 When I was a kid, I found this famous picture by Edvard Munch immensely disturbing. Nobody could satisfactorily tell me what it was "about" and World War II was sufficiently close a memory in the minds of adults I knew for some to equate it with the Holocaust almost in the same breath, when they talked about that at all.
For Susanne Meyer, a Hamburg-born student of art and natural philosophy who runs her own website, "no other picture (...) has such an authentic way of expressing so directly the phenomenon of FEAR as an existential human condition" (Cyberinstitut.de).
At mystudios.com, "dedicated to the advancement of arts on the web," they reckon it "perfectly sums up all the horrors that mankind has visited upon himself all throughout our checkered history" (review).
The Norwegian National Gallery notes that the "work has gained enormously in popularity, especially since World War II. Perhaps the existential fear here rendered by the artist has become more widespread in recent decades?"
They, like Meyer, quote Munch's diary entry for January 22, 1982:
"I was walking along the road with two friends.
The sun was setting.
I felt a breath of melancholy -
Suddenly the sky turned blood-red.
I stopped, and leaned against the railing, deathly tired -
looking out across the flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword
over the blue-black fjord and town.
My friends walked on - I stood there, trembling with fear.
And I sensed a great, infinite scream pass through nature."
(Article at a site by Museumnet Norway.)
One of the bravest people I've read wrote in the early '90s -- I shall introduce her later -- that "Munch, hospitalised on several occasions for his psychiatric illness, remarked: 'A German once said to me: "But you could rid yourself of many of your troubles." To which I replied: "They are part of me and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and it would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings".' This is a common concern."
A common concern, indeed. And one which -- fortunately to a far lesser degree -- I long shared, at times destructively. Until one of the wiser mind-doctors I've consulted on occasion, told me that I was unlucky, or lucky, enough to be "cyclothymic".
I had almost no idea what cyclothymia was. For me, there simply was a jumble of "things that needed sorting out": the "highs" and the "lows"; a quite unreasonable sensitivity to the weather and even phases of the moon and the tides; periods of great creativity and others where even on the most glorious of days, I felt shrouded in my own dark night of the soul, a place where F. Scott Fitzgerald said "it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day" (thanks to the Sprezzatura weblog for reminding where that one came from.)
These were among "symptoms", I swiftly learned, of cyclothymia, which gets a more clinical definition at Mental-Health-Matters. At an interesting 'Depression and Bipolar Web' created by a writer and journalist named John McManamy, who has battled "bipolar disorder" himself, others have stepped forward to contribute their own experiences (scroll down for the comments).
Somebody else to address the disease is Dr Robert Hsiung, associate professor of clinical psychology at the University of Chicago, who maintains 'Psycho-Babble' (and calls himself Dr. Bob). Times were that I was as confused as "andrewb", who once left queries there about mood stabilisers and got a host of responses.
For me, no treatment could really begin until I gave up the booze, which I did six years ago (with more help from my employer than ever I'd have imagined). Then came the psychiatric sessions and the drugs, in doses which have come down quite considerably since, coupled with a diagnosis of seasonal affective disorder and starting to tackle that too!
Well, I still have my bad days, like everybody else, though they're not the horror they used to be. One of my first girlfriends used to spend hers in bed, simple as that, and re-emerge when the black bout was over. I still know enough people who do something similar to be writing this post partly for them.
As for the "nature or nurture debate" currently being revisited (that recent article by geneticist Dr Kevin Davies comes from NOVA Online), when I think I've got problems, I wish there was more I could do for a close relative whose "uppers" and "downers" come in four-monthly cycles which have proved singularly hard to deal with.
Yesterday was a bad day, triggered by a range of things from a minor tummy bug I'd been nursing for a week to an overdose of fatigue and a sudden weather shift to bleak and grey. The day itself was a "write-off", left me uncommunicative, lethargic, depressed and unable to raise much interest in anything apart from a half-hearted bid to learn a bit more about HTML.
But it passed. It's gone.
And most important, I knew life was going to brighten up.
For one of the most debilitating features of "manic depression" and even the milder variants of such disorders is the fear when you're down that you are going to stay down, the loss of self-confidence and sense of powerless, the feeling that it's never going to end.
And when it does finally finish, the affective changes -- or mood swing -- can be so intense that in the elation of being "up", you forget what it was to be "down", as if it had been part of somebody else's life.
Far worse is a reluctance to talk about it and an inability to seek help, which can easily be disastrously misunderstood by the people closest to you. I've seen too many instances of this among families and in friendships to feel that it matters to write about it here.
Looking back on my years polarised in an uneasy mental "marriage of heaven and hell", I remember at least two things that long prevented me from doing anything about it. One was the fear of being considered an "invalid" or "nutcase" by workmates and by friends, written off as weak or "sick in the head". In fact, it wasn't like that at all. Once I faced up to my condition, one side-effect was pretty soon finding out who my friends really were. The other was the fear that tackling cyclothymia, even once I knew it for what it was, would cost me the creativity along with the "highs".
For more than two years, it did. I managed at work okay, but otherwise lost both the desire and ability to write, didn't even want to listen to music or read poetry. I felt dulled, the loser in a "conflict between reason and the imagination" (here admirably dealt with in a study of William Blake and Carl Jung).
 Of all the people who pulled me through, top of the list is that courageous woman: somebody I've never met.
Her name is Kay Redfield Jamison, the American clinical psychiatrist who has won a "genius award" for some pioneering work on mood disorders and helping people with them.
Kay Jamison knows a great deal about Blake, Byron and any number of artists who have been
'Touched With Fire'. This book on 'Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament' is a masterpiece, not only recognised as such by her peers, but immensely readable. It's one of the only books I can say changed my life; chancing on it was like having an intimate conversation with somebody who really understood where I was at.
Afterwards, I read Jamison's memoir, 'An Unquiet Mind', an equally astonishing achievement in which she recounts her own personal experience of manic depression. It's a very moving tale of the many battles she fought to save herself and take the treatment she feared, while bringing a new understanding of mental illness to her own profession.
Both books are tremendously helpful for anybody facing any form of bipolar disorder, whether they're living with it or know people who do.
This entry began with Munch and ends back in Norway. I've stumbled across a site strangely known as the Windsor Castle Online Archives.
Where on earth Windsor Castle comes into it, I have yet to discern. And in this surprising repository of "wisdom, wit and humour," I might have a hard time finding out.
There are more than 680 pages of it!
11:53:41 PM link 
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