Arnold Thomas Fanning

After his mother died when he was fairly young, Arnold Thomas Fanning had his first experience of depression. It didn’t last for long, but the seeds were sown. Fast forward to a decade later and Fanning was an up and coming playwright with lots of opportunities opening up. But at the same time, he was starting to suffer from delusions about his abilities and this rapidly became mania.

He had just given up a good job to give himself the time to write full time, but things weren’t going well. He was back living with his father who he had a difficult relationship with and he had just left an artist residency in disgrace. Very soon after that he had a total mental breakdown and was admitted into a secure unit where they began to treat him. After release he, went home with a bag of drugs, but there was to be much worse to come.

From there he descended further and further into his mental maelstrom. This book is his raw and brutally honest account of someone going through depression and all sorts of mental anguish. When it was happening he managed to alienate almost all his friends and family, ended up in several institutes and was prescribed a cocktail of drugs that they hoped would help him recover. It did reach the point where he stared into the abyss as he came very close to suicide, but he didn’t quite have the courage to do it that day. Might have been cowardice, but it saved his life that day.

The account is compiled from records and from what others have recounted to him, some of the episodes he has not been able to remember because of the illness. It doesn’t make for any less terrifying reading though. The fact that he has been able to get through his mental illness with a lot of help and write this book is a testament to his strength of character.

Mental health is important, if you are feeling depressed or anxious, then speak to someone who can help. This may be a family member, or you might be better speaking to an independent expert who will be able to help you. Do not ignore it.… (meer)

Arnold Thomas Manning begins his memoir about bipolar disorder by launching the reader, “you”, into the scene of one of his psychotic episodes that occurred at Heathrow airport in the days after the Indonesian tsunami of 2004. Writing in the second person, Fanning wants you to experience for yourself the extremes of a manic phase, complete with messianic delusions of grandeur and uncontrollable surges of energy. His words guide you to visualize pulling a defibrillator kit off the wall in order to show others just how committed you are to travelling with volunteers to ravaged Sumatra. You’re apprehended and charged with theft, but no matter: you decide to travel instead with young British soldiers to Cyprus, believing you’d make a fine chaplain to their company. But, no, perhaps it’s better to fly to Israel, convert to Judaism, and join the Israeli Defence Forces? Soon the police have had enough of you. They drive you down the motorway and push you out of their van. You’re not dressed for the winter cold, but you’re at the mercy of this relentless energy that surges through you. You walk to London, stopping along the way to do things people just don’t do in public. Your mind is on fire even as your body wears out.

After this riveting introduction, Fanning turns to a more conventional narrative structure. Initially, at least, he does not go all the way back to childhood, but to the point at which changes in his mood first became evident: when he was 20 and his mother died of cancer. Since that time, he had been subject to periods of debilitating depression, usually during the spring and summer. Autumn and winter signalled upswings in mood and energy.

After graduating from university, Fanning, an aspiring writer of short stories and film scripts, had been willing to sacrifice the security of a full-time pensionable job in stage management and, later, steady part-time work in the literary department of the National Theatre, in exchange for the time to write. In his late twenties, he won a residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in County Monaghan in the Irish Border Region. He hoped to finish his first full-length stage play there, but his disordered mind had other ideas. Concerned about his moods, he’d consulted a Dublin hospital psychiatrist before leaving for the Guthrie Centre, and the physician prescribed antidepressants, which Fanning discontinued once in Monaghan. Now his moods were cycling rapidly between intense sadness over the death of his mother and “strange, breathless joy.” The words of the Bible’s Book of Revelation “could have been written for me,” he thinks—after all, he is likely the one Christ loves the most. Maybe, given Fanning’s newly appreciated special status as “the Alpha and Omega”, he is even the one best suited to solving the problems of the world.

Over a period of days, Fanning’s behaviour grows increasingly alarming and bizarre. He gets the idea to bring his long-grieving, laconic father to the artists’ retreat to lift the older man out of his own dark moods, but Fanning ends up yelling, sobbing, and hitting his dad as they travel north from Dublin. Later, Fanning will be thrown out of the Guthrie Centre after brandishing a hunting knife at a female guest. He subsequently spends days driving the roads of the Border Region, stopping occasionally to scribble furiously in his notebook. Ultimately he phones 999, and officers of the Royal Ulster Constabulary find him weeping in his car. They transport him to hospital where he is diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

One would think that after this, things would be more straightforward. One problem is that it is not easy to find the right combination of psychotropic medications to address the extremes of mood without flattening, even erasing, the patient’s sense of self. Another problem is that those who are extremely mentally ill lack insight into their condition. (They suffer from “anosognosia”.) Once they begin to feel their moods evening out and a quieting of frenetic thoughts, patients often determine (without consulting any medical professional) that they’re well enough to adjust or discontinue medications as they personally see fit. Psychiatric drugs have severe, sometimes intolerable side effects. On one anti-psychotic drug, Fanning experienced persistent, uncontrollable, stiff, jerking movements (“tardive dyskinesia”). It’s hard to be compliant with a drug regimen that renders you a kind of puppet to some seemingly malevolent force. A third, significant problem is that an extremely mentally ill person becomes dependent. Often with no other option but to return to the family home, the patient relies on family members with whom he often has a history of strained, difficult relations. This was the case for Fanning, who had to rely on his father, an artistically talented, but hard and embittered man, who appears to have wrestled with his own undiagnosed mood disorder. Such is the quality of Fanning’s writing, however, that the reader is able to appreciate how this ordeal was experienced by the older man, who was plagued by demons of his own.

Fanning’s memoir is an honest, raw, and brave document. He recalls numerous hospitalizations, time spent in America where he attended artist and writer retreats, lived, worked and had a tempestuous relationship with a well-to-do young Jewish-American artist, and the harrowing period he endured as a homeless person on the mean, dangerous London streets—a form of living hell, if ever there was one. He was endlessly in trouble with the law for public disturbance, indecent exposure, theft—you name it. It took a long time for anyone to recognize that he was, in his own words, not bad but mad, that he needed not punishment but treatment.

Lest you think this memoir documents only distress, I’d have you know there are some lighter bits. Some of Fanning’s behaviours are actually funny. Once, for example, when nurses on a psychiatric ward tell him to stop cursing, he accuses them of being racist: “To me, using swear words is a typically Irish trait; trying to get me to stop is therefore racist, to my thinking.”

Years ago, when I briefly worked in a small gift shop, a disheveled young man entered the building one afternoon. He immediately commenced pacing up and down the length of the room, muttering and sputtering. I noticed his hand was bleeding and said so. He approached the countertop that I stood behind and drops of blood splashed down on the white surface—the colour of the droplets matching the intensity of his agitation. “I have to move! I have to move!” he said to me in desperation as I handed him a tissue. His, too, was a mind on fire, I now see. Years later, Arnold Fanning’s memoir illuminates for me just how intense that fire can be.… (meer)