PREVENTING EPISODES WITH INSIGHT
6 NINJA SKILLS FOR THE MENTALLY CHILL
SUICIDE, PSYCH WARDS, AND OTHER DOWNERS
GETTING BACK ON YOUR FEET AFTER MANIA OR DEPRESSION
DEALING WITH FRIENDS AND FAMILY
10 HIPPIE SHIT THAT ACTUALLY WORKS
HERBS, WILDERNESS TIME, AND OTHER WAYS TO HELP YOURSELF
CONCLUSION: GIFTS FROM THE JUNGLE
INTRODUCTION TO THE 2017 EDITION
When my publisher contacted me about doing a second edition of this book, I felt a little bit like a punk musician being asked to go on a promotional tour for a rerelease of an album she'd recorded when she was still playing reggae at bar mitzvahs: “I can't put on those old clothes and go sing those old songs—I'm a different person now! It would be a lie—a reggae-flavored act of deception!” But the more I thought about it, the more I came around to the idea. What if I didn't have to wear a dreadlock wig and play the same four chords on my old synthesizer? What if I could play the tour as myself—a wizened thirty-year old with slightly different insights and ideas than the fresh-faced youth I was back then? What if, rather than pretending the intervening seven years hadn't happened, I used my experiences and insights to make the original act way better than it had been before?
That's when I started to get really excited.
I wrote the first edition of Welcome to the Jungle when I was twenty-three. At the time, I was less than two years out of college, living with roommates and just starting out as a writer. Bipolar was very much at the forefront of my mind, since I had only been diagnosed a few years before. My imagination was completely enchanted by the idea of being mentally ill—a status that seemed both crippling and darkly glamorous (all my favorite writers and musicians were manic-depressive; now I was in the club, and I had to admit it felt a little bit cool.)
Since then, my thinking on what we call mental illness has evolved quite a bit. I have had a lot more time to observe myself; to see for myself whether my own lived experience matched up with the bipolar prophecy read out by the doctor (“Thou shalt have manic episodes and depressive episodes of ever-increasing intensity! Thou shalt never live another day without meds!”) and to realize the many ways in which it very strongly diverges. It has been a priority for me in this revised edition to emphasize the many, many paths that people diagnosed with mental illness can take in life. Every person is different, and this is just as true for people with a mental illness diagnosis as for people without.
Over the years, I've also grown more and more uncomfortable with the way our medical system pathologizes human experience. Not all weeping is depression; not all dancing is mania—yet if you take the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders too seriously, you just might start to believe that, relegating all sorts of important and meaningful aspects of life to the category of “I'm just bipolar and need my meds adjusted.” To tell you the truth, it's been years since I've even thought of myself as being “bipolar.” I am not “bipolar”; I am human. (Does that disqualify me from writing this book? Or am I more qualified than before? I hope you will agree that it is the latter.)
With that in mind, this new edition has a greater focus on the human, not the diagnosis: the ways in which each person can find his or her own way through the extreme emotional states and intense experiences that we are calling “bipolar”—whether that means medication or meditation, psychiatrists or vision quests, good sleep or good all-night dancing, or a little bit of everything.
Sincerely, Hilary
INTRODUCTION TO THE 2010 EDITION
This is a book about bipolar disorder. Or if you're a free spirit or an R. D. Laing enthusiast who doesn't believe in a pathological explanation of your extreme mood states, it's a book about living with the highs and lows everyone else in North America is calling “bipolar disorder” (the punks!). I'm supposed to use this introduction to tell you my personal story about having bipolar, but that can wait.
Right now I've got a hankering to write about shin splints.
I got shin splints when I was thirteen. They hurt. My Anglophilic boarding school made everyone participate in enforced jaunty after-school sports (and, every spring, supposedly jaunty sniper drills on the lawn). After a single week on the cross-country running team, jogging along behind the meaty-calved senior boys, my shins started to feel weird. Little shoots of pain sprang up each time my shoes hit the pavement. It really hurt, but I winced and kept running. If I ignored the problem, it would probably fix itself. Four practices went by. I limped along. During the fifth practice the coach (of whom I was terrified) rode up behind me on a bicycle and shouted, “Stop running! You're limping! Go to the infirmary!”
Confused and embarrassed, but relieved, I turned around and walked to the school physiotherapist's office, where a team of smokin' hot sports therapists treated me for shin splints. Going to physio was fun and cool: there were always tons of people there getting their ankles wrapped or their sprains ultrasounded, or just hanging out in the whirlpool drinking from sketchy-looking Nalgene bottles. The physiotherapists teased me about letting my shin splints get so bad without asking for help. I did the stretches and exercises, got a better pair of running shoes, and eventually started running again.
Total days of pain: less than five.
Social approval of shin splints: high.
Overall experience with shin-splints diagnosis and treatment: supercool!
Six years later, I was a junior at the University of British Columbia, majoring in English literature. No more sports, no more sniper drills. This was the West Coast, baby—poetry readings, pot, and rainy-night house parties. I lived in a funky old house in Kitsilano that had a rich history of student debauchery and was known to several generations of UBC students as the place to go for anything involving mint juleps and knife throwing. Six of us lived there, and it got loud.
In January of that year, I started having trouble sleeping. Writing it off to the constant noise and stimulation in the house, I didn't pay much attention. By February I couldn't sleep at all, and my mind was swimming in thoughts and rhymes. Box! Fox! Haha!
In lectures, I either scribbled furiously in the diary I carried with me everywhere, recording my urgent insights (“He was an ornithologist. He was bornithologist into it!”), or I stood up abruptly to leave partway through and weep in the bathroom or wander in the forest that surrounded the campus. At parties, I would give my phone number to several different guys, then panic and jog home through the night, all the way from East Van to Kitsilano. At my part-time job as a bagel-stand cashier, I would prop my ever-present diary over the cash register and worry about the people who