Mother's not herself today

Another one of those nauseatingly narcissistic Facebook things

Yet another actual FB message, echoing three or four hundred I have read lately, tossed off to casually announce one's wild popularity as a human being, and thus dragging everyone else's mood down as they realize what pariahs they are:

"I've caught up on all my emails. I shall now bask in this small accomplishment for the thirty seconds it will last."

Translation: "OMG, I just have SO many friends! SO many people love me that they SWARM my inbox with messages of worshipful adulation. I just can't keep up with it all, and if I take a breath for 30 seconds, I am simply inundated. Please! Please, all my slavering sycophants. Give me a chance here! Give me a second to breathe! Curb your adulation for a couple of minutes, and I promise to favor you with a one- or two- word response (one word for every 500 of yours). What can I say? You are truly my fans, and you are precious to me. Now KNOCK IT OFF."

Howdy, ma'am

Now, now, NOW!

(From a short-lived mid-00s site called ABSURDITO (http://absurdito.blogspot.ca/2004/06/birds-schoolchildren-song.html)  comes this startling revelation about the most annoying song I've ever heard. Then some comments. Then some more.)

'The Birds' schoolchildren song

For years I've wondered exactly what the words are to the song sung by the children in that famous scene in Alfred Hitchcock's film, The Birds when Tippi Hedren arrives at the Bodega Bay School and sits outside smoking a cigarette while the birds gather in the schoolyard behind her (while the kids sing the song inside the schoolhouse). 

Finally, today, I've found the actual lyrics as sung in the film. Other lyrics I've found on the internet were shorter. It turns out that The Birds screenwriter Evan Hunter extended the song with new lyrics (and has been receiving royalties ever since!). 

I took these lyrics from the actual shooting script of the film, which can be found at: http://www.screentalk.biz/hitchcock.htm 
The following begins with the script's description of the action, and then I omit all other scene descriptions and present only the song's words: 

EXT. BODEGA BAY – DAY – LONG SHOT

Melanie’s car turns and goes up School Road.

EXT. SCHOOL – DAY – MED. SHOT

Closer shot of the car coming to a stop outside school.
Inside the school, we HEAR the children SINGING.

CHILDREN (O.S.)

I married my wife in the month of June. Ristle-tee, rostle-tee, Mo, mo mo!

…

I carried her off in a silver spoon. Ristle-tee, rostle-tee, hey bombosity, knickety-knackety, retro-quo-quality, willoby-wallaby, Mo, mo, mo!

…

She combed her hair but once a year. Ristle-tee, rostle-tee, Mo, mo, mo! 
With every rake, she shed a tear. Ristle-tee, rostle-tee, hey bombosity, knickety-knackety, retro-quo-quality, willoby-wallaby, Mo, mo, mo!

…

She swept the floor but once a year. Ristle-tee, rostle-tee, Mo, mo, mo!

She swore her broom was much too dear. Ristle-tee, rostle-tee, hey bombosity, knickety-knackety, retro-quo-quality, willoby-wallaby, Mo, mo, mo!

…

She churned the butter in Dad’s old boot. Ristle-tee, rostle-tee, Mo, mo, mo!

And for a dasher she used her foot. Ristle-tee, rostle-tee, hey bombosity, knickety-knackety, retro-quo-quality, willoby-wallaby, Mo, mo, mo!

…

The butter came out a grizzle-y-grey. Ristle-tee, rostle-tee, Mo, mo, mo! 
The cheese took legs and ran away! Ristle-tee, rostle-tee, hey bombosity, knickety-knackety, retro-quo-quality, willoby-wallaby, Mo, mo, mo!

…

I brought my wife a horse one day. Ristle-tee, rostle-tee, Mo, mo, mo! She let the critter get away. Ristle-tee, rostle-tee, hey bombosity, knickety-knackety, retro-quo-quality, willoby-wallaby, Mo, mo, mo!

…

I asked my wife to wash the floor. Ristle-tee, rostle-tee, Mo, mo, mo! She gave me my hat and showed me the door! Ristle-tee, rostle-tee, hey bombosity, knickety-knackety, retro-quo-quality, (the song slows – it is near the end) willoby-wallaby, Mmmmmmmo, Mmmmmmmo, MO!

