Introduction
A PLACE TO START
I highly recommend the following links on the internet for: (a) some problems in psychiatry, (b) the Authenticity Mental Health Network, and (c) the Americanization of mental illness---to begin your stay at this subsection of my website on mental health. But, in the end, readers are free to begin where they please. This hardly needs saysing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html?ref=sociology(c)
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jun/23/epidemic-mental-illness-why/(a)
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jul/14/illusions-of-psychiatry/(a)
http://authenticity-institute.org/who-we-serve-2/authenticity-mental-health-network/(b)
STORIES OF JOURNEYS THROUGH MADNESS:
Twenty-seven years old and in her first semester at Yale Law School, Elyn Saks had days when, she writes, I feared that my brain was actually heating up and might explode. I visualized brain matter flying all over the room, spattering the walls. Whenever I sat at a desk and tried to read, I caught myself putting my hands up to either side of my head, trying to hold it all in. For more of this story through madness go to: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/apr/17/infiltrating-the-enemy-of-the-mind/
MY JOURNEY: A DIFFERENT CHAOS NARRATIVE
BIPOLAR DISORDER: A Longitudinal Context: October 1943 To October 2011
11th Edition, Draft #1: By---Ron Price of George Town Tasmania Australia
(175 Pages: Font 14—80,000 words)
Disclaimer: This on-line book is offered for informational purposes and, with a host of other resources now available, as an aid to others. It is NOT a substitute for medical advice. Although I make every effort to offer only accurate information, I cannot guarantee that the information I make available here is always relevant, correct and current. This account is of my personal experience. The field of mental health is highly complex and each person's situation is idiosyncratic. This acccount, this somewhat clinical story, is my personal, idiosyncratic, narrative. It is my experience, the story of some of the encounter of my mind with the world, neither a simple account nor perspicuous; the story of some of the traffic between what the world imposed and my mind demanded, received and reshaped. Readers will find here many generalizations but, at the centre of the account, is my life.
No one should rely upon any information contained herein, make any decisions or take any action based on such information. Of course, some readers may decide to do so, but I am not an expert and can make no guarantees insofar as advice is concerned. Consult your doctor before starting any diet or exercise program, taking any medication or, indeed, taking any action at all as a result of reading part of or all of this work. I am not responsible for any action taken in reliance on the information contained herein. If damages are incurred by anyone, whether directly or indirectly, as a result of errors, omissions or discrepancies contained in this account, I cannot and will not be held responsible. If anyone wants to write to me personally they should feel free to do so. My email address is: ronprice9@gmail.com
1. Preamble and Introduction:
1.1 This medium-sized book was once very small, indeed, not much more than a long essay of about 2000 words. It started out as that very short essay ten years ago in 2001: (a) as a statement to obtain a disability pension in Australia and (b) as an appendix to my memoirs, a five volume 2600 page opus found in whole and in part at various places on the internet. Both this statement and that book of my memoirs could benefit from the assistance of one, Rob Cowley, affectionately known in publishing circles back in the seventies and early eighties as “the Boston slasher.” His editing was regarded by some as constructive and deeply sensitive. If he could amputate several dozen pages, several thousand words, of this exploration of my life experience of bipolar disorder(BPD) with minimal agony to my emotional equipment I’m sure readers would be the beneficiaries. But, alas, I think Bob is dead.
I did find an editor, a proof-reader and friend who did not slash and burn but left my soul quite intact as he waded through my labyrinthine passages, smoothed them all out and excised undesirable elements. But this editor is in the late evening of his life and, after editing several hundred pages of my writing, he has tired of any continued exercise in my literary fields, and so I am left on my own. I have begun to assume the role that both Cowley and my friend exercised, but it is a difficult and relentless role and I, therefore, only take it up sporadically given the quantity of my writing which does require editing. Without my editor friend, who is now nearly 80 and leads a quiet non-editing life, I advise readers not to hold their breath waiting for me to do what is a necessary edit in this now lengthy work.
For the rest of this account readers can google: Ron Price BPD. They will find portions or all of what I have come to call my chaos narrative at many internet sites dealing as these sites do with: depression, bipolar disorder, various disorders on the affective spectrum and a wide range of mental health issues. My email address, as I say above, is: ronprice9@gmail.com. Any reader who would like to write to me personally in relation to any personal issues raised here feel free to do so.
