The intensity of Manic experience

 

Heavy Light is the story of a mental breakdown, a journey through mania, psychosis, and treatment in a psychiatric hospital, and onwards to release, recovery and healing.

Heavy Light deal with a lifetime of ups and downs, from hypomania in the Alps to a complete breakdown and a locked ward in Wakefield, explaining how the mind loses touch with reality, how we fall apart, and how we can be healed – or not- by treatment. The intensity of manic experience, as well as peril, strangeness, a shot through with the love, kindness, humour, and care for those who deal with someone who becomes dangerously ill. Heavy Light’s beauty, power, and compassion   

Elavil known as Amitriptyline was launched by Merck, an American drug company in 1966 which is still prescribed today for physical pain.

With the coronavirus pandemic, clinical reality depression already started leaking through in the trauma of survivors, unresolved grief for those who died alone, in gnawing anxiety among the young, whose melancholy touches body, mind, sex, study, diet, and landscape.

During the lockdown, while previously undepressed have begun to get an inkling of common symptoms, insomnia, agoraphobic withdrawal, rumination, and brain fog.

Horatio Clare’s  Heavy Light illuminates a fundamental part of human experience through beauty, power, compassion, and  takes us through an extravagant bout of bipolar bewilderment and a search for treatment outside lithium and various antipsychotics.  Clare’s personal journey through society, psychiatry, and psychotherapy, and seeks an understanding of a widespread crisis, which shame and fear have tended to conceal. Clare’s madness involved illegal drugs, infidelity, deliberately crashing his car, and believing himself married to Kylie Minogue. Clare ends up being hospitalised under the Mental Health Act.

Heavy Light includes first the patients who have been sectioned alongside him, and then the wider community of the mentally unwell in Britain today.  Clare’s argument not only against chemical answers to his own illness but also against the hast way individuals are labelled with diagnostic categories.

Heavy Light: A Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing by Horatio Clare, Chatto & Windus, £16.99, 352 pages.