Though the above is in the shooting script for the film, in the film the children shuffle around the lines to the song and change a few words. The changed words sound like they changed the unrhythmic "hey bombosity" to "hey donny dostle-tee". Also, "I carried her off in a silver spoon" appears to have changed to "I brought her off by the light of the moon." And "Mo, mo, mo!" sure sounds more like, "Now, now, now!" 

Finally, I *SWEAR* that, instead of the word "butter" (in the first stanza) the kids sing "poison"!! This would certainly be keeping with Hitchcock's macabre humor. So, I've taken the liberty to make these changes to the updated version below. 

So here are the above lyrics modified as sung in the film:

The poison it came out a grizzle-y-grey. Ristle-tee, rostle-tee, Now, now, now! 

The cheese it took legs and ran away! Ristle-tee, rostle-tee, hey donny dostle-tee, knickety-knackety, retro-quo-quality, willoby-wallaby, Now, now, now!

She let the critter get away. Ristle-tee, rostle-tee, hey donny dostle-tee, knickety-knackety, retro-quo-quality, willoby-wallaby, Now, now, now!

I asked my wife to wash the floor. Ristle-tee, rostle-tee, Now, now, now! 
She gave me my hat and she showed me the door! Ristle-tee, rostle-tee, hey donny dostle-tee, knickety-knackety, retro-quo-quality, Now, now, now!

I married my wife in the month of June. Ristle-tee, rostle-tee, Now, now, now!

I brought her off by the light of the moon. Ristle-tee, rostle-tee, hey donny dostle-tee, knickety-knackety, retro-quo-quality, willoby-wallaby, Now, now, now!

She combed her hair but once a year. Ristle-tee, rostle-tee, hey donny dostle-tee, knickety-knackety, retro-quo-quality, willoby-wallaby, Now, now, now!

Blogger's observations. The Birds is one of my favorite Hitchcock films (the other one being Psycho, which I'll have to devote a whole post to), mainly for the cheap thrills. You don't have to figure anything out in this movie. There is no intrigue; there are no plot twists; indeed, there is no plot. The birds come; they see; they conquer. Based on a short story (Daphne du Maurier?) which is in turn based on a true incident, nothing is ever explained here, much as in life. Terror and confusion hopelessly intermingle to bring a formerly happy and innocent community to its knees.

The song the schoolchildren endlessly sing (which drives me bananas with its nonsensical monotony) reminds me a lot of a song we "took", or rather sang, in about Grade 5. It was bad, but not quite THIS bad. It was called The Wee Cooper o' Fife (and doesn't that sound more Irish than Scottish?), and here is the part I can remember, spelled phonetically:

There was a wee cooper who lived in Fife
Nickety-nackety noo, noo, noo
And he has taken a comely wife
Hey willie-wallacky, hoo John Dougal a rain co-rushity roo roo roo.

Oh she wadna bake and she wadna brew
Nickety-nackety noo, noo, noo
For the spoilin' o' her comely hue
Hey willie-wallacky, etc.

Nobody knew what it meant. Nobody explained anything to kids in those days (or now, probably). This was right around the time of the Canadian Centennial, when we had to learn all sorts of daft folk songs that were supposed to be Canadian. Canadian meant Scottish, English and Irish. So we didn't know what a cooper was (a barrel-maker, it turns out), where Fife is (? Isn't that something you blow into?), what a comely hue was supposed to be, and what all that other shit meant, if it meant anything at all.

Though I thought we had every Burl Ives recording ever bleated, we didn't have a recording of him singing "that song". I've dug up the lyrics, and it's definitely the same one:

She wouldna wash, nor she wouldna wring (nickety-nackety, etc. etc. etc.)
For the spoilin' o' her gowden ring
She wouldna card, nor she wouldna spin
For the shamin' o' her gentle kin

So the wee cooper went to his woodpack
And laid a sheepskin on his wife's back
"Now, I wouldna thrash ye for your gentle kin,
But I would thrash me ain sheepskin."

"Oh, I will bake and I will brew,
And nae mair think o' my comely hue!
"And I will wash and I will wring,
And nae mair think o' my gowden ring!

"And I will card and I will spin
And nae mair think o' my gentle kin!"
So ye what has gotten a gentle wife,
Just ye send for the wee cooper o' Fife!

Charming, isn't it? This song (which may or may not be a somewhat simplified version of the song in The Birds) is all about domestic violence and a wife cowed into submission by her husband's threats of physical harm. Good, clean, wholesome fun.