I recommend the following links to Baha'is interested in the field of mental health:
http://bahai-library.com/theses/mentalhealth.html
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.Bahai_Association_of_Mental_Health_Professionals
MY MENTAL HEALTH: AN EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE
The naturalist Charles Darwin(1809-1882) certainly did not invent the idea of evolution. Evolution can be defined in many ways. One of these ways is "the continuous change over time in the state of some system as a fundamental property of that system." The idea that a process of evolution has occurred in the history of life or of the cosmos itself was found in Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science as far back as 1786. The histories of religion, of philosophy, of science, of the fine arts, of the industrial arts, show that they have one and all passed through stages. That was the way the English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist Herbert Spencer(1820-1903) put it. I recognize that evolution is the law of many diverse orders of phenomena in life, and I take this to be the case with the mental health issues I have faced since my inception. I give an account that can be found here of that evolution and the many interventions that have taken place in my dealing with these issues in my life.
MARK FOSTER
I post this item below from one of the men to whom I have been writing for many years. He is a Professor of Sociology at Johnson County Community College in Kansas. His website is one of the most creative and extensive for someone like myself with an interest in the social sciences and especially sociology: Mark Foster. While I don't agree entirely with Mark in his post below, I think his point is one that needs to be made and is an omportant one in the discussion of mental health issues. Foster said that:
Someone raised the issue that there is not much said in the Baha'i texts on the subject of mental health or mental illness. IMO, that is a good thing. One of the Baha'i principles is the harmony of science and religion, which, IMO, requires that revealed religion and the sciences operate in separate jurisdictions. There appears to have developed a popular Baha'i theology of psychological/neurological conditions. Personally, while I would like to see that popular theology replaced with greater wisdom, I would not like to see it replaced with a more sophisticated theology. IMO, psychological and neurological conditions are the provinces of the sciences, and the Baha'i Faith, as a revealed religion, has no direct contribution to make to the subject. --Mark Foster
As I say, I do not agree entirely with Foster's statement since I am of the view that, in the field of psychology, the Baha'i Faith has much to contribute. But the subject is complex and I do not intent to expand on the issues related to this question, this issue, here.
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TWO PASSAGES BELOW FROM MY CHAOS-NARRATIVE
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1. Individual consumers of mental health services must work out what is best for them in terms of those services and in terms of what activities are appropriate for them within their coping capacity in life’s day-to-day spectrum. It seems to me there are some activities which are simply not appropriate for me to engage in given my constellation of mental health issues and the personal circumstances of my life.
2. The famous novelist Willaim Faulkner once said that "every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't and then tries the short story which is the most demanding literary form after poetry. And failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing." For me the writing process has worked itself out differently in spite of, or perhaps because of, my mental health issues. The Latin expression mens sana in fabula sana can be translated: "mental health is a coherent life story." Neurosis and mental health disorders are, therefore, life-narratives that are not coherent. The writing of my memoirs, my poetry and, indeed, most of my now published work took place in the last decade of the treatment for my bi-polar disorder, 2001 to 2011, the first decade of this 3rd millennium. The core of this treatment consisted of alterations to my medications. It is my hope that the current medication regime for my BPD will be the final one since it seems to have regularized my life to my satisfaction. The coherent life story that readers will find at many places on the internet is as coherent as it was possible for me to describe in the context of my BPD over the seven decades of my life.
THE SUBJECT OF MENTAL EFFORT and THE METAPHORICAL NATURE OF PHYSICAL REALITY
Three of the many significant influences on my poetry, influences which have given great pleasure to my mind and heart and informed my intellectual perspectives over the last two decades(1991 to 2011), were William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson and William Shakespeare. I was in my late forties before these three influences were first appreciated. They helped me to see nature in all its forms. My second wife, Chris, nature programs on television and, of course, nature itself also stimulated my interest in and appreciation of the external aspects of nature. I found that nature’s external forms permitted my rational mind to attain a renovated and renovating vision of the organic world--and particularly my own inner and personal world. But this vision was slow and difficult to achieve; it developed insensibly and sensibly over the decades; the pitfalls surrounding the acquisition and development of this vision, were many, obscure and subtle.
