Insanely Good: 10 Books About Madness That I (A Mad Person) LOVE

Plus (BONUS!) a whistle-stop tour of my first nervous breakdown

TW: Discussion of mental illness and suicide.

Last week, my friend texted me about a book she had come across that she thought I would love. It was the memoir, Everything/Nothing/Someone that came out last year. My pal was absolutely right, I practically inhaled the book which details the author, Alice Carriere’s mental illness that began in her early teens and which she spent the guts of two decades in the grip of. Carriere’s life has been one of immense privilege growing up as the only child of renowned American painter, Jennifer Bartlett – more on this below.

Part of my fevered consuming of the book was, of course, down to Carrier’s frank, raw and spare prose – she writes about the aftermath of an acute panic attack: ‘I awoke the next morning and fell, breathless, into a room I could barely recognise, a body I could barely feel, and a mind I could barely follow into perception.’

The most incredible aspect of Everything/Nothing/Someone for me was the similarities between my own experience of mental illness and the author’s. Here, at last, nearly 20 years after my first breakdown, I was reading someone describe the exact same untethering from reality that I went through at 22.

At the breakfast table I told my husband, Seb, about the book. Seb bore witness to that first chaotic, frightening unravelling. We’d been going out for just a year in the Autumn of 2007 when it began. He has also borne witness to every episode I’ve had since (is he, in fact, the common denominator and not the bipolar disorder that I’ve been subsequently diagnosed with!?).

‘The woman in the book I am reading had the exact same things as I had back during the first time and I mean the EXACT SAME things. The conviction that she wasn’t real, feeling like her limbs were alien. She couldn’t see her own face in the mirror because it was too terrifying. Just like me.’ I said cheerily. 

He seemed concerned. ‘Is it not difficult to read that?’

‘No, not at all. I just feel this weird connection to her. This is the only time I’ve ever come across anyone describing exactly what happened to me.’

Me somewhere on the long and winding road of being a full-time mad bitch

Despite my elation at finally seeing my own experience reflected back to me, when I finished the book, I was left with a residual sadness the cause of which took a couple of days to identify. I realised the book had made me sad because I didn’t have a book like this 17 years ago when I was so terrified that I had broken my brain forever. It would have reassured me so so much to know that someone else had felt this mad and sad and dislocated and had survived it.

I feel a short synopsis of my first breakdown is probably in order (if you want a longer unpacking of this breakdown and the others I’ve had since allow me to refer you to either of the non-fiction books I’ve written!)

So for ease here’s a bit of a condensed timeline:

1985 - 2006: No mental illness – yay! What a time that must’ve been (I can barely remember it tbh lol)

2003-2007: Some (what I thought was) routine recreational drug use. The ‘routine’ bit is debatable now. As an example of stupid shit I did on drugs, I once smashed the top of a bottle of absinthe and proceeded to drink it (from what was left of the bottle) through my cardigan – using the material to ‘strain out’ any glass. Yeah maybe not as ‘routine’ as I’d thought.

September 1 2007: Fucks own life irrevocably.

AKA I took a pill at Electric Picnic and as the song says ‘The silicone chip inside her head gets switched to overload’. Cue night of terrifying hallucinations lying alone in a tent convinced I was going mad/was going to die – something that wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility, that was the same year as the first tragic death at Electric Picnic.

September 2nd - November 17th: Goes mad.

This involves but was not limited to:

• Seeing a strange face when looking at my own face in the mirror.

• Hearing whispers in my ears.

• Becoming convinced that reality was fake.

• Having paranoid thoughts that looped endlessly in my mind.

• Becoming certain that my memories were fake.

• Believing that my friends and family had been replaced.

• Becoming convinced that my right arm was not my own (always a hard one to explain… just try picturing looking down at your right arm and it seeming to be a stranger’s arm but then discovering that it’s attached to you… not sure if that helps lol).

• Belief that I had died or had never existed taking hold.

• Becoming terrified that I was going to murder someone.

• Living in constant, unrelenting terror that I was going mad and had broken my brain forever. (Spoiler I kind of had… but also it’s not that simple.)

November 18th-December 7th: Starts planning own suicide all the while trying to keep up the pretence that everything is fine and refusing to see a doctor because I was too afraid of admitting that something was seriously wrong despite all of the above indicators that something was seriously wrong.

December 8th: Decides to put the killing self idea on the back burner and agree to the psychiatric intervention as a last ditch attempt to not die from this madness.

December 2007 - January 2008: Attend John Of God’s Hospital seeing a psychiatrist and a psychologist. Starts medication.

2008 - 2012: Deeply rocked by what happened to me but slowly starts to recover with help of meds, friends, family and therapy. Still having bad days and weeks when the old terrors return but getting better at coping with it all. Brain never the same again – poor old brain.

2012 - present: Honestly these 12 years are kind of like the sequel to all of the above – a very involved lengthy sequel (I wrote a whole book about it). A condensed retelling would include: more madness, postnatal depression, meds change, alcoholism, paranoid intrusive thoughts, meds change, manic episodes, hospitalisation and more meds changes. Gotta love a meds change.

As I said above, back when I was 22 and suicidal, I was extremely scared of receiving psychiatric treatment even though by December of 2007, after nearly four months, the illness had completely annihilated the person I used to be. I was utterly ground down by it all and had gotten to a place in my mind where suicide had started to look like the only way to end the pain of madness.