The good in mania: high activity and alpha behavior

I'm surprised there's not much to be found on the positive elements of mania. I've seen websites advertising the joys of the anorexia "lifestyle choice" recently. If people can make that death zone disease into something desireable, mania is a snap in comparison.

Mania, at least, actually does have a lot of legitimate positives to it, when it isn't overly acute. I won't try to address the depressive phase, that's relatively tougher.

Mania is a team of tireless wild horses. If you can steer them, they'll pull you places most people don't have the time, energy, or patience to go. The ride makes you more visible to others and amplifies both your good and bad points by making them more obvious to more people. Mania often brings on increased goal-directed activity, self-esteem, diminished need for sleep, and more involvement in things that are fun. Severe episodes bring pressured speech, distraction, agitation, and increased likelihood of injury, but except for injury, none of those things is terrible for the manic, they are mostly a pain for the people around them.

I also got an interesting slant on mania from something written by my friend Jim Brody who runs the evolutionary psychology forum here.

Interestingly, in general, some feel that there is a lot of overlap between manic qualities and qualities found in people who take emergent leadership roles. From an evolutionary perspective, manics are sometimes seen as forming a kind of steady state balance with those of us who are less driven, ironically partly because they can be so good at gathering resources for themselves and becoming very visible. We impose penalties on them because they are often driven to take on more than others and more likely to try to or succeed at evading the usual consequences.

The rest of us have trouble keeping up and try to constrain them. The familiar grandiosity of mania has the effect of making manic people feel immune to social consequences for a while, and that brings with it the advantage of gathering more for themselves without the continual pressure for reciprocity that constrains the less manic.

Some technical sources along these lines ...

Russell Gardner, 1982, "Mechanisms in manic depressive disorder: an evolutionary model." Archives of General Psychiatry, 39, 1436-1441.

James F. Brody, "Evolutionary recasting: ADHD, mania, and its variants," Journal of Affective Disorders, 65: (2001) 197-215.

kind regards,

Todd

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