Much madness is divinest sense To a discerning eye; Much sense the starkest madness.

Creative Genius

So sorry to have not included this before. I was just backing up the hard drive of my main computer and noticed this file hanging about and don’t see that I ever included it in a BIM.

Bipolar Disorder and the Creative Genius

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro98/202s98-paper3/Krishna3.html

“One common feature in mania or hypomania is the increase in unusually creative thinking and productivity. The manic factor contributes to an increased frequency and fluency of thoughts due to the cognitive difference between normalcy and mania. Manic people often speak and think in rhyme or alliteration more than non-manic people. In addition, the lifestyles of manic-depressives in their manic phase is comparable to those of creative people. Both groups function on very little sleep, restless attitudes, and they both exhibit depth and emotion beyond the norm. Biologically speaking, the manic state is physically alert.”

Kay Redfield Jamison  An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness  http://www.amazon.com/Unquiet-Mind-Memoir-Moods-Madness/dp/0679763309  reviewed in BIM 17 back in 1997.

“Madness …. most certainly can, and often does, kill love through its mistrustfulness, unrelenting pessimism, discontents, erratic behavior, and, especially, through its erratic moods.”  An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison

manic depression is characterized by “excessive involvement in pleasurable activities.” …. “full inter-episodal recoveries” Diagnostic and Statistical manual  DSM IV, from An Unquiet Mind.

A recent take on it http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8504605.stm 

Selected Poems by Emily Dickinson

I felt a cleaving in my mind

   As if my brain had split;

I tried to match it, seam by seam,

   But could not make them fit.

The thought behind I strove to join

   Unto the thought before,

But sequence raveled out of reach

   Like balls upon a floor.

Much madness is divinest sense

To a discerning eye;

Much sense the starkest madness.

'Tis the majority

In this, as all, prevails.

Assent, and you are sane;

Demur, - you're straightway dangerous,

And handled with a chain.

‘While all human personality is probably, at bottom, in a kind of chaos, and only compelled into coherence by the necessity to act in the outer world, it has been the tradition of biography, in all its forms to impose a, more or less, Newtonian pattern of linear intelligibility on this turmoil of an individual’s nature.’ Jesse, the biography of Jesse Jackson by Marshall Frady