Read Nothing Was the Same for Free Online

fabulous. The dean of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital toasted me with a glass of champagne to congratulate me on my “personal courage,” and colleagues from Trinity and University College Dublin were kind beyond reckoning. One of the consulting psychiatrists gave me a book of poems by Yeats, with a note that said simply, “Thank you.” Another sent a breathtaking bouquet of tangerine poppies and wild cornflowers to my room. After dinner and an easy flow of wine, two other colleagues, professors of psychiatry in Dublin, took me to the General Post Office, heart of the 1916 Easter Uprising, and pointed to the statue of the dying Cúchulainn. We thought you might like to see this, they said, laughing. He had it really hard.
    My private life was now exposed to all and sundry, and I found it hard to live with the new reality. As a child I had been quiet and invisible when troubled; as an adult, I had hidden my mental illness behind an elaborate construction of laughter and work and dissembling. Now, my mind and heart and their respective pathologies were brightly lit on a page, behind a lectern, on a television screen. Yet, despite this, it felt good to be honest, to be a part of the community I until recently had kept to the edges of. I was no longer just a re-searcher and a clinician answering questions about diagnosis and treatment; I could talk of my own madness and fears, feel not so distant, not so hypocritical.
    I was overwhelmed by the many thousands of letters I received in response to the publication of An Unquiet Mind . Most were generous; many were disturbing. Religious diatribes were common. I received hundreds of letters from fundamentalist Christians berating me for turning my back on God and abandoning my Christian faith, which I had not been aware I had or had not done. Others thought my illness just deserts for not having truly accepted the Lord Jesus Christ into my heart, or for not having prayed often or sincerely enough. I had left my mind open to Satan, and he had entered in. Madness and despair were precisely what I deserved and would have in this world and in the next. I should expect to burn throughout eternity. I got more than a taste of the intolerance and hatred religious extremity harbors toward those with mental illness; it was unpleasant and frightening.
    I was taken aback by the medieval quality of some of the beliefs held, modern incarnations of demons and possession, and by the viciousness of the attacks. One woman, who included a prayer card with excerpts from the Bible, wrote that it was a good thing I hadn’t had children as I had at least “spared the world of one more crazy manic-depressive.” There were several variations on this theme. “You are clearly unaware of the pain and suffering you and other manic-depressives cause,” wrote one person. “How could you have even considered having children, bringing another psychotic into existence?”
    There is a large and politically powerful contingent that is virulently opposed to the use of any kind of medication to treat psychiatric illnesses; they weighed in often and with frightening vehemence. Individuals who enjoyed their manias or regarded their ecstatic psychoses as a gift castigated me for colluding with the medical establishment by recommending medication. Others, a smaller group, felt I had written with too much affection about my manias.
    Some people questioned whether my psychotic experiences were not in fact perfectly sane, simply visionary states or another, more enlightened form of consciousness. A trip I had taken to Saturn during one of my manic episodes and that I had described in my book seemed to me, when compos mentis , quite clearly psychotic. I soon found I was a piker when it came to inter-galactic travel . Scores described their trips to Mars and Saturn and star clusters far beyond. Some regarded their planetary voyaging as a manifestation of illness, others as a useful extension of their usual mental lives. One