A Taste of Old Coin

It was with that pill that his father killed himself, on a patch of waste ground, when he was twenty. Thirteen years later, the one on the locked ward is him. A psychiatrist prescribes him the same thing and tells him it is for life. He takes it. Twice a day, every day since.

A Taste of Old Coin tells of the years it took to put a name to a bipolar disorder, and of the years it has taken since for people to stop calling it temperament. Bipolar I disorder, more than ten years late. Five admissions, two mechanical restraints, a courtroom with a folding screen down the middle.

But this book is not about the illness. It is about what happens after the diagnosis, when the people around you, a court and sometimes psychiatry itself decide that what they have in front of them is not a sick man but a temperament. And it explains, plainly and from the inside, what nobody explained in time: what hypomania feels like, what mania does, what psychosis builds, what anosognosia is, and why stopping lithium when you feel well is the most dangerous thing there is.

It is not written from memory. It is written against memory, with half a million dated messages in front of it.

For those who have the diagnosis, for those who love someone who has it, and for those who have never understood what people mean when they talk about this.