After the Fire Goes Out: Writing before and after Treatment for an Affective Disorder

Abstract

For “Lise”, “publishing this under my own name is too great a risk for an early career academic, so I have chosen to use a pseudonym; although I hope this essay will help others living and writing with depression and bipolar disorder, what motivated me was the opportunity to write about both the nadir of my struggle and the way my disease continues to impact my life after treatment. I am beginning to make sense of how being bipolar shapes my life”. In the quiet rush of joy that is hypomania, Lise feels “like an open faucet, words pouring out… I remember things from years ago with great clarity … . I take in everything”. But a single experience of true mania — of psychosis — prompted this writer to seek treatment, with diverse implications for her craft.