• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 470 0

and generous in the fees they negotiated. Unfortunately, a few days after I signed the contract, the University of California announced that it was beginning a major financial development campaign and that individual members of the faculty no longer would be able to solicit funds from private donors. I was left with a personal bill for twenty-five thousand dollars, which, as one of my friends pointed out, was a lot of money for concert tickets. Still, the concert filled UCLA’s huge Royce Hall and was a great success; it also turned out to be the beginning of a series of concerts performed across the country, including one that we did a few years later with the National Symphony Orchestra at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. It was also the basis for the first of a series of public television specials that we produced around the theme of manic-depressive illness and the arts.

Throughout the setting up and running of the clinic I was fortunate to have the support of the chairman of my department. He backed my being director of a medical clinic despite the fact that I was not a physician, and despite the fact that he knew I had manic-depressive illness. Rather than using my illness as a reason to curtail my clinical and teaching responsibilities, he—after being assured that I was receiving good psychiatric care and that the medical director of the clinic knew about my condition—encouraged me to use it to try and develop better treatments and to help change public attitudes. Although he never said, I assume my chairman found out about my illness after my first episode of severe psychotic mania; my ward chief certainly knew, and I imagine that the information quickly drifted upward. In any event, my chairman treated the issue strictly as a medical one. He first broached the subject by coming up to me at a meeting, putting his arm around me, and saying, “I understand you have some problems with your moods. I’m sorry. For God’s sake, just be sure to keep taking your lithium.” Now and again, after that, he would ask me how I was doing and make sure that I was still taking my medication. He was straightforward, supportive, and never suggested for a moment that I stop or curtail my clinical work.

My concerns about openly discussing my illness with others, however, were enormous. My first psychotic episode occurred long before I received my license from the California Board of Medical Examiners. During the period of time between starting lithium and passing my written and oral board examinations, I observed many medical students, clinical psychology interns, and residents denied permission to continue their studies because of psychiatric illness. This happens far less often now—indeed, most graduate and medical schools encourage students who become ill to get treatment and, if at all possible, to return to their clinical work—but my early years on the faculty at UCLA were plagued by fears that my illness would be discovered, that I would be reported to one kind of hospital or licensing board or another, and that I would be required to give up my clinical practice and teaching.

It was a high-pressure existence in many ways, but mostly I loved it. Academic medicine provides an interesting and varied lifestyle, lots of travel, and most of one’s colleagues are bright-eyed, bushy tailed, and generally thrive on the stresses of having to combine clinical practice with publishing papers and teaching. These stresses were compounded by the fluctuations in mood, however attenuated, that I continued to experience while on lithium. It took several years for them to truly even out. For me, when I was well, it was a wide-open opportunity to write, think, see patients, and teach. When I was ill, it was simply overwhelming: for days and weeks at a time, I would put up the DO NOT DISTURB sign on my door, stare mindlessly out the window, sleep, contemplate suicide, or watch my guinea pig—a memento of one of my manic buying sprees—furiously scurrying around in his cage. During those times I could not imagine writing