A BRILLIANT MADNESS: Living with Manic-Depressive Illness by PATTY DUKE

Very informative, as well as biographical, with many resources listed at the end of the book.

I think there are a lot of people suffering from M-D (Manic-Depressive) Illness that do not get the help they need because of either ignorance or misdiagnosis.

Anna Marie Duke, known to the world as Patty Duke, has led an extraordinary journey with this illness.

I liked when Patty made a comment that people have “an unbelievable ability to deny” and that if we didn’t we all would go crazy! We do tend to live in denial at times.

Patty talked about having panic attacks as a young girl and claiming to herself that when she becomes nine they will stop and every year she claimed the same statement and then at forty-five, up jumps the devil and she is still having attacks! That comment about her continually claiming to stop doing things hit home for me! I'm sure we've all been there with some ungodly habit we want to quit. Unfortunately for Patty, MD was not a habit. She also mentioned the suicide attempts and discovers they were a classic cry for help and how she felt as though there were demons inside of her making her do all those crazy things!

She talks about the things that happened in her life that were triggers of her manias such as not being able to appease her mother while dressing her to attend the Emmy Award show, being pregnant and unmarried and losing a close person who died. All these things happened to Patty around the same time.

Patty talks about the shame felt being manic-depressive, the guilt at how she made people feel and the stigma that is placed on people once its learned they have manic-depressive illness.

Patty’s mother thought she killed her mother when her sister opened the door for her. This was probably the key that triggered her manias.

When Patty did the movie, Call Me Anna, it was to let people be aware that manic-depressive illness was fixable.

What I gleaned from reading this book:
When a person is going through their mania, they feel as though there are no consequences to anything they may do – and the mania can be as minute as having a box for each earring or being sexually promiscuous.

At least two to three million Americans suffer from Manic-depressive disorder.

Families suffer because of the abuse they receive from the MD person.

The National Mental Health Association notes that 43% of Americans believe that depression is a personal or emotional weakness and not a disease.
Manic-depressive illness is often misdiagnosed by doctors. Thus patients receive treatments for illnesses that doctors think they have and the medication just doesn’t work.

There really needs to be a study of the persons family history. Genetics, loss and turmoil – lots – make a ripe combination for classic manic-depression.

Manic-depressive illness runs in families. Its encoded in the genes (a genetic tendency toward temperamental instability). The relationship between environment and genetic is what allows the disease to flourish.

When manic-depressives are in their manias, they often feel this is their most creative time. If they need medication, there is a tendency to not want to take it because they feel they will lose that creativity. They like their manias.

I would like to point out that the doctors who gave their input in this book do stress throughout the book that some people tend to be moody and have high-sustained energy but are not manic-depressive. Not everyone with mood swings are MD. A person should only be diagnosed as MD when their family history has been considered, mood swings are cyclical and this interferes with their jobs, families and they have thoughts of suicide.

Some very creative people were manic-depressive: Virginia Woolf, Vincent Van Gogh, George Frederic Handel, Robert Schumann, Edgar Allen Poe, just to name a few.