As a famous Canadian poet, perhaps Canada’s greatest 19th century poet, Archibald Lampman, expressed the challenge: “the poet must not cease from the mental effort required both to obtain this renovated vision of external nature and to return, restored, to the world of men." For those who struggle with some form of mental health issue this may be very difficult. It was not nature in its external forms: flowers, trees, the entire geology and geography of place, that provided for me the deepest satisfactions and fascinations. This renovated vision found and now finds its chief conceptual home, its guiding hand, one of its chief tools and aids, one of its fertile sources and bases, in a particular view of physical reality in all its forms. This view I call, thanks to the literary efforts of John Hatcher since the 1980s, a metaphorical construct whose value, use and importance is an inner, symbolic, dramaturgical, one.(1)
CREATIVITY AND MENTAL ILLNESS
When I finally came to accept lithium without any mental reservations by the early 1990s; when I began, too, to see the end of my teaching career on the horizon by the mid-to-late 1990s and what I hoped would be a coincidental reduction in the various forms of frustration that I had experienced in marriage, in my career and in my community life in many and complex ways for decades, at least as far back as the 1960s---I began to write poetry a great deal. One could say I was obsessed; my wife certainly would use that word and I have come to accept that word as a realistic description of my behaviour, especially now more than a decade later in 2011. I have been retired from FT, PT and volunteer work and I devote all of my waking hours when possible to reading and writing, poetry and publishing, research and independent study.
The drive, the passion, to create never seems to leave me and other activities, domestic and social, serve to provide a useful backdrop, respite, diversion and alternative, coping tools and possibly crutches, to the constant demand that comes from my inner, my psychosocial world and the philosophico-religious assumptions at the centre of this world. But this creative drive is not in the extreme form that is sometimes reported by sufferers of BPD who, without medication, say that their creative urges would literally push themselves from within until their muscles in their chest and rib cage were torn! Or, as the writer Mark Vonnegut puts it half-humorously and half in a self-deprecating tone: "I have so many original thoughts I have to take medication for it."
Many people without BPD create much more extensively than I do. Creativity is found in the temperaments and personalities of all sorts of people and I do not want to over-emphasize or accentuate its presence in people with BPD. I have never been able to write during depression and, once lithium stabilized my moods back in 1980, writing began to flow incrementally and, in time--by the 1990s--copiously. Creativity in people with BPD, it is sometimes argued, stems from mobilizing the energy that results from negative emotion and to initiate some sort of solution to their problems. Discontent, to put it another way, can be the mother of invention for some BPD sufferers. To put this yet another way: discontent can be adaptive or compensatory because it can spur a person on and force the use of his imagination and, in the process, help him ride out the storms of life. If there are genes for creativity and BPD the research has not indicated it thusfar.
From at least 1991 until this year 2011, some two decades, my literary output has been utterly phenomenal. I could never have predicted it in the first 50 years of my life. Again, to go down this track and describe the writing process and creativity in general in more than the cursory manner than I have here would take me into another one of Alice in Wonderland’s borrows where I do not want to go and where I would take myself and readers away from the central theme in my account of bipolar disorder.
SOME OF MY INTELLECTUAL INTERESTS
I have taken a keen interest in the social sciences and humanities, the latter only in the last two decades, since my late forties when I began to teach English Literature to matriculation students in Perth Western Australia, and since I approached(1989-1999) and then enjoyed(2000-2011) my retirement from the job world. The students of English Literature I taught were students hoping to enter university the following year. The multitude of subjects or disciplines I taught, of reading and study, of decades of observation and experience, some of it based in outrageous personal misfortune as well as life's wonderful fortunes, aided my journey. Much despondency, much joy and immense quantities of the quotidian, assisted me in: (a) making my spirit and mind feel alternately strong, capable and energetic on the one hand and vulnerable, exhausted and burdened on the other; (b) giving me an increased veneration and respect for certain portions of the world’s immense corpus of poetry and prose; and (c) acquiring a resolute contemplation of life developed over several epochs of Baha'i history. The great traditions of learning in the great civilizations on the planet over the last several thousand years have become one, among many, of the centres for my study now in the evening of my life, these middle years(65 to 75) of late adulthood as some human development psychologists call the years in the lifespan from 60 to 80.
