Why I Wrote The Dialectics of Mania?

People often ask me why I wrote The Dialectics of Mania. The simple answer is that I felt I had a story that needed to be told. My manic and psychotic episode in 2023 was unlike anything I had ever experienced. I had never heard of someone becoming consumed by a delusion that they were living out the Seven Days of Creation. Nor had I ever heard of someone becoming so convinced that their final breath might somehow save humanity. The entire experience felt surreal, frightening, exciting, confusing, and at times completely unbelievable. It was a series of events unlike any I had encountered before, and I knew there was a story worth documenting.

When I was transferred from Nepean Psychiatric Hospital to the Hills Clinic, I was desperately trying to make sense of everything that had happened. For weeks, I had been scribbling notes on scraps of paper. I wrote about my work life, my childhood, my relationships, and the experiences that had shaped me. In many ways, I was trying to understand not only the manic episode itself but also the broader story of my life. The Hills Clinic provided me with the opportunity to transform those scattered notes into something more coherent. For the first time, I was able to sit down at a computer and begin organising my thoughts. What had been a collection of fragments slowly became a narrative.

As I began writing The Dialectics of Mania, I discovered something surprising. All I had to do was write down what happened. Despite the confusion and chaos of the episode, many of the events remained incredibly vivid in my memory. Scenes, conversations, emotions, and experiences returned with remarkable clarity. Chapters seemed to write themselves as I documented events one after another. I could remember incidents in extraordinary detail and record them almost exactly as I experienced them. The process felt less like creating a story and more like uncovering one that was already there.

Another reason I wrote The Dialectics of Mania was that I had wanted to write a book for most of my adult life. For more than twenty years, I had imagined writing and publishing books of my own. While I had previously contributed to The Consumer Journey, which focused largely on reflections about the mental health system, I had never fully told my own story. The events of 2023 finally gave me a story that I felt compelled to tell. That story did not end with The Dialectics of Mania. The experience also led to the writing of A Turtle's Journey, my memoir, and many of the books and projects that followed.

Looking back, writing The Dialectics of Mania was about much more than documenting a manic episode. It was about making sense of one of the most chaotic periods of my life. It was about understanding how I arrived at that point and what happened afterwards. It was about transforming confusion into understanding. What surprised me most was the level of detail I was able to recover and document. In many ways, the book is a direct record of what happened as I experienced it. It captures the excitement, confusion, fear, grandiosity, vulnerability, and recovery that followed.

I wrote The Dialectics of Mania because I had a story to tell. But in the process of telling that story, I also discovered a deeper understanding of myself. And perhaps that is the real reason the book exists.