Word: manic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...adolescence madhouse enough--with sufficient confusion, shame and manic, grandiose-despairing energy of its own? The years from puberty to the first full-time job are a rough passage through which the child, if tough and lucky, evolves into a creditable, honorable, responsible grownup. You cannot light a candle in a high wind. What's needed for the development to occur is shelter, safety. A context of abstinence is the beginning of such shelter...
Jamison had her first psychotic breakdown just months after receiving her Ph.D. in psychology from UCLA. Found to have manic depression, she was put on lithium, now a standard therapy for the condition. She responded well to the medication, but like so many other patients--and despite all her training--she stopped taking it as soon as she began to feel better. Her resistance was part denial, part side effects (the high doses used in the early '70s blurred her vision). But the core of her defiance, Jamison makes clear, was that she was addicted to the highs...
...have the disease compared with the general population," she says. "Why is that so hard to stomach? If 80% of composers had thyroid disease, no one would have a hard time accepting that . And I've said over and over again that you don't have to have manic depression to be creative. In fact, most creative people...
With or without creativity, Jamison cautions, there is nothing glamorous about manic depression: "It's a horrible disease." In her manic phases, her restless energy helped destroy her first marriage and sent her on financially ruinous shopping sprees. Then, in her blackest despair, she tried to kill herself...
Sabbath's Theater demonstrates that Roth still has the power to shock and amaze, although it doesn't have the fresh manic energy of Portnoy's Complaint (1969), a novel that capitalized on the then popular literary subjects of Jewish Americans and psychoanalysis. The paganized, foul-tempered Mickey Sabbath is beyond all that. Some readers will find the material and language too scabrous for their taste. Others will have their own reasons to cry foul. Roth's old adversaries in the suburban Sanhedrin should have no beef: Mickey is not bad for the Jews; he is bad for everybody...