Why Some Hypomanic Patients Self Destruct

"I want to be hypomanic, this is who I really am." Such words are common to hear from bipolar patients or family members. They exalt the fires of their hypomanic moments; yet, you often see them trading stability for those flames: thousands of dollars wasted, relationships ruined, self-destruction under what seemed like a benevolent warmth. Why? Why do those people consume themselves in that inferno? To understand their behavior, we must suspend our lens and adopt theirs: the first step in understanding their behavior is to understand their experience. I hope to show one potential lens.

To see the second and third order effects of their condition: their sobs after destroying their relationship, the splurge of money that leaves them without rent, their consuming projects whose gravity is everything to them, are not a great help in understanding their life.

Bipolar patients themselves do not find it easy to reflect, write, or speak about their experience in the grips of hypomania, for the first effect of hypomania is the seizing of their entire being. The experience itself refuses to sit at a lower scale of being, something compartamentalizable, and instead rises to the highest. Thus, when the patient describes their experience, they struggle to speak in what we consider coherent: that pressured speech, that flight of thoughts, is not a symptom but their lived interior experience in that moment.

Even a patient with extreme meta-cognition is not immune to this phenomenon. For example, he may understand and map the mechanisms clearly in the moment, filtering his external speech to match social expectations in both content and rhythm. At best, he finds it easy to filter his speech, but his interior world is still a cascading web of connected fractals, each bound together by a thread that somehow feels more real than the reality at his feet. He still finds himself in a state of atypical energy, pressured thoughts, and irritability. He simply becomes a bilingual captive of two realities at once. It is precisely from this that we must look towards their implied and explicit representations of their interior world rather than just their explicit symptoms.

For example, consider the case where a bipolar patient spends thousands of dollars on a project or product which seems impractical. From our perspective, it is incoherent: they need that money for rent, they may already have what they truly need. The first error in trying to encounter bipolar phenomenology, trying to understand the 'why', is placing reason above the embodied, total human experience.

Under that hypomanic fever, reality feels acutely more real than it typically does. The uneven paint on their walls cast pronounced textures and shadows, the gliding of their fingers across a chain link fence rings in the flesh under a resonance, the significance of the world is, quite literally, somewhere above life itself.

In such a realm, logic loses its protective grip. To simply be, to simply experience life itself, borders on the transcendent. Even the most isolated and lonely patients find themselves feeling the fire of something analogous to grace descend onto them. Life is breathed into them, energy fills their spirit, and suddenly, potentially for the first time in months, they feel alive. In such a state, anything meaningful suddenly exponentially grows in meaning.

Hypomanic bipolar patients seek the bridge towards interior transcendence through the material realm.

The tragedy is that this bridge is destined to collapse under the weight of time, and often times its construction is prioritized at all material cost. From all perspectives, material tragedies logically cohere with their hypomanic lens. They truly are a different person: the way their perceive the world is fundamentally distinct from their typical state.

To put it simply, hypomanic patients ascend beyond the normal realm of being, into something greater, and thus they live under a post-logical algebra. Sight precedes meaningful action: even a moderate understanding of this algebra can bridge the gap between our mundane world and their higher world.

From someone who wrote this, in a single sitting, under the grip of hypomania,

David