A Manic-depressive Psychosis

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31902, 1 February 1969, Page 4

A Manic-depressive Psychosis

r The Family Man. By John y Gale. Hodder and Stoughn ton. IM pp. g Although Mr Gale classifies i, his book as a novel, it is •f clearly based on his own ex- ? periences and insights in the ' £ process of developing a menit tai illness and making a rek covery from this. His narran tor, Andy Minuss, is symbolih cally named for the complete *1 disappearance of meaningful :e life dhhich occurs in him n-, whilst he is in one of his deimpressed phases. This is folio lowed by a swing into mania, is when life accelerates unbearle ably. “It was quite hard tn work noting down the ideas g- for future use, and a lot of ryithem got lost. It was as to though. I was plugged into a is, great current: I tried to go le with it, ride it in a sort of id tidal way, rather like al

woman having a baby; to play it as though it were a great fish. Often 1 had an incipient headache and could feel my brain hot, inflamed, and bursting with ideas.” The author, in fact, is able to give a perceptive description of a manic-depressive psychosis almost as poetically as Janet Frame did for schizophrenia. From the time Andy Minuss turned 13, none of his activities were any longer natural and perfectly timed. Selfconsciously he had lost his co-ordination both physically and psychologically. For the rest of his life his quest is for some sort of plan or system to make life meaningful, whilst all the time part of his mind is telling him that he will never find the answer. A short stay in a psychiatric hospital leaves him feeling I like a “cold rice pudding”

with the knowledge that his cyclical insanity would always be with him, and he must learn to recognise the signs of each attack, so that he can try and cope with it. As his whirling thoughts build up to a crescendo of confusion, his prose keeps pace whilst describing ordinary happenings in his family life, with his children and the wife who has to bear the brunt of his pathological thinking. Although this book is written about a particularly unpleasant form of psychiatric disorder, its flowing poetic account carries orfe along to an understanding of the author’s burden that he cannot lay down. If this author can work himself away from the intense preoccupation with his own mental processes, his literary future will be well worth following up.