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To Madness and Back

© John McManamy

'Twenty-hour days were not uncommon. In the meantime my dress had become slightly eccentric ...'

This is the conclusion of five articles that chronicle my lifelong struggles with depression and mania:

Few of you have ever had the experience of waking up from a drunken stupor in a strange city in a strange country, jobless and friendless and nearly penniless. You don't really want to be sober, for aside from the unwelcome intrusion of reality, you also find your psyche playing host to the type of cold fusion nuclear reaction that demands instant release.

Rage, Goddess, sing the Rage - a line from Homer. The shrinks have no adequate description for it - agitated depression, dysphoric mania, a mixed state, mania and depression fused into an explosive kinetic ball of emotional kilotonnage, one that makes the very act of living totally unbearable. It was simply a matter of following through.

Meanwhile, as I lay sprawled on the floor of an apartment that I could ill afford to pay the rent on, it was a beautiful summer day in Melbourne, Australia. Outside my window the eucalyptus trees that lined my street created the impression of an urbanized Eden, while the kookaburras' shrill laughter in the distance sounded forth a Midsummer Night's Dreamscape of fairyland gaiety.

But the rumbling of the tramways around the corner represented my one-way ticket out this life, out of my private little hell. I only had to change trams maybe once or twice to put me within walking distance of the suspension bridge that spanned the harbor.

Only seven months before I had been on a plane to Melbourne bound for a bright new life. I had sent out my resume to the major Australian newspapers and business magazines, and four editors had made me an offer. Oddly enough, I snapped at the one that offered the least money, lured by the idea of making my mark on a paper going through the kind of changes I revelled in.

This had been my modus operandi in New Zealand, taking over stodgy publications and giving them the old razzamatazz. I had done this on a law journal, an accountant's journal, a finance journal, and the business pages of a national Sunday newspaper. My average tenure lasted about a year. My longest stay was three years. On my last job, they integrated the Sunday paper into the daily one, and I had been left out in the cold. Looking back, my downsizing only served to delay my ultimate crash and burn.

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