Mania and Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong by Jerry Clark & Ed Palattella

Author:Jerry Clark & Ed Palattella
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781442260085
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

• 9 • Flight of Ideas

The Burdens of Bipolar Disorder

They were linked from the beginning, from Hippocrates on: black bile and yellow bile, depression and mania. An overabundance of black bile led to melancholy or depression—the mental imbalance that, starting in antiquity, dominated all others. But too much yellow bile created a mental imbalance that Hippocrates, Galen, and their contemporaries considered serious and debilitating in its own right—mania, another form of madness. The two humors, though separate, often seemed to combine. Astute observers noted how depression often followed mania—derived from the Greek menos, for spirit—and how mania often followed depression, in varying degrees of intensity. “Medical conceptions of mania and depression are as old as secular medicine itself,” according to one comprehensive history of the condition. “From ancient times to the present, an extraordinary consistency characterizes descriptions of these conditions. Few maladies in medical history have been represented with such unvarying language.”1 The two complex maladies—depression and mania—could remain separate but also become fused in a distinct disease: manic-depressive illness, now commonly known as bipolar disorder, which, along with schizophrenia, represents one of the earliest known mental illnesses.

About 1.9 million Americans are known to suffer a form of manic-depressive illness, or about 2.6 percent of the adult population in the United States; the average age of onset is twenty-five years old.2 The prevalence is higher among those in prison, or those who have engaged in criminal behavior—such as Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong.3 Though she often displayed behavior that trended much more toward the manic than the depressive, the cyclical nature of her illness was apparent, especially to her. She diagnosed herself as manic depressive.

“I am a functioning bipolar,” Diehl-Armstrong once said. “If you can get along in a state prison with the type of deviates they have here—if you can get along, you are maintaining your mood pretty well.”4 Several months later, also from prison, she said: “I am also a unique bipolar person. I am a rapid cycler with mixed states. They wanted to put me in a textbook. You can be manic and depressive at the same time. I don’t like any of these labels. I am a unique person.”5

Diehl-Armstrong, as frequently is the case, is correct in her analysis. She was a unique person, in the sense that manic-depressive illness affects each person differently. It is a disease that melds with each person’s personality traits and magnifies them. Manic-depressive illness exhibits general symptoms that are consistent from person to person. But, on an individual level:

Manic-depression is an equal opportunity disease: It may affect those whose underlying personality is shy or outgoing, altruistic or narcissistic, responsible or spoiled, kind or cruel. The symptoms of mania and depression interdigitate with the person’s underlying personality to create a unique medley that differs not only from person to person but even from day to day within a single person as the disease process evolves. It is this interaction of disease symptoms with underlying personality that makes manic-depressive illness so difficult to comprehend for most people.

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