The Gifts of Mania

Abstract

‘What does sadness feel like? Acid rain.’ At the outset of this adventurous personal account of bipolar disorder, Lucy Newlyn outlines some of her incentives: among them, to explore and discover her own mental processes; to help diminish the terror and stigma of insanity; and to illuminate the complexity of the human mind as beyond straightforward definition. ‘The mental condition I describe does not accommodate itself to the normal tidy distinctions between forms’, she asserts, ‘and no straightforward narrative mode will do’ (p. 7). Her exploration, written in diary form but frequently straying into more experimental modes, follows emergent investigations of the illness over the last two decades, from Kate Jamison’s Touched with Fire (1996) to Mark Haddon’s Polar Bears, which premiered at the Donmar Warehouse in 2010, and Stephen Fry’s two documentaries The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive and The Not So Secret Life of the Manic Depressive: 10 Years On, aired in 2006 and 2016.