Musings on Bipolar and Gastronomy from a Writer in South Africa

I love Mary, who blogs at Letting Go, and writes about life in South Africa. I missed this gem last week, but it's worth reprinting for two reasons. First she writes about a meal she had at La Bulli, which was for years rated the best restaurant in the world. Then she muses on a book by David Healy that starts with the untimely death of Rebecca Riley, and wonders, which came first, the condition or the drug?  I will let this one speak for itself.  Mary doesn't usually write about this topic but when she does, she has an interesting perspective from a country not to many people write from. Like Mary, it's a keeper.

The village encased in blank walls of heavy mist, a cow mooing somewhere out of sight. A friend has shared bunches of fresh fenugreek and handfuls of broad beans with me, so I am cooking up a storm.

And I am reading reviews of Colman Andrews’ biography of the molecular gastronomc chemistry schoolboy aka chef Ferran Adria. Years ago I ate at La Bulli in between rereading Cervantes’ Don Quixote and revisting battle sites of the Spanish Civil War. Aside from the haughtiness and inscrutability of uncommunicative macho waiters, I was astonished by a seagreen foam of  what had once been plump ripe olives and perhaps a crust of Parmesan. It tasted  delicious, but I was left with the impression of having eaten nothing at all. After a ravishing and improbable meal of six minute, invented dishes (including a gritty spoonful of frozen foie gras dust) I went out in my trim little bullfighter’s cape of scarlet and black and  gobbled up tapas of manchego cheese, coddled eggs and chorizo, grilled anchovies, a creamy almond soup spiked with garlic. Spanish food is very more-ish.

The secret to Ferran Adria’s success? “His tongue is bigger than ours. He literally has a larger tongue than normal, with more papillae.” That may be so, but my appetite is much bigger than Ferran’s.

So good to be online again, my busy real life has gone into hiatus. Big Pharma watch from the London Review of Books, a hard look at the contested and unreliable history of bipolar disorder and the increasingly drastic  treatments:

One now speaks of a ‘bipolar spectrum’, which includes, along with bipolar disorders I and II, cyclothymia (a mild form of bipolar II) and bipolar disorder ‘not otherwise specified’ (an all-purpose category in which practically any affective instability can be placed). The spectrum also includes bipolar disorders II1⁄2, III, III1⁄2, IV, V, VI, and even a very accommodating ‘subthreshold bipolar disorder’.

The category has expanded so much that it would be difficult to find anyone who couldn’t be described as ‘bipolar’, especially now that the diagnosis is liberally applied to people of all ages. Conventional wisdom once had it that manic depression burns out with age, but geriatric bipolar disorder is now the talk of psychiatric congresses. Elderly people who are depressed or agitated find themselves diagnosed with bipolar disorder for the first time in their lives and are prescribed antipsychotics or anticonvulsants that have the potential to drastically shorten their life expectancy: according to David Graham, an expert from the Food and Drug Administration, these psycho-tropic medications are responsible for the deaths of some 15,000 elderly people each year in the United States.

Scary stuff! Time to give the Internet a break and do some gardening before the sun burns off the mist and it becomes too hot outdoors. The thing about sobriety is that we get to choose what happens each day and how we respond. Something else to be grateful for –

Thank you Mary, as always.

Try Happiness, You Will Like It More Than Misery

Mary, the brilliant webmistress of Letting Go, has a real gem today. Mary is a talented writer- and was a writer and editor. Like me, she is a friend of Bill W. Unlike me, she writes about it beautifully. I noticed the longer my long term sobriety became, the less i wrote about it. Mary inspires me, and I will be dedicating my next year coin later to her this month.


It is raining and I am sitting indoors witha pot of tea and a copy of The Atlantic article on What makes us happy? In looking at what makes for a good life, the writer Joshua Wolf Shenk focuses on the Grant study: for 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age. The director George Vailliant paid attention, not to what kinds of troubles these men faced, but how they responded to health crises, divorce, war, failure or success. Do we respond to life with humour, altrusim, hopefulness and resilience or do we shrink back, give up too easily, act out our pain in blaming or violence? What factors prevent the development of mature, flexible defences and responses to life’s challenges?

‘Again and again, Vaillant returned to his major preoccupations. One is alcoholism, which he found is probably the horse, and not the cart, of pathology. “People often say, ‘That poor man. His wife left him and he’s taken to drink,’” Vaillant says. “But when you look closely, you see that he’s begun to drink, and that has helped drive his wife away.” The horrors of drink so preoccupied Vaillant that he devoted a stand-alone study to it: The Natural History of Alcoholism.’

But Vaillant’s key preoccupation was with the importance of relationship in a happy life. His comment on 40 years of studying life histories of the Grant study is revealing although probably not a surprise to many of us.

“The only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”

Continues here.