MODERN MADNESS

A lawyer and mental health advocate describes recent skirmishes in her decadeslong battle with bipolar disorder and offers advice on managing the condition.

After two memoirs, Cheney offers 65 swiftly moving personal essays that suggest the rapid cycling through moods that her disorder causes. Her reflections recap and update the story of the disasters she described in Manic and The Dark Side of Innocence: “serious run-ins with the law, immense amounts of alcohol, multiple suicide attempts, demolished relationships, financial ruin (mania’s costly gift),” and, eventually, a mental hospital where she spent “three unimaginably long years and multiple rounds of electroshock therapy.” The author describes how she has learned to manage her condition with therapy and medication, especially so-called “atypical anti-psychotics,” along with tactics of her own devising. To subdue problems like mania-induced lust, she carries a list of “ten sacred rules” to follow when a manic episode nears, the first of which is: “Don’t change into something sexier. Wear granny panties and flats.” Vivid as such material is, the impact is undercut by the disjointed, nonchronological structure of the book. A dozen or so pages after feeling enraged by the “cluelessness” of an internist who questioned whether she needed all of her medicines, Cheney tries in another essay to go off an antidepressant. Was the doctor right? Were the incidents related? The author doesn’t say. She also blurs the line between reminiscence, self-help, and advocacy as she explores topics such as hypomania and mental health stigmas in brief sections that serve up, mostly uncritically, the kind of health boilerplate found on websites for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other agencies. Cheney can’t have anticipated the criticism the CDC has faced during the pandemic, but her too-easy acceptance of medical-establishment orthodoxies is at odds with the original voice heard elsewhere in the book. The author includes a helpful resource list.

Old and new ideas commingle as a writer comes to terms with her bipolar disorder.