I have a friend, let’s call her Amanda Nicol, who, in 2003, wrote a highly insightful and devastatingly emotional novel about a young guy and his struggle with mental illness.
But it’s not fiction.
Everything that the main character – ‘Dan’ – describes and experiences, is what Amanda Nicol went through, as she struggled with swings of extreme hypomania, bipolar affective disorder and manic depression.
Amanda’s description of her/Dan’s psychotic symptoms, delusions and hallucinations are, surely, educational and informative.
It is compellingly chilling to read of Amanda’s/Dan’s loss of control as she/he gradually becomes aware of periods of episodic behaviour that have occurred during frequent mental blackouts.
I got to know Amanda very well, we became truly close and, if this doesn’t sound too weird, I started to love her.
It was a good, a healthy, a non-sexual love, but yes, it was a kind of love above friendship, and it had sprung out of the devastation that her words – that the vivid description of her illness – had inflicted upon me.
This week I became aware that a person I know, a person I have immense professional respect for, has been battling – not too successfully – with bipolar syndrome.
I can understand a little of where she is, the person behind this new discovery. I can understand some of her confusion; I can appreciate the periodic snaps of her loss of direction.
But over and above these things, the one feeling I’m struggling to come to terms with is an overwhelming sense of devastation that a person so young – a person with so much of her life ahead of her – and a person so full of such obviously outstanding talent, is desperately trying to deal with such a debilitating mental illness.
And I feel for her.
There still seems to be a stigma attached to mental illness that there isn’t for physical illness and you’d think that would have been dealt with by now. This makes some people reluctant to address their problems and seek the help they need. There also isn’t the glamour or funding surrounding mental health that there is around say, cancer, where mega-rich celebs design little t-shirts that fashionistas will pay a fortune for to raise money. More needs to be done considering that 1 in three people will at some point suffer from mental health issues in their life. Just look at funding – the funding for long term mental health care at local authority level is shite.