Darkness and fog pervaded my house when I woke up New Year’s morning. The windows were peppered with frozen mist. They formed a mosaic of broken mirrors as I looked out the glass. All I could see were fragments of my face encased in the silence of a whiteout. There were no people on the street, only the footprints of the wind. When I walked through the rooms, they were empty and cold. Then the deathly toll of the churchbell rang: bong, bong, bong. My house was empty. No sign of children, pets, or toys; just long dead pictures. The faded works from a lost culture, alive yesterday. But where am I today? Am I alive and doing well in this fishbowl of death? Yesterday was New Year’s Eve. We drank from those empty bottles of champagne. The party horns blew in the new year. No, it was the fall from the stool that bruised my brain. Alive, alive, I am no more!

This is what happened to me that fateful night. I went off my medication for manic depression. A horrible blow to my head preceded the delusion that I was dead. What is it about this disease that causes me to roar down the highway of death, where shadows are alive and whisper in loud voices? Is it a bundle of neurons firing in all the wrong places? Or are they ripe for moments of inspiration, where treasures of art are stored?

"If the doors of perception are cleansed, everything appears as it is - infinite." – William Blake

Blake described sunspots that exploded in the brain at accelerated bursts. All great works of art are created at these points. Molecular biologists speak of these as UBO’s, unidentified bright objects which can be perceived on a PET scan. This is conception at the birth of an idea. "In the beginning, God created the heaven and earth." Is this God’s big bang?

How did it start for me? At a young age, I remember feeling different from everyone. If I didn’t get my way, temper tantrums followed. When I was four, my folks went away on vacation and I was slowly captivated by a blue mood. It began like a fog rising in my belly. Fear and dread encroached from all sides. The fog rose to my head. The motor in my head buzzed and danger crept near. I hid under the table while around me a maelstrom of fury raged. Good and evil fought for my soul, but all in the etches of my mind. I’d run away to hide, never knowing from what. I was still unable to voice the words, "Help me."

Where does an insidious illness like manic depression originate? Ask Edgar Allan Poe: "During the whole of a dark, dull, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively in the heavens, I have been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. Its proprietor, Roderick Usher, spoke of acute bodily illness–of a mental disorder which oppressed him. I was at once struck with an incoherence–an inconsistency–an excessive nervous agitation. His action was alternatively vivacious and sullen. His voice varied rapidly from a tremulous indecision (when the animal spirits seemed utterly in abeyance) to that species of energetic concision, which may be observed in the lost drunkard, the opium addict, in periods of most intense excitement....It was, he said, a constitutional and a family evil, and one for which he despaired to find a remedy."

A strange correlation between Poe’s prose in the Fall of the House of Usher and my own life is described in this scene from high school. I was hit by a case of bad acne. It so devastated my self-esteem that I couldn’t show my face in school. I hid all schoolday in an empty dairy plant. In January, the temperature was so cold that the pipes in the building were frozen. Icicles hung from the ceiling like stalagmites in a cave. They formed a jagged shadow which hovered over the place like a funeral dirge. It was damp, cold and heartless. The stench of death was palpable on the moldy walls. Yet, in my black mood, it was easier to look through the pipes of my jailhouse and observe the hostile world than to venture out.

Alfred Lord Tennyson described manic depression as a "taint of blood" Lord Byron, the poet, of like vein, but in a different context, felt that "some curse hangs over me and mine." Byron’s fiancé, Annabella Milbanke, describes the inconsistency between his moods and character. She says, "When indignation takes possession of his mind–and it’s easily excited–his disposition becomes malevolent. He hates with the bitterest contempt. But as soon as he’s indulged those feelings, he regains the humanity which he’d lost and repents deeply. So that his mind is making sudden transitions–from good to evil, evil to good." She fled with her child after one year of torture. Byron never saw them again.