This is the only Burl Ives version I could find on YouTube. WARNING: may be hazardous to your mental health if you loathe marionettes as much as I do. But for some reason, when I was a kid, they were everywhere, from the execrable Howdy Doody to Supercar, one of the better action-adventure series of the '60s. Except for that goddamn chimp.

ADDENDUM. Why I hated that goddamn chimp from Supercar, followed by an image of his death mask.

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16 basic principles of mass indoctrination

(From a blog called Aspie Savant)

1. Start while they’re young.

2. Create the illusion of political freedom.

3. Use simplistic stereotypes to sway public opinion.

4. Mix facts with lies.

5. A big lie is more convincing than a small lie.

6. Give the masses “bread and circuses” to keep them well-fed and distracted.

7. Simplify complex issues by portraying them as dichotomies. Eliminate nuance.

8. Spread propaganda by all means possible.

9. Ostracize dissident voices through ridicule or defamation.

10. Faith in the correctness of a religion or ideology is more powerful than force.

11. Manipulate history records to support your religion or ideology.

12. Control different sides of the same debate and you control the outcome.

13. The masses are less swayed by reason than by stirring their emotions.

14. Drive the opposition in a corner. When they fight back, act like a victim.

15. Label all non-conformistic behavior as pathological and promote “cures” for them.

16. Use rituals and mass events to keep people occupied and strengthen their faith.

(For more of this kind of thing, see Aspie Savant)

Blogarification: This is a typical internettish-Facebooky-Twitterish thingammy that goes all over the place and has everyone all exercised. It has some truth in it, but suffers from the same kind of heavy-handed, what? Fist-pounding, or whatever-it-is, that it decries. But it still makes some interesting, nay, important points.

The small drowned child has been a universally-embraced image which is supposed to spur humanity on to ever-greater heights of awareness and compassion in the refugee crisis, but it won't. When it comes to refugees and the chaos they could create in the developed world, we ain't seen nothing yet. Climate change is going to create unfathomable numbers of displaced peoples, perhaps in the millions, not just because their home countries are uninhabitable but because the food is going to run out. When the food runs out, humanity is not at its best and has been known to rip out the throats of its competitors. That's really the only reason homo sapiens exists.

THEN we'll see how much good a sensationalistic and tasteless photo of a drowned kid will do.

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Pop-Tarts machine

Rubber baby buggy bumpers

Some cool Harold Lloyd movie titles

Death of a hero

Today is World Suicide Prevention Day, though almost nobody knows about it or pays much attention. For the most part, the best sufferers of mental illness can hope for is pity.

But there is another way, something that might just break through public indifference and scorn, and that is the power of story. This piece ran in the Saint John Telegraph-Journal in 2005. It mourns the death by suicide of my dear friend and comrade Glen Allen, an award-winning journalist and great human being who suffered deeply from the effects of bipolar disorder.

I will not say he "lost the battle" with this sometimes-nightmarish disorder because I think he won, in that he lived for over 60 years, loved and worked and married and had children and wrote and taught and travelled all over the world. Even in the midst of unbelievable pain, he was articulate and wrote with a grace I'll never approach. I'd like to share this article again, just as it went down ten years ago, when my grief was very fresh.

December is long and dark at the best of times, and this year the merriment of Christmas was dulled by a death. When I opened my daily paper to the obituary section, I saw a face that made me gasp, a face I had never actually seen but knew as well as my brother’s. I read the account of his death in disbelief, shocked but not completely surprised that my friend had frozen to death beside some railroad tracks in Toronto, full of pills, after wandering away from a psychiatric ward.

My friend was Glen Allen, newspaperman, Maclean’s correspondent, world traveller, insightful and witty writer, gentle, courageous (and sometimes lost) soul. What brought us together was some ferociously honest writing about alcoholism, and what held us together for years and years was a mutual struggle with various demons. He always wrote about them better than I did. Or so I always thought.

I never knew Glen in the usual sense. I never saw his face. I had heard his voice a number of times, most memorably when he read his Getting Sober and Staying Sober pieces on CBC Radio’s Morningside. I sensed straight-from-the-shoulder directness and convoluted complexity in one person. This man was in pain, and so eerily distanced from the pain that he could write about it in prose that shimmered and shocked and stung. His writer's mind was so alive and focussed as to be almost crystalline, whereas the rest of him seemed to be slouching towards oblivion.

