A couple of months ago on a routine visit to my psychiatrist I confessed to screaming at Mark in the Metro. “Perhaps he was being annoying?” she asked. “Yes,” I answered, “he was being deliberately hateful and provocative. But there are much better ways to handle that than shrieking at someone in the Metro.” And I listed some. She prescribed me a mood stabilizer, meaning that my freakish temper tantrums have been reinterpreted as irritable mania - the kind that gets worse with PMS (I hadn’t known that) - and hoisting me up onto the bipolar bandwagon.

Here I am being written up in the New York Times as a wannabee! Caveat: the author has a too-narrow conception of mania as being fun, creative and productive. Mania can also express itself as irritability, which is none of the above. So psychopharmacologists who see mania everywhere are not just killjoys.

http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/health/features/n_9986/

[originally transmitted by e-mail March 10, 2004]

Have they no shame? Urging us on to burnout to prove our greatness?

Or perhaps it’s just one of those trendy defiant bi-polar “I don’t need meds” statements. Though I’ve never felt that Corporate Communications followed the mental health care fashions that closely.

—–Original Message—–
From: Corporate Communications
Sent: March 8, 2004 10:11 AM

THOUGHT OF THE DAY:
“Great men are meteors designed to burn so that earth may be lighted.” -Napoleon Bonaparte

[originally transmitted by e-mail March 10, 2004]