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MERRY TO BE MAD

by Richard Jameson

Hypomania cannot really be called a complaint, it is so pleasant. But it is excessive and excess must be cured. Moderation in all things. The victim may be so hilariously happy that this leads to paranoia and certainly hallucination. The doctors are not relieving his distress (he has none): they are bringing him down gently to earth.

I 'suffered' from hypomania forty years ago. I didn't know I was suffering from anything at all. I brought a ventriloquist's dummy into the office and started fooling around. The boss was not amused; he sacked me. At home my hypomania turned to hallucination. Lying on my bed I seemed to be witnessing a trial going on in the room above.

My mother and the Queen were both on trial for crimes against the State. I won't go into the details but it was gripping and lasted about half an hour. The voices were very clear and comprehensible and my mother was finally condemned to build her own walled garden from the inside.

So real were all these shenanigans that I rang the police. The next thing I knew was that I was languishing at the top of a hill somewhere in Surrey for a year and a half. With a record like mine it was a devil of a job to get back into society. I wandered in and out of mental hospital for fifteen years.

Talking the language of mental illness is to contract it pretty acutely. To be cheerful is to be 'high' , to be depressed is to be 'manic'. The big hurdle is to get out of hospital, earn your living and establish a little home. Then you can be as manic as you like provided you don't harm anyone (especially yourself) and you don't go 'over the top' (whatever that means)

The chemicals in my brain may have gone wrong and I am a great believer in chemicals that put this right. Forty years later I still take so many that I'm sure I will rattle to my grave. Good show. It is up to me of course. The patient himself is his finest physician. But the pills certainly help where willpower fails.

Hypomania is the cheeriest illness in the book, but excess can stretch the paranoid critical faculty to extremes. Hate is the other side of the coin of love, gloom gives shadowy shape to the portrait of joy. At least the hypomanic never gets bored.

Professor Crisp asked me to write an article for his book on the STIGMA that the whole psychiatric profession faces. My view is that it is not as bad as it was in 1960. Then there was positive hostility to mental illness - now there is much more understanding. One could say that mental illness is rife in the community, so there is certainly interest, if not universal cures.

It is up to the doctors and the government to make very well known to the public exactly what is going on. Humanity is a science which everyone should have an alpha plus in. Then the human being would rise above his condition, see what makes him tick and, thankfully, flourish.

Maybe I can contradict myself and say that I was distressed, but it was extremely agreeable. However with hindsight I see that incarceration was not the answer at the peak of my career when I was just about to star in a musical at the Lyric, Hammersmith. A few kindly words and a night's sleep might have achieved as much as 15 years locked away.

Now I am preparing myself for death, looking back on a rich innings of absorbing interest. This is the way it has worked out. Next Sunday I go on stage with my magic show yet again. Last night I chatted with LBC's Clive Bull on his show. This morning I am trying to hammer out a scientific paper on hypomania. Oh well ...