cards and bank accounts there is little beyond reach. So I bought twelve snakebite kits, with a sense of urgency and importance. I bought precious stones, elegant and unnecessary furniture, three watches within an hour of one another (in the Rolex rather than Timex class: champagne tastes bubble to the surface, are the surface, in mania), and totally inappropriate sirenlike clothes. During one spree in London I spent several hundred pounds on books having titles or covers that somehow caught my fancy: books on the natural history of the mole, twenty sundry Penguin books because I thought it could be nice if the penguins could form a colony. Once I think I shoplifted a blouse because I could not wait a minute longer for the woman-with-molasses feet in front of me in line. Or maybe I just thought about shoplifting, I don’t remember, I was totally confused. I imagine I must have spent far more than thirty thousand dollars during my two major manic episodes, and God only knows how much more during my frequent milder manias.

But then back on lithium and rotating on the planet at the same pace as everyone else, you find your credit is decimated, your mortification complete: mania is not a luxury one can easily afford. It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. But money spent while manic doesn’t fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you’re given excellent reason to be even more so.

Having a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard in no way prepared my brother for the sprawling financial mess he saw on the floor in front of him. There were piles of credit card receipts, stacks of pink overdraft notices from my bank, and duplicate and triplicate billings from all of the stores through which I had so recently swirled and charged. In a separate, more ominous pile were threatening letters from collection agencies. The chaotic visual impact upon entering the room reflected the higgledy-piggledy, pixilated collection of electric lobes that