Thanks to Kenneth for sharing, and good to hear he's back.
The title seems to be funny because it highlights that mental health mostly isn't about discrete erroneous events, but about the ability for a mind to cope within a world...
I was in love with a bipolar woman. We shared an apartment for a few months, not too long after she had emerged from a manic period.
Her mania came on when she was alone in a new foreign city, used psychedelics, and became close friends with several people who were... firmly distanced from the reality-based community, let's say. She slept little, hallucinated, had strong ideas that all kinds of random events were connected, centered around her own destiny, and all that stuff.
I'm also pretty weird. Like Kenneth, I could attribute much of my erratic productivity to periods of hypomania. Never had any real mania. I'm very interested in semi-esoteric stuff like Buddhist philosophy, Zen Masters, insight meditation, and other things you might guess at.
I had a period when I was trying to read kind of arcane philosophy like Deleuze & Guattari's Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus... I remember being in my dorm room drinking too much coffee, reading that book or David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, or some pirate PDF about Spinoza, or whatever I could find...
The D&G books are subtitled "Capitalism and Schizophrenia" and one thing they do is kind of hijack the term "schizophrenia" and use it to designate something like the subconscious creative processes of the mind that seek to connect things, create these proliferating conceptual networks, build ideas atop ideas, change things, experiment, become different, etc...
I'm reminded of this because I'm thinking of the way hypomania can be a "positive" and "productive" state as long as you can maintain your health and groundedness... it seems related to how I sometimes feel like I need a slight bit of some kind of insanity or delusions of importance in order to have novel ideas.
Like, I'm thinking about a new kind of database, that I imagine is going to be really useful, beautiful, and novel. Sometimes I get what I jokingly call "too much coffee syndrome" and my rather simple idea starts to branch out into some impossibly grand project... like, I don't know, maybe to implement stored procedures, I need to make a new stack-based language with type inference... and content-addressed values... with a new kind of source control system... and a new kind of IDE that will be usable on mobile devices... and so on until I haven't eaten all day...
So in that whole sphere of my life, the idea-generating, novelty-demanding me who wants to reformulate basic parameters, invent totally new things, revolutionize everything, explain to everyone the new better way... etc... that's something I have to manage. My ideas aren't insane, I could explain them patiently, and I realize I don't have time to implement them... but the restlessness of my thoughts can be painful.
So anyway, partly because of this restlessness and tendencies toward some mild mania, I've taken an interest in mind pacification, especially through meditation.
Meditation is attractive because it also comes with connections to all kinds of fascinating theories about the mind, reality, and who knows what, and cultural treasures like Buddhist sutras, Tibetan art, and all kinds of stuff...
Here's a pretty plausible scenario:
1. You feel restless and anxious.
2. You get into meditation.
3. You hear about "Zen" and start studying.
4. You learn that its founder taught the Lankavatara Sutra.
5. You pick up Red Pine's translation from a local hippie store.
6. You sit and read Mahamati's praise to the Buddha:
> Like a flower in the sky / the world neither ceases nor arises / in the light of your wisdom and compassion / it neither is nor isn't
> Transcending mind and consciousness / all things are like illusions / in the light of your wisdom and compassion / they neither are nor aren't
> The world is but a dream / neither permanent nor transient / in the light of your wisdom and compassion / it neither is nor isn't
> There is no self in being or things / no barriers of passion or knowledge / in the light of your wisdom and compassion / it neither is nor isn't
That's fascinating stuff! What does it mean? Clearly it is deeply important, since people say it's the whole basis for Zen, and Zen meditation is obviously deep and profound, since the whole industry of mindfulness tacitly reveres all of Buddhism...
This comment is probably a good demonstration of my mind when it's bordering on "too much coffee." I kind of forgot how I was going to tie all this stuff together, and now I'm really hungry.
In the relationship I mentioned, I took on a role of helping, which worked fairly well. We made sure to get enough sleep, to get out and be kind of healthy, to just ground ourselves in different ways. It was an educational period of my life, because it helped me realize I need to take care of myself, too.