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 brigher ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others 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 pervade one�s marrow (Jamison, 1995, p 67).

The fast ideas are too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends� faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against � you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind (Jamison, 1995).

I must weep myself to death. I cannot live. I cannot die. I have failed so. It would be better if I had not been born � I am the most inferior person in the world. � I am subhuman (Beck, 1967)

it is as if bodily & psychic batteries have run down completely (Gleitman) � something do with resting/membrane potentials. there�s certainly minimal neural activity, or at least, as demonstrated by the PET scan, minimal rates of metabolic activity

Each day I awoke deeply tired, a feeling as foreign to my natural self as being bored or indifferent to life. Those were next. Then a gray, bleak preoccupation with death, dying, decaying, that everything was born but to die, best to die now and save the pain while waiting (Jamison, 1995)

maybe if I can scientify/objectify/causally understand my psychopathological suffering, I can reduce it (both analytically and in degree)