The Daily Novel

They have a huge need for close friends.

At first reading this statement will seem banal. Obviously everyone has a huge need for friends. So this is one thing which manic depressives share with the rest of humanity.

Nevertheless I am arguing that manic depressives have an above average need for friends. On two grounds. First, personal experience. Second, research findings.

I will start with the second.

Research findings. Again and again researchers find that those designated mentally ill (not only manic depressives) have difficulty in forming close personal relationships. It is not necessary for me to waste time quoting the literature because this is now generally accepted.

But there is a corollary which needs a paragraph. Because of this, many people who share many of the symtoms of the mentally ill, do not end up sectioned, fired, or otherwise stigmatised. They are able to manage their condition, because they have been fortunate enough to make some close friends who help them to manage their condition. Which is one reason why some manic depressives manage to achieve much more in their lives than most normals.

Personal Experience. I have gradually realised on my voyage through life that my need of close friends is greater than the need my ‘close friends’ have of me. Most often I have to ring them, rather than wait for them to ring me.

This matters when I am in depression, when there is a total inability to reach out to any other human being. If, when in such a mood, someone rings you up and invites you out to lunch in two weeks time, it helps a bit.

That’s enough on the main subject. But it reminds me about how my career as a journalist actually helped my manic depressive temperament.

Because the nature of a journalist’s job is that many people want to bend their ear. So they do get rung up often by public relations men, and as they get established by managers, politicians and others in power. Of course, you know when they ring up, that it is professional not personal. But it lifts you nevertheless. It dents your mood that life is hopeless and that everything you have done is not enough.

It also meant for me that I valued such contacts. And that although I had fewer contacts than most journalists, I did have possibly deeper contacts with my sources, including the civil servants of my day, who tended to be much more reticent in their contact with journalists than they are today.

My manic depression also meant that throughout my working life I have been more dependent than the average on forming personal friendships with some of my working colleagues. And journalism is one of those careers is which there is most often a cameradie between working colleagues. Not least because of the battle to meet a deadline, which is always a battle, even if you are working for a monthly. Because something always happens in the day or two before you go to press which you would like to include.

But the main reason that manic depressives need close friends more is that it only close friends who realise that the occasional manic episodes, and the periods of incapacity, are all part and parcel of the total personality, which can be relied upon. At least relied on as much as many human beings who have never been diaghosed with anything more serious than measles.