Welcome to The Dickensian Reset!
FAQ
From the back of the book:What’s it like to live in a psych ward?Neil Garrison was a corporate upstart with everything going his way. That is, until COVID-19 broke the world, and, eventually, his mind.Falling victim to his latent bipolar disorder, Neil’s world is turned upside down by a manic episode so severe that his very personality changes.With a colorful cast of characters, Neil recounts his mental breakdown and subsequent stay in the psych ward in this intimate memoir about marriage, psychiatry, and his Zen Buddhist faith.
Q: Why is it called "The Dickensian Reset"?
As is retold in chapter three of the book, my personality changed drastically very suddenly. I was in such a good mood, I felt like I had been "reset", almost like turning a computer off and on again.
At the time, it reminded me of the dramatic transformation Ebenezer Scrooge went through in Charles Dickens' classic tale, A Christmas Carol. The word Dickensian is a nod to the legendary author.
Unfortunately, this personality change wasn't permanent, just a manifestation of my mania.
I have a mood disorder called bipolar disorder. In mood disorders such as mine, your feelings don't always line up with reality.
Rather than just "moodiness", which is an emotional over-reaction to a given situation, the depression or mania that bipolar people suffer from are near-constant moods of misplaced sadness or enthusiasm that are experienced over a prolonged period, often without an external cause. These episodes can last months or even years.
For most of my life, this mental illness manifested itself as deep depression or volatile hostility. Other times, I'd experience periods of intense creativity and I would start up a major project such as a new company. I recognize today these periods were hypomanic episodes.
The episode I experienced in 2001 was something entirely different. Spurred on by COVID, my mental illness reached a new extreme: true mania—a psychotic break from reality.
It was hypomania to an extreme: I felt great, I started up multiple projects, every idea I had I thought was brilliant, and I saw what I felt were connections between everything. Everything was significant. I was literally high on life and could no longer work or act rationally.
Q: Are you "cured"?
It took me about two years to fully recover from the episode I recount in the book, but thanks to medication, counseling, and support from those closest to me, I'm currently in remission; my mood has been normal, or "euthymic", for years now.
Bipolar disorder doesn't just go away though. I'm not "cured". I need to stay on medication or it's likely that I will not only experience another depressive or manic episode, but it would be worse than the last, and my sanity would be even harder to re-establish. I need to stay vigilant, opting in to sanity each and every day.
Q: What is mania?
Here are some symptoms of mania. I experienced all of these during my episode.
- Feeling incredibly high or euphoric—to others the maniac may appear to be intoxicated.
- Delusions of Grandeur—and, often with it, grand plans or schemes
- Flight of Ideas—jumping from one thought to the next with seemingly no connection between them
- High levels of creativity and productivity, but without an ability to accurately self-edit or self-critique, the quality of the output is often poor.
- Apophenia—seeing everything as significant, or connections between disconnected things
- Sleep loss / not feeling the need to sleep
- Poor appetite and weight loss
- Pressure of Speech—fast and frenetic speech, talking over others, rambling.
- Religious Delusions
Q: Was it really that bad? You seem pretty sane in the book.
Yes, I was in rough shape.
I couldn't perform my job functions, despite my high energy level, just like someone couldn't work if they were high on cocaine.
The book does an okay job of capturing my flight of ideas, but my thoughts were constantly racing, jumping from one ambition to the next, often abandoning one fleeting goal as another presented itself.
The book intentionally does a poor job of capturing my pressure of speech. While to everyone else I was babbling incessantly and nonsensically, in my subjective experience, I was being rational. In my mind, people weren't able to keep up with me, but that was their fault, not mine.
I wanted to capture what it was like to go insane, so the book is told from my (incorrect) perspective, rather than fully reflecting the reality of my situation.
Q: You talk a lot about Zen Buddhism in the book. Are you still a Zen Buddhist?
I'd currently describe myself as agnostic—meaning I accept that we cannot know anything for certain about the supernatural—but I do have a great respect and for Eastern traditions such as Taoism, Buddhism, and Zen.
My wife, Lilly, believes that my entire religious preoccupation with Zen, which started two years prior to my hospitalization, was part of one, very long, manic episode. This is a matter of debate between us.
Q: Why didn't you seek help earlier?
In 2014, I did begin seeing a therapist, but they were not a psychiatrist and could not prescribe medication. They didn't see me long enough to see the cycle of bipolar disorder in me, Up until my psychotic break, I was high-functioning, despite my condition.
Q: What about your family, didn't they notice something was wrong?
To her credit, Lilly had me pegged as bipolar fairly early on in our relationship. At the time, I disagreed with her. I felt I was dealing more with depression because I didn't experience bona fide mania until the episode recounted in The Dickensian Reset.
I saw the rest of my family—my siblings and mother—too infrequently for them to notice, and I never wanted to burden them with the pain I was going through when suffering with depression.
Q: How do you feel about your diagnosis today?
My mania—despite putting me in the hospital, straining my marriage, and almost costing me my job—was a blessing. It forced me to seek help, and left no way I could be misdiagnosed.
I had needed medication for a long time, but was trying to "be a man" and suffer through the depressive episodes.
The stigma around mental illness is real, and ridiculous. The brain is like any other organ: it can get sick, and require medication.
Today, I don't view myself as being "less than" because I have bipolar disorder. I did nothing to deserve this, it's not something I had any control over—it's simply biological.
Ultimately, the diagnosis was a boon to my life. I finally knew what was wrong, and I could set about fixing it—or at least, managing it.
Q: I suspect I have bipolar disorder! How can I get help?
First, do not attempt to diagnose yourself. Only a mental health professional can give you a bipolar disorder diagnosis. Online quizzes or self-assessment guides are not a replacement for an expert medical opinion.
Talk to your primary care physician to get a referral to a psychiatrist in your area.
If you do receive a bipolar diagnosis, or that of any other psychiatric condition, be patient with the process. As is reflected in my book, it may take some time to find the right combination of drugs that will work for your unique physiology.
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