A first-hand account of bipolar disorder
Bipolar disorder is a devilishly difficult disease. It’s devastating for the often gifted people who have it, tricky for the doctors who treat it and frustrating for the loved ones who struggle to understand it. So any illumination into the bipolar mind is worthy of our attention. He Wanted the Moonby Mimi Baird is a welcome window into the world of one such manic-depressive: her father. Dr. Perry Baird was an internationally recognized physician and brilliant scientific researcher in Boston before the Second World War when he suddenly disappeared from her life. Whenever 6-yearold Mimi asked where her beloved daddy was, her mother would wave her hand and respond vaguely, “He’s away.” Mimi saw him only once after that, and he died when she was 21.
It wasn’t until some 50 years later that she tracked down a manuscript, written in pencil in her father’s hand on sheets of onion skin paper, documenting his mental illness and his five agonizing months in a state hospital in 1944.
It’s Dr. Baird’s first-person manuscript that forms the bulk of this book. The rest includes brief medical reports, interviews with his friends and Mimi’s own account of her attempts to forge a connection with a man she always felt close to but never really knew.
Dr. Baird writes lucidly, often grippingly, of his many acute manic episodes and his prolonged suicidal depressions. During his manias he felt euphorically powerful, his body generating so much heat he didn’t need a coat in winter. Colours were more vibrant, gestures imbued with hidden meanings.
He saw himself as the hero of every book he read: he was the Count of Monte Cristo, a Musketeer, Houdini. His sense of time and place were distorted, as he perceived hundreds of years passing, or sensed Earth was millions of miles away.
Repeatedly straitjacketed, as was the custom at the time, Baird saw it as a kind of test and managed to get out of the restraining garment time after time, untying knots with his teeth and toes. He felt resourceful; the staff, however, saw him as an antagonistic. They slapped him, hit him in the head with a heavy rubber hose and swathed him mummy-style in cold sheets that had been soaked in ice water.
He writes of this “utterly meaningless period of confinement” and of being subjected to “the destructive powers of loneliness, despair, idleness, filth, the ignorant dictates of below average doctors, lies and deception, the long absence from the strengthening power of work, isolation from all customary environment, disgrace.” He lost his marriage, access to his children, his medical licence, his reputa- tion, his money and most of his friends. As he puts it, “My heart was breaking.”
But he was not well enough to go home. He writes of “teasing” the staff to relieve the monotony by “playing pranks” such as fashioning a key from a bedspring to unlock his room door or using the iron bed frame to pry off the doorknob. His medical reports, however, called him aggressive, combative, disruptive and threatening.
He Wanted the Moon is unique among memoirs of mental illness because Baird was both a patient and a doctor, observing his own medical condition, his treatment and the social stigma. More remarkably, during the times he was well, this prescient researcher was doing animal experiments to investigate a biochemical cause of bipolar disorder, years before other scientists published their findings on such a link.
Sadly, bereft and broken, Baird underwent induced insulin comas, electroshock treatment and finally a lobotomy, which left him brain damaged. He died of a subsequent seizure in 1959. (In a tragic irony, the originator of the lobotomy won a Nobel Prize.)
In one passage, Dr. Baird prays that psychiatric hospitals will someday become a refuge where the mentally ill “may hope to recover through channels of wise and gentle care.” It’s debatable whether we’re there yet, but He Wanted the Moon is an important step in that hoped-for direction. Marcia Kaye (marciakaye.com) is an awardwinning health journalist who has a beloved relative with bipolar disorder.