Modern Madness

August 1, 2020
A lawyer and mental health advocate describes recent skirmishes in her decadeslong battle with bipolar disorder and offers advice on managing the condition. After two memoirs, Cheney offers 65 swiftly moving personal essays that suggest the rapid cycling through moods that her disorder causes. Her reflections recap and update the story of the disasters she described in Manic and The Dark Side of Innocence: "serious run-ins with the law, immense amounts of alcohol, multiple suicide attempts, demolished relationships, financial ruin (mania's costly gift)," and, eventually, a mental hospital where she spent "three unimaginably long years and multiple rounds of electroshock therapy." The author describes how she has learned to manage her condition with therapy and medication, especially so-called "atypical anti-psychotics," along with tactics of her own devising. To subdue problems like mania-induced lust, she carries a list of "ten sacred rules" to follow when a manic episode nears, the first of which is: "Don't change into something sexier. Wear granny panties and flats." Vivid as such material is, the impact is undercut by the disjointed, nonchronological structure of the book. A dozen or so pages after feeling enraged by the "cluelessness" of an internist who questioned whether she needed all of her medicines, Cheney tries in another essay to go off an antidepressant. Was the doctor right? Were the incidents related? The author doesn't say. She also blurs the line between reminiscence, self-help, and advocacy as she explores topics such as hypomania and mental health stigmas in brief sections that serve up, mostly uncritically, the kind of health boilerplate found on websites for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other agencies. Cheney can't have anticipated the criticism the CDC has faced during the pandemic, but her too-easy acceptance of medical-establishment orthodoxies is at odds with the original voice heard elsewhere in the book. The author includes a helpful resource list. Old and new ideas commingle as a writer comes to terms with her bipolar disorder.

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August 1, 2020
Once again, Jones (Manic, 2008; The Dark Side of Innocence: Growing Up Bipolar, 2011) mines her life and shares her mental health struggles. Ever since her January 2008 New York Times essay, Modern Love, about bipolar dating, the former lawyer to stars like Michael Jackson has tried to help others with mental health disorders and to educate normies. For example, she notes that Robin Williams' 2014 death led to copycat suicides and that Norway doesn't report suicides at all to avoid harmful consequences. She addresses the fact that one in five Americans who take psychiatric drugs, most often antidepressants, can suffer from serotonin discontinuation syndrome (essentially, withdrawal) if they stop taking their medicine or reduce their dose. As many as half of people with bipolar disorder will attempt suicide, so it's important that Cheney includes contact information for such places as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and the National Alliance on Mental Health. Cheney's well-written resource is deepened with inspiring quotes like Ralph Waldo Emerson's To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)