When I was in my twenties, I recall sitting in a Catholic church. The altar was three stories high and ornately decorated with amber, topaz and beryl. Elaborate wood carvings sculpted the framework from ceiling to floor. Statues of two archangels guarded each side of the altar. Under a stain glass window I read the words, "The eyes of the Lord are everywhere, keeping watch upon the evil and good." It seemed like they looked right through me. When I heard the fiery priest bellow, "Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand," I knelt in Godly reverence. On the periphery, I noticed a woman with a gaudy, pompadour hat. It rocked the contour of serenity. All I wanted to do was knock it from her head. I hastily left the church when I couldn’t fight the impulse to laugh. That’s how quickly my mood shifted from tranquil to irascible.

Ernest Hemingway, along with himself, had a father, brother, sister, and son who suffered from manic depression. His hard drinking and world traveling ways are legend. He’d fish for blue marlin in the Florida Keys, run with the bulls in Spain, and hunt elk in the mountains all in a period of weeks while sleeping less than a couple of hours and drinking a quart of booze a day. At age sixty-two, he was committed to the Mayo Clinic for depression, tried to walk into an airplane propeller, and displayed a reckless disregard for his body. Years of hard drinking had decimated his liver and sexual virility. According to his friend, A.E. Hotchner, "He lost his will to live." Hemingway finally ended his life with a bullet to the brain, shattering the hopes of avid fans. His granddaughter, Margaux Hemingway, killed herself too. Molecular biologists have identified the eighteenth chromosome on a gene as the site for manic depression. This quantifies the genetic link found in family trees.

The self-destructive patterns of the disease characterize my own life. Here’s an example from my early twenties: I drove the car at 140 miles per hour in a blinding rage. Street signs disappeared and lightpoles formed a single white line. It was like a time lapse photograph with zigzagged lines. Two police cars attempted to cut me off, but I laughed with glee as they skidded off the road. I told my girlfriend to hop in the back for her safety. Then I slugged down a fifth of Jack Daniels. While uproariously laughing, cranking the tunes and sailing over the highway, I was ecstatic to the sense of feeling airborne. It was a horrid rush, but luckily nobody was killed. Manic depression has an insidious and demonic obsession with death. Evil is its twin brother. Vincent Van Gogh, a manic depressive, aptly describes it: "The root of the evil lies in the constitution itself, in the fatal weakening of families from generation to generation....The root of the evil lies here, and there’s no cure for it."

The cure didn’t arrive until 1948 when the miracle drug Lithium was discovered by Dr. John F.J. Cade. He believed that urea, a compound excreted in urine, caused mania. He was testing his suspicion that the manic person suffered from an excess of urea or a sensitivity to it. When he injected it into guinea pigs, they had convulsions and some died. Dr. Cade then tried injecting the pigs with lithium urate, the most soluble salt of uric acid. He was stunned when the pigs became lethargic instead of manic. This suggested that lithium reversed the effects of urea. So while his original hypothesis was wrong, he discovered Lithium. Nobody knows how Lithium works, but it’s believed it restores nerve cells, or neurons, back to normal biochemical states. In 1970, after substantial clinical trials proved its effectiveness in treating manic depression, Lithium was approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Since then, millions of sufferers have had their lives saved as a result of this wondrous drug. I am one of them!

How is the treatment of manic depression relevant to my present life? I suffered from an untreated illness for twenty years. In those years I was hospitalized numerous times for mania, accidents, and falls. Now that I’m stabilized on Lithium, my moods have leveled off. There are no more terrific highs or desperate lows, or times when I wouldn’t sleep for weeks or get out of bed for days. Life is normal, but uneventful. Many manic depressive patients on medication complain about this normalcy. Artists and poets, of which a high percentage suffer from the disease, think it dulls creativity. I’m grateful to be alive.

My gratitude extends to my wife, Carol, who refused to give up on me when everyone else did. To God, who drew his omnipotent strength from my weakness. It was God who led me to the medicine that alleviated my torment. My hope is that more natural cures can be found for all illnesses, that people will realize that manic depression is a medical disorder, and will treat us with the same compassion as any sick person. I believe the winds of change are in the air in this regard. Hope lives!