Meditation and Mental Illness

Here's another excerpt from the book I'm working on:

It happened to me sometimes when I went to Center City Philadelphia at night, fixed on the red beacon flashing atop every skyscraper, and definitely when I visited Manhattan.  For a while the lights and the sounds and the pace just took me, and before I knew it my mood would be ablaze, my decisions poor, my sleep a short annoyance and my future barely considered.  With each pulsing minute my impulse control deteriorated and my ability to make good choices took a thumping.  The vibrant city would have been a great laboratory to study what it is that takes me as I turn manic, but I couldn’t handle it and was lucky when someone with me would whisk me away.

As I developed skill at noticing the physical feelings that seeped into my body as I ramped up, and as I became able to remain settled in a maelstrom of activity, my moods leveled and stayed still.  Today the hum of the city still tunes me a pitch higher, but I can join the activity and not get carried away.  Literally and figuratively.

It was meditation that helped me develop the ability to approach a difficult or tempting situation and face it with the confidence that I could enter the foray and leave without scars on myself, my friends and family, or my wallet.  

It’s difficult to say how meditation has changed me, but it has changed my ability to cope with and manage the most challenging aspects of bipolar disorder.  Mental illnesses are diseases of symptoms with indeterminate causes. The physical mechanisms that make one person ill while most others remain well are unclear.  We speculate that there are genetic predispositions in there, and the brain of a person with an affective disorder must somehow be different than the brain of a person without one, but physical tests that prove the origin and development of many mental illnesses are elusive.  Signs are absent.  Symptoms are all we have.

And so we treat the symptoms and hope the disease goes away.

Meditation gives us a way to manage symptoms when they appear.  It also enables us to catch presenting symptoms early and head-off an impending episode of mania, depression or anxiety.  But really, how?

We’re training when we practice meditation, developing the skill to bring focus and balance back to a situation with one deeply felt calming breath.  This pause of flight, this ability to pull a field of scattered, slipping awareness back to one moment of hyper-attention and peace, enables us to pause and assess situations with a clear mind and an educated decision-making capacity.  This all can happen in one breath.  But only if we take thousands of focused breaths in practice first.

It may seem outrageous that one can pause the onslaught of emotion as mood changes take hold, but the ability to do just that is uncanny and can be developed.

As this skill is developed through disciplined daily practice, it becomes clear how meditation can help battle mental illness on two fronts.  The first is to help a person to settle down, pause and recover during a tumultuous period of budding mania, depression or anxiety.  Caught early and contemplated, these forays into madness can be diminished and calmed before they take deep hold and drive a person into helpless distress.  Episodes can be managed and made less damaging.

The second skill, harder to develop, precedes the first.  One can actually predict when episodes are brewing; feel precursors in the body and in thoughts and emotions that foretell a slip in the mind’s true functioning.  There are always warning signs that an episode is imminent.  While it may feel like dangerous mood changes just happen all of a sudden, more often telltale events occur first.  But in the bustle of each day we miss them and end up sick.  While meditating and remaining aware of our body and mind we can notice these markers that tip us off to trouble ahead.  Then we can focus on the benefits of meditation and add other interventions as necessary to head off an episode or diminish its severity.