Sometime during his short tenure on Morningside, I began to write to Glen Allen. This guy just had a magical way with words, and seemed like a genuine (and pain-ridden, and large-hearted) human soul. I just had to get in touch with him. I was delighted to get responses, brief at first, then longer and longer, and over time we developed a sort of relationship through the mail. This was in the days of real letters on paper, written by hand, and I always delighted in his vital and elegant script, even if it deteriorated pretty badly towards the end. Often he’d write on beautiful blank cards, and I have one in front of me now, gorgeous sprays of crimson and gold called Flowers for Lord Buddha.

I think my letters must have gone on and on. I could hardly help myself, in those days, since I had no idea what was wrong with me and why I could not settle myself the way everyone else seemed to. But Glen had the same square-peg syndrome, which in his case registered as endearing eccentricity. He had a black lady cat named Imelda (I can’t think of a better cat name, can you?); he was concerned about his future once, and consulted a psychic in the backwoods of New Brunswick; when asked to be a speaker at a meeting, he shared his “experience (long), strength (not much), and hope (I’m going to hang on if it kills me)”.

Ten years is a long time, ten birthdays, ten Easters, ten Christmases. What did we write about? I can barely bring myself to open the file folder that holds all his letters, preserved and precious to me. The stark end of his life has made it impossible But I know we wrote about recovery: from alcoholism (we were both afflicted, and though his sobriety was patchy at best, he genuinely loved AA and treated it with the greatest reverence in his writing), from our parents (both of us had grown up with oppressive, cuttingly sarcastic fathers who withheld affection unless our performance in life was perfect: meaning we were never loved at all), and the worst thing of all, depression, the thousand-pound rock that weighs on the sensitive soul and destroys pleasure and joy and love. Both of us had bench-pressed thousands of pounds over the years, and though he told me his official diagnosis was manic-depression, now rather slickly called "bipolar disorder", I did not realize we shared the same affliction until this past spring, when I experienced what is delicately referred to as an “episode”.

I thought then of Glen, wondered where he was, how he was doing. It wasn't the first time. Wasn't even the twentieth. We wrote to each other for an incredible ten years, while Glen pulled up stakes and moved again, and again, and again, afflicted with terminal restlessness, an attempt to outrun his own pain. But in 1996, I finally lost the thread. I tried and tried. I even e-mailed his brother Gene, but got no answer. The trail was cold, and I had to surrender him to fate or the angels.

When I read his obituary, accompanied by a picture of Glen looking like a mere boy, sweet and shy, someone who just called out to be loved, I was barely out of my own thrashing battle, still trying to figure out what the hell happened to me, how the genie had exploded out of the bottle and derailed my life. But I kept thinking: Glen would know. He'd know just what to say to me, he'd know how to spread balm very gently on the raw wound of my mind. Like a sherpa, he'd been there before me, braved the elements and somehow survived it all.

Until now. When I read of the way he died, frozen to death like a street person (those souls he so identified with and wrote about with such compassion), with no one to hold him as the life ebbed out of him, I wanted to scream at the injustice of it all: at the medical community's complete inability to help such a large-hearted, lavishly gifted human being; at the gap between Glen and his loved ones (there was no doubt he loved them, but something always got in the way), at the grim, fearful, love-deprived boyhood that left scars on him, and in him, that would never be healed.

I did take out the folder, and looked at his dear, graceful handwriting, but haven't read the letters yet. I had thought of writing a piece about him, a sort of tribute, but I knew no one would really get it. When I think of him, which is often, tears well up, and I just want my funny, sardonic, gentle, wounded, wonderful brother back.

There is a song from the 70s by a group called Bread that I keep hearing in my mind. It has a haunting lyric that is like an impressionist painting of Glen's life:

"For a love that wouldn't bloom,
For the hearts that never played in tune.
Like a lovely melody that everyone can sing,
Take away the words that rhyme, it doesn't mean a thing."

The words seem to make a melody of themselves: I think I knew his name. I never knew him, but I loved him just the same. Wish that I had found the way, and the reasons that would make him stay.

But he couldn't stay; the pain was too great, the loneliness had hollowed him out, and the demons that screamed inside his skull had to be silenced once and for all. Such a person, making an intentional exit, is often described as "finally being at peace".

I think it goes beyond that. I think he is everywhere. I know he hangs around here, a warm spot in the room, a kind of disembodied smile, and I don't want him to go.

