Andy Behrman Quotes

I am a rapid-cycling manic-depressive, bi-polar one disorder, which means I can have thirty or forty episodes a year, and I used to have thirty to forty episodes a year.

Money is a huge issue for manic depressives. Sometimes the problem is not nearly on the same scale as it has been for me, but nonetheless, it's difficult to deal with. Many get themselves into debt that can take years to clear up, write bad cheques, shoplift and borrow huge amounts from family and friends.

Bipolar disorder is about buying a dozen bottles of Heinz ketchup and all eight bottles of Windex in stock at the Food Emporium on Broadway at 4:00 a.m., flying from Zurich to the Bahamas and back to Zurich in three days to balance the hot and cold weather (my sweet and sour theory of bipolar disorder), carrying $20,000 in $100 bills in your shoes into the country on your way back from Tokyo, and picking out the person sitting six seats away at the bar to have sex with only because he or she happens to be sitting there. It's about blips and burps of madness, moments of absolute delusion, bliss, and irrational and dangerous choices made in order to heighten pleasure and excitement and to ensure a sense of control. The symptoms of bipolar disorder come in different strengths and sizes. Most days I need to be as manic as possible to come as close as I can to destruction, to get a real good high
a $25,000 shopping spree, a four-day drug binge, or a trip around the world.

When I'm manic, I'm so awake and alert, that my eyelashes fluttering on the pillow sound like thunder.

I couldn't sleep for nights on end, as my brain felt like there were thoughts colliding within it; I obsessed over small details, from saving pennies and polishing each one of them to washing my clothing over and over in the washing machine.

Most nights, I'm good for only four or five hours of sleep. That leaves the other 20. I have to fill them some way.

I think, when it comes to psychiatry, that a lot of people are overmedicated. I think when it comes to ECT a lot of people go through too much. I think there's a lot of guesswork in psychiatry.

I counterfeited Mark Kostabi's artworks. During the eighties, Mark didn't paint his own paintings. Instead, he had other artists painting them, and he just added his signature. So what I did was to use some of the same painters, and signed his name myself.

My manic depression was ravaging my life, but because nobody could see it, many people thought it was a figment of my imagination.

The little depression I experienced during my manic-depression was not like depression as anyone else had ever described it. It was very violent and angry, and I was full of rage. I wasn't lying in bed.

My ever-present mania meant I was never phased by staying up twenty hours a day or by the different time zones. I was Superman.

There are lots of people with mental health disabilities, and that's just the way their life is; it's not like you see it in the movies.

Like Sylvia Plath, Natalie Jeanne Champagne invites you so close to the pain and agony of her life of mental illness and addiction, which leaves you gasping from shock and laughing moments later: this is both the beauty and unique nature of her storytelling. With brilliance and courage, the author's brave and candid chronicle travels where no other memoir about mental illness and addiction has gone before. The Third Sunrise is an incredible triumph and Natalie Jeanne Champagne is without a doubt the most important new voice in this genre.

Weekly $25,000 shopping binges at Barney's and "high end" boutiques for clothes I barely wore were the norm. So were lavish meals with friends where I picked up $1000 tabs. These high-priced activities were within my limits because I was extremely successful financially, a testament to my manic behavior, not to mention my involvement in illegal activities.

My illness is one often characterized by dramatic overspending - in my case through frenzied shopping sprees, credit card abuse, excessive hoarding of unnecessary material goods and bizarre generosity with family, friends and even strangers.