In your book, you say you experienced depression when you were a child and had manic episodes in college. Yet you say you were first diagnosed with bipolar disorder at age 49. Why did it take so long?
JOHN MCMAMANY: Who wants to admit they’re crazy? I kept telling myself I was normal, but my mind had other ideas. When I finally did see a psychiatrist during a suicidal depression, he misdiagnosed me with clinical depression. After all, I didn’t look like the type who danced on tables.
And this happens all the time?
JOHN MCMANAMY: Fortunately for me, my psychiatrist caught his mistake fast and got me the right diagnosis and on the right meds. But between our natural state of denial and our ignorance in not knowing what has hit us, and our doctors often failing to pick up the obvious, we are often talking a period of a decade between when we first notice things not being right and seeking help, and a decade again for many people in finally getting the right diagnosis.
That’s amazing. Are there any studies on that?
JOHN MCMANAMY: Yes, quite a few. And the people who are at special risk are those with the less obvious symptoms, people who appear depressed all the time, but may cycle imperceptibly up into short periods of feeling normal or better than normal. These are people right smack dab in the middle of the mood spectrum.
Tell me about the mood spectrum?
JOHN MCMANAMY: It’s a very old concept, but it’s now gaining new force. Think of a continuum with depression at one end and mania at the other. In the middle, depression and mania tend to converge and mix it up. These depressions tend to cycle while the manias have elements of depression. We tend to think of depression and bipolar disorder as two separate illnesses, but in my book I maintain that they are part of the same unifying and overlapping phenomenon that also includes psychosis, anxiety, and behavior.
Your book is one of the few that has depression and bipolar disorder in the title.
JOHN MCMANAMY: Precisely, because separating out the two is artificial. This is not my idea. The leading experts have been writing and discussing this for years. I’ve been reading their medical journal articles and talking to them. In my Newsletter and on my Web site, I have been writing about this in language patients can understand. I think I was the first one. Now the public is catching on. One book came out this year with one take on the spectrum, and my book has my take on it.
