{"id":3361,"date":"2010-06-21T22:10:58","date_gmt":"2010-06-21T21:10:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=3361"},"modified":"2010-06-21T22:12:28","modified_gmt":"2010-06-21T21:12:28","slug":"people-problems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=3361","title":{"rendered":"People Problems"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But it’s not fiction.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Amanda’s description of her\/Dan’s psychotic symptoms, delusions and hallucinations are, surely, educational and informative.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I got to know Amanda very well, we became truly close and, if this doesn’t sound too weird, I started to love her.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

And I feel for her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3361\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}