I’ve been hospitalised numerous times, the most recent in March of this year. In February I took over 350 various psychiatric medications and ended up on ICU for a week, being kept alive by a medical ventilator. The reawakening to godawful hospital dinners and ICU psychosis that had me believing the man in the mask from the film Scream was standing watching over me was pretty tough I can tell you, although after taking a lunge at him resulting in all my needles and cannulas flying everywhere things seemed to improve to the point where I was finally back in the ‘real’ world.



I’m on a cocktail of drugs that will probably bankrupt the NHS and receive regular psychotherapy. Extensive psychological testing has revealed that my problems are in no way based on psychological issues, i.e. past or present trauma, difficult life-circumstances or realising I know who Justin Bieber is.

Which leaves neurology as the only explanation for my mood swings and associated symptoms - mild OCD, anxiety and panic attacks, and mood intolerance which leads to an eating disorder of sorts. The news that my problems are neurological is actually quite comforting - I have always maintained that there appears no rhyme or reason for the fluctuations in mood and the fact that it appears to all be the result of the erratic release and reabsorption of neurotransmitters such as noradrenaline, serotonin and dopamine, most probably as a result of genetics, confirms my suspicions that this is something firmly out of my control, but which I can learn to manage. The next step is a CAT scan to confirm whether or not I have any actual physical damage to my brain, either as a cause for my bipolar symptoms or as a result of too many overdoses. Assuming that shows up nothing, it’s drugs, healthy lifestyle and the aforementioned psychotherapy.

So the question must be posed: why, when I have tried to cease living so many times, should I be excited by he possibilities of body and mind rejuvenation and extended life spans?

The answer is: I don’t know.

What I can state is that it’s not based on the idea that my disorder could be ‘cured’ within my lifetime. Not that it’s not a possibility, but given the complexity and ambiguous knowledge of precisely what causes it, I’m not sure I’ll live long enough to reap the fruits of scientific endeavours in this field, and that’s assuming I don’t actively have a hand in my demise or not.

A major role is surely played by my manic periods when anything and everything seems possible. As I’ve written elsewhere (http://goo.gl/OoGMQ7), at these times I’m like a walking advertisement for David Pearce’s Hedonistic Imperative. In my euphoria I’d happily offer my brain for research into the condition, whether this be by tinkering with my genome to planting electrodes in my head. Hell, I’d even volunteer for my mind to be uploaded to a computer if you can find a working ZX81 anywhere (16 KB ram pack optional). There are some bits [pun intended] and pieces to iron out - not all mania is sunlight and kittens and I can become impatient (everyone else is so slow) and irritable (everyone else is so wrong) and in a worse case scenario, psychotic. You certainly wouldn’t want my mind upload in charge of nuclear launch codes, put it that way.

And, of course, there’s the other pole to be considered, the crushing desolation and despair that comes with the depressive episodes. Often lasting for months at a time, this is certainly my least favourite part of what’s become known as the ‘celebrity disease’. While lots of work has been done linking severe mental illness with creativity, to be honest very often the most creative enterprise I can achieve is to get out of bed and crawl to the kitchen for a cup of tea. It’s on those days when the immortal [pun intended] words of Annie Lennox ring in my ears: ‘Dying is easy, it’s living that scares me to death.’ So far, so ho-hum.

Suicidal ideation comes upon me very quickly, without warning and will very often be acted upon immediately. There is an infinitesimal gap between thought and action nor any triggers that I have been able to identify although, if it is purely neurological, it may well be that there are no such triggers. It just is.

Which is all to the well and good. I don’t fear death - as an atheist for me the act of dying is like like turning the lights out before shutting the door behind me. Indeed, the biggest traumas I have experienced have been the waking up from suicide attempts, not the shuffling off this mortal coil bit.



Yet, here I am, very much alive, with an apparently iron constitution, in the midst of a writing frenzy that I think borders on genius but which I will no doubt see for the crap it is when my mania decreases. Bipolarism is a fact in my life and the best I can hope for is to manage it better.

Even more so, here I am as a confirmed technoprogressive who, given the chance would love to still be around in 500 years to see what’s happened to the generations to come, our planet, the universe. Whether we have created the utopian ideal I so wish for, or annihilated ourselves by one means or another, I would love to see it, to know. So how can I marry these two opposing viewpoints? It puts me in mind of a Woody Allen quote: ‘I’m not scared of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.’

Well, as I see it, I have 3 options:

1. Not a lot changes. I carry on much as I have since my teenage years attempting and often failing to manage my mood swings.
2. I really get behind David Pearce’s Hedonistic Imperative and hope that his prediction that those reading his manifesto today are unlikely to benefit from the more exotic qualities of paradise engineering turn out to be wrong.
3. I sign up as a research participant in as many studies into bipolarism as I can and try to do something useful to help, if not me, then those that follow. Anyone out there who perchance may be looking for such a participant - look no further.

As someone who strongly supports bodily autonomy, it should be my decision as to whether I live or choose to die. It’s inevitable that the day will roll around once again where I knock back a few handfuls of psych drugs with a bottle of single malt to wash them down. In my current mood it seems inconceivable that I should want to do such a thing. There’s so much to see, to do, so much more I could achieve, learn, but I have enough self-awareness to know that day will come when those ideals seem like pipe-dreams. My condition worsens with age, although my techniques for bringing that suffering to an end don’t appear to be increasing in finesse, so who knows, I might outlive you all.

And if the Singularity steps up to the mark saves the day at the last minute? I guess I’ll owe Kurzweil a drink, hopefully without his 100 or so vitamins to go with it.

One last thing: please don’t discount people with severe mental illness from participating in the transhuman enterprise. We may often see things very differently from ‘normals’ but that could be immensely useful as the posthuman project moves forward. I may be as mad as a bag of frogs, but I like to think that I’ve still got more to offer.

Assuming that is, just like the rest of you, I live long enough to accomplish it.