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Lone Outrider: Glen Allen's private battle

Glen Allen remembered in his own words

Blogger's note. Tomorrow, September 10, is World Suicide Prevention Day, though it seems that almost nobody knows about it or pays it much mind. Certainly the internet has been virtually silent about it, while posting millions of responses to a video by an obnoxious blonde screaming about "fat shaming". Mental health shaming is an invisible, silent thing, though it registers on sufferers like an ice pick to the solar plexus. The reason no one mentions it is that it is considered unremarkable and even normal. It just does not register anywhere.

When I woke up today I remembered this piece. It was something I had seen before, reproduced on someone else's blog. I knew Glen Allen. We never met face-to-face, but we wrote to each other regularly for ten years while he went through storms that I can only imagine. How he functioned as well as he did, for as long as he did, is remarkable, a fact that is almost never taken into account with (and how I hate the term) the "mentally ill". 

After being out of touch for years, I learned Glen's fate in 2005, when I was at the apogee of my own storm: I opened my daily paper and saw his picture under the obituaries. Having just taken a massive overdose, he had wandered out of a psychiatric ward in Toronto and passed out beside the railroad tracks in sub-zero December. How people die says something about the way they lived, and it struck me as oddly apropos that he died like some of the street people he understood and loved so well. 

What I didn't know, because he never told me, is that he wasn't just a newspaper reporter but an award-winning print journalist for Maclean's Magazine, war correspondent, English teacher in China, volunteer in mental health services, producer for CBC's national radio show Morningside, and no doubt many other things he didn't think significant enough to mention. 

This piece is very long, but I run it here without edits. Without a doubt, it is the best piece on depression, bipolar disorder and mental illness in general that I have ever read, and it is typical of Glen that he generously shared it even while struggling with his own recovery. Even in the throes of a consuming illness, Glen Allen had a certain unmistakeable quality of grace.

(The following story appeared in the New Brunswick Reader on June 19.
1999, under the headline Angels of Madness. Glen Allen was found frozen
to death last week in Toronto.)

By Glen Allen

The anesthetist, head swathed in a surgeon's fez, plunges the needle in
a ready vein and leans over and says, "You'll smell the smell of garlic
and then you'll be out."

And out I am in this fourth of a series of eight shock treatments on
the psychiatric wing of the Saint John Regional Hospital. While I'm
unconscious, a nurse places two electrodes on my skull and the attending
psychiatrist flips a switch, sending a powerful current of electricity
into the addled spheres of my brain.

Odd as it may seem - odd because no one really knows why it works - I
awake feeling refreshed in the recovery room where I am asked my name,
the date, where I am. I not only answer the questions in rapid order but
I note the clarity of the vivid colours all around, the pleasant
ticking of a clock hung on the wall, the murmur of friendly voices. I am
climbing out of the pit of suicidal despair that sent me to the hospital -
the fifth stay in hospital in three provinces in two years - in the
first place. And for the first time in a long time, I feel healthy and I
tell myself that this is how other people, untroubled by the mania or
depression that has come out of the dark closet of my mind every decade
for the last 40 years, must feel most of the time.

Electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), as it is properly known, is the
treatment of last resort for some psychiatric afflictions, notably
depression, and I haven't experienced it for 44 years. A frightened and deeply
depressed boy of 15 - by far the worst time in my life - I was given a
series of treatments without the benefit of anesthesia and while I don't
remember much beyond that first rude shock I felt well for 10 years, I
left home and enjoyed a successful career in the construction industry
from the far North to California until this strange and cruel malady
caught up with me once again.

Manic depression, or bipolar disorder as it is now called in these days
of political correctness, touches the lives of one of every 100 New
Brunswickers. It is an often devastating malaise that can strike without
warning, rendering its victims subject, initially, to inexplicable
"highs" that can spin out of control. First comes "hypomania" - a time of
great busyness and well-being and then follows full-blown mania when the
afflicted persons will make great plans, sleep not at all, feel a sense
of grandiosity, spend wildly and travel widely.

It can also be a time of delusion or even hallucination (hearing,
seeing or smelling things that aren't there) marked by extreme irritation
with family or friends who cannot share this experience. This condition
leads the manic persons to believe that what they are doing is
absolutely correct. They may, as I have done in the past, write floridly mad
letters to everyone but the Queen simply because it seems necessary to
alert the world to some clear and present danger, again the right thing to
do.

