THE CHALLENGE OF LIVING LIFE AS BOTH A BIPOLAR AND AN ALCOHOLIC.

Jane S. is one of the 60-percent (or more) of 'manic depressives' (persons severely bipolar) who are also alcoholics. Her bipolar life story covers forty-seven years of sobriety and forty-five years on lithium therapy, how her illnesses have interacted, and particularly how much of the shape of her life -- and her achievement of her life's goals (including, for the last forty-seven years, sobriety) -- has been shaped by her bipolarity.

This book is important reading for those dealing with 'manic depression,' either in those close to them or in themselves, and even more for those who suffer from both of Jane's diseases. Her memories include, literally, the good (paying cash down for her first Mustang, though that was because she didn't know how to work a bank account), the bad (the sailboat she was on being boarded by the Coast Guard off Maryland), and the ugly (hearing her head being dribbled like a basketball outside her side-room in the hospital) -- and the very good, the white-light dream that began her recovery from alcoholism. She is believed to have been on lithium therapy for her condition longer than anyone else in the United States.

MY STORY

It isn’t very exciting, but I’ll begin at the beginning—except I’ll put in three vignettes from years later.

The first vignette—maybe “vision” would be a better word—is most obviously from the alcoholism part of my story, though I know now it’s from both. It was the night I stopped drinking, in October 1970. For almost the first night in years, I didn’t have a nightmare—I had what I now think of as my white dream (and I’m afraid I’m having to tell the story in the same words I use later on—it’s hard enough to find one set of words). In the dream there was a large window with no curtains and glistering white sunlight poured in that window almost as white as diamonds. I had never had a dream like that before (or since)—what was it like? Even the words I have found don’t seem to describe what happened very well. I saw the light, though I can’t really describe its appearance (even “white” isn’t quite right), and as soon as I saw it, it was like the design of things was opened to me. I sat there, all confused, and then my whole self that had been angry and “down” was suddenly “up”—like a switch from drowning to swimming.

In the second vignette, maybe twenty months later, I’m in a padded side-room in the mental hospital and I’m convinced my head is detached and bouncing around the room. (I think now it was from the sounds of a volley-ball game outside, but back then it was my head and it was bouncing off the walls.) This is obviously part of the “bipolar” part of my story.

The third vignette is in the same part of the bipolar story. I’m in the same (mental) hospital (my last one), beginning the lithium treatment (which had just recently been re-approved in the United States). This is only a short time after the bouncing volleyball-head. After a few days in solitary confinement I was allowed to wear real clothes and my meals were upstairs. Eventually I was allowed down the huge staircase to the dining room and after all I’d been through the dining room was like a palace and I could eat anything I wanted and even have seconds.

But when they began to introduce the lithium carbonate, I did not do well. I had tremendous tremors and it was nothing for me to take a spoonful of cereal and the tremor would be so great the cereal wound up thrown across the room. I can still see that and the table I was sitting at. Then one day the nurse came up to me with a little plate of crackers covered with peanut butter. There were about half a dozen crackers on the plate—no, maybe four or five. I asked what they were for and I was told just to eat the crackers: the doctor had ordered them. After a week or two my tremors were gone and with just a few minor exceptions they have not returned. That was something more than forty years ago.

So there are the parts of the “trailer” for my story. A wonderful vision, then my head as a bouncing volley-ball, and then fooling my system by putting Lithium in peanut-butter on crackers. Back to my story.

BEGINNING: CHILDHOOD/YOUTH TO DADDY’S DEATH

I was born June 26 1941, on just about the hottest day in years, in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, to two intelligent loving parents. Two years later my brother was born (on a colder day, in October) and he had the same conditions I have—manic depression and alcoholism. But he developed differently