My stance vis-à-vis the great poetry and literature of history as well as much of the social sciences and humanities has been more active especially since the social and occupational demands of life have diminished in recent years. This active stance, though, is necessarily of a highly selective one given the burgeoning resources now available in all fields of study and learning. Being an active agent of one's own learning is crucial to the cultural attainments of the mind which Abdul-Baha says is the first attribute of perfection to be acquired in life. The resources available now for students and writers like myself are simply staggering in their magnitude thanks to the internet. Life is short and time is fleeting; the hour is urgent and, let there be no mistake, ours in the duty to labour serenely, if we are able, and to lend our share of assistance in whatever way circumstances may enable us to assuage the fury of the tempest of our times.
I must admit and acknowledge that my precursor models and their styles, those I have drawn on for my various and several literary purposes, have increased with the years. For this reason, I qualify as a practitioner, as a legitimate Canadian-Australian hybrid participant, in the tradition that leads from the great Romantics to the great Moderns and the Postmoderns. My perspective rests on: (a) a resolute contemplation of my time and place, (b) a broad synthesis of much from the social sciences and humanities and (c) a noetic integrator that interprets large fields of reality, that is the ontological and theological, epistemological and teleological framework and construction of my religion. And because of this my perspective is—I can safely say--distinctly my own, at least in part. Although this last sentence is long and complex and, although some of the words I have used in this last sentence are long and difficult for some readers, they are necessary to convey what I am trying to convey. I anticipate that only some readers will take an interest in this attempt, however inadequate, to explain 'where I am coming from,' as they say these days in the vernacular.
My perspective is one that, I like to think, includes man, nature, society, every atom in existence and the essence of all created things, as Baha'u'llah puts it poetically in His Hidden Words(3). It is the perspective of a man with a wide and, insofar as I am able to envisage and articulate, a coherent range of concerns. It is the perspective: (i) of an imaginative observer of both the external world and the world of the unseen; (ii) of one who is and has been for more than half a century committed to the gradual, evolutionary building of a New World Order, the foundations of a global society, the City of God, through the teachings of that charismatic and prophetic figure Baha’u’llah; (iii) of an adherent of a new and independent religious system with a detailed and verifiable record of its history and development; (iv) of a participant in a system whose growing influence is arguably the most remarkable development in contemporary religious history; (v) of a man who has not, as many might think, attached himself to a utopian, an unrealistic, dream; (vi) of a person who endeavours to see life simply as it is and to estimate everything at its true value in relation to: (a) a view of universal truth which is perennial but not archaic, (b) a view which accepts that no fortuitous conjunction of circumstances will make it possible for the human community to bend the conditions of life into conformity with some set of human desires—that such a hope, is illusory; and (c) a view that the world is one country, has one common homeland and humankind are its citizens. All of this has taken place: (a) while dealing with the rigours of severe mental tests in the form of bipolar disorder(BPD) in the last 68 years, and (b) while dealing with the joys and satisfactions of this existential world.
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(1) I have been deeply indebted since the 1980s to the writing of John S. Hatcher. He holds a B.A. and M.A. in English literature from Vanderbilt University, and a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Georgia. He is currently a professor and director of graduate studies in English literature at the University of South Florida in Tampa. A widely published poet and distinguished lecturer, he is author of numerous books on literature, philosophy, Baha'i theology and scripture, including Close Connections; From the Auroral Darkness: The Life and Poetry of Robert E. Hayden; A Sense of History: The Poetry of John Hatcher; The Ocean of His Words: A Reader's Guide to the Art of Baha'u'llah; and The Purpose of Physical Reality; The Kingdom of Names. He and his family live on a farm near Plant City, Florida.
(2) Louis Simpson, editor, An introduction to Poetry, Macmillan, 1969; Ludwig Tuman, "Toward Critical Foundations For a World Culture of the Arts," World Order, Summer 1975, pp.8-35.
(3) Baha'u'llah, Hidden Words, Bahá'í Publishing Trust, Wilmette,1985.