But mania can go well beyond this epistolary extravagance. Earlier this
year, in the grip of mania and hospitalized in Montreal, I saw my
father - dead, lo these 35 years - in elevators and there was a constant
jabber of voices in my ear, one of them a basso profundo saying over and
over again with astonishing clarity in Chilean Spanish, "Los pobres son
dijes" (The poor are good). Prior to this, I nurtured the idea - the
same fevered idea I had had the year before - that I had to travel to
Northern Alberta's Peace River country to complete a novel my father had
written decades ago - one in which the heroine and her children seek to
make a new home there but never actually arrive. I had hitched a ride
with a trucker headed for Calgary. He insisted I leave his company
somewhere south of North Bay, Ont., and get psychiatric help. ("You're out
of it, man," I recall him saying as he reached over and opened the
passenger door.)

I made my way to Montreal where I ended up in St. Luc Hospital and
later a halfway house where a barrage of drugs including lithium
established a calmer state of mind. After two months of recuperation, I returned
to Saint John where my truly enlightened employer gave me yet another
chance to ply my trade as a reporter. But within weeks, mania had come
full circle: its sinister cousin, clinical depression had set in. I felt
a blackness of mood, a sense of dread and despair and a longing to end
my hopeless life I hadn't felt since an earlier suicide attempt and
once more entered the hospital where, this time, ECT was the indicated
treatment.

Looking back on it all now, I might have known something was amiss when
I was yet a small child. My father was off at war and my saintly
mother, I was convinced in my five-year-old mind, was a German spy. When that
war ended and the Cold War began, I was sure that the Soviet Union, our
latest enemy, would invade the leafy precincts of my Toronto
neighbourhood. I remember staring at the Disney decals on my bedroom wall and
believing that taken together they were a bizarre scroll of destiny: the
world would end in fire.

Shortly after that, my parents split up and I was seized with a sense
of power - perhaps my first "manic" episode - when I became their
go-between. Each would have me memorize messages for the other and when my
father - a man deeply hurt by the war - came to pick me up for Sunday
outings in his 1947 navy Pontiac, I would do my best to heal the breach,
subtly altering their second-hand messages so as to ensure that each
knew the other was loved and deeply missed. In hindsight, it was the wrong
course to take. They lived together in a stormy alcoholic marriage
until both died of cancer in their mid-fifties.

But once this feat of wishful thinking was accomplished, I fell into
the deepest of depressions, a malaise that was to last for years. Alone
in my room for days at a time, I wept incessantly and wished for
release. One desperate day, I cut across a wrist with a broken bottle and an
alert doctor in a hospital emergency ward recognized the act for what it
was, a cry for help, and recommended to my bewildered mother that my
mental state be assessed. My parents shared society's distaste for
anything that smacked of mental illness and had a deeply felt distrust of
mental-health practitioners. They had already taken me out of school, read
the angry and despairing poems I had fixed to my wall; they had watched
as I refused food and the attentions of my friends, but they were

reluctant to place me in the hands of the shrinks as if once there, there

would be no turning back. But there was no alternative: I was taken to

see the good Dr. Grant who clapped me in hospital and after rest and
conventional therapies of the day failed, suggested ECT.

And so it went. I would have eight or nine trouble-free years until the
monster reappeared and I would be swept up in the rising and falling
tide of mood. Indeed, in the sixties I spent time in a hospital in
Chicago and 10 years later in Montreal, I jumped in front of a moving bus. In
the mid-eighties, a full two years were blighted by bipolar illness.
That was a time of sheer terror and misadventure. Among other things, I
had concluded that the big banks were to blame for all of society's
ills. I hired a video camera crew and forayed into one of the major bank's
headquarters in downtown Montreal, shooting footage of executives at
their desks. I was also convinced at one point that the Mafia was after
me.

Then came last year and this - two botched trips out West, time in a
hospital in Thunder Bay, then Montreal and three stays in the facility in
Saint John, one of them in a coma following a suicide attempt.

All this time, all through these years I had been told by professionals
that I had to take medication - namely, lithium - to ward off the
depredations of an illness that is of the brain, not of the mind, an illness
that is largely due to faulty genes and biochemistry being grievously
out of whack.

But for years, especially when I felt well, I denied to myself and to
the world at large that I had bipolar disorder. I wanted badly to be
like other people, even given the fact that members of my immediate family
had been stricken in the same way resulting in hospitalizations and
suicide.

