The neurobiology of bipolar disorder

Abstract

When you're high, it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, and the power to seduce and captivate others is a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria now pervade one's marrow. But somehow this changes: the fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. You are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. (K. Jamieson)