Instead of taking my pills, I would attempt to cope in other ways.
Sadly, until the bottom fell out of my world in 1984, I drank heavily, just
as my father had done before me. I also moved constantly. I always felt
better for a time when I changed location. I have lived and worked in
England, Italy, Algeria, three American states and seven Canadian
provinces. After I married, I trucked my little family around, bag and
baggage, as far afield as Chile and China.

.

But there were no cures, only palliatives. One of them - alcohol - was
ruinous. As for travel...well, as someone wiser once said, when you get
off the bus you're always there waiting for yourself. Depression, my
lone outrider, would inevitably close in just as a ship spotted as a tiny
smudge on the horizon inevitably comes to shore, looming larger than
life itself.

Manic depression is a mood disorder as opposed to schizophrenia, which
is a disorder of the thought process itself. In it, there is a
disruption of a person's normal emotional states, such as happiness or sadness.
The moods of manic depression include at one end, utter melancholy,
passivity and fatigue and thoughts of suicide and at the other, elation,
grandiosity, agitation and, when extreme, delusions and hallucinations.
Delusions can include grandiose beliefs: a person may think she or he
has special talents or is related to a special person. A manic might
also believe that he or she is the subject of whispers of friends and
strangers alike, or that Lloyd Robertson is sending special messages during
his newscast. Hallucinations are usually imagined sights or sounds.
Auditory hallucinations are more common (although all senses may be
affected) and may have a religious overtone, such as the voice of God or
angels and may sound like commands.

Most people go through many more bouts of depression than mania, though
to be considered "bipolar" a person must have gone through at least one
manic episode. For some, it is a chronic illness that becomes more
pronounced with age but a manic depressive typically goes through long
periods of remission in his or her life. A person may be relatively
symptom-free with only mild mood swings for years, then for any number of
reasons (the primary one being discontinuing prescribed medication) the
cycle returns.

There are manic depressives who experience only one cycle in their
lives and others in whom the illness disappears at an early age. But
complicating things is the fact that depression and mania can exist at the
same time. As writers Diane and Lisa Berger state in their excellent
primer on manic depression called We Heard the Angels of Madness, the term
"bipolar disorder" deceives because the mania and depression "do not
occur in even opposition. It is not like the North Pole and the South
Pole; instead, it more closely resembles two points on the equator.
They're side by side, sharing a border and overlapping.

Researchers don't yet have a definitive cause of manic depression but
they do know that it runs in families and that defective genes must, in
part, be at fault.

But all that said, why tell this tawdry story at all? I have lost all
appetite for the confessional and take no pleasure in this exercise. But
there are two points I would like to make in passing. One relates to
stigma. The mentally ill, however much society has changed in recent
years, are prey to an abundance of myth and misinformation that is, quite
simply, astonishing.

Victims of major mental illness - schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and
clinical depression - are still often shunned and tucked away, even
though their maladies, most experts would now agree, are physical in
nature, just like diabetes or heart disease. And the most serious of these
diseases, schizophrenia, has disabled many of the 300,000 Canadians
affected by it, many of them young people in their prime. They are our sons
and daughters, wives and husbands, our neighbours and we have all too
often tended to see them as a tribe apart, spoken of in whispers. They
are no more "violent" than the population at large and their illnesses
are, for the most part, episodic in nature. Most enjoy great islands -
even archipelagos - of calm and productivity between short-lived bouts
of illness. And they are much with us: one of five New Brunswickers, at
some point in their lives will, like me, go beyond the brink and need
the attentions of the mental-health-care system.

The other point worth making is that there is help out there. Each of
13 regions in the province has a community mental-health-care centre
staffed by a psychiatrist or two, nurses, social workers and
psychologists. There are problems: there is a dire shortage of child and adolescent
psychiatrists and public money is short indeed for the chronically ill.
But for the most part, the work of this corps of professionals is
largely unsung. While they may be too few for the demands placed upon them,
in my experience - a view confirmed recently by an Ontario study - New
Brunswick has one of the best mental health-care systems in the nation.

Meanwhile I have come through once again feel eminently sane. If the
demons come calling again it won't be for many years hence. I have hope,
I have met some interesting people along the way and am very glad to be
alive.

For these blessings I thank the God of my understanding. Without Him by
my side would I have been here to tell this sometimes sorry tale?

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