I’ll be starting a mania study group in a week and I’d love to have you join it. This is a free group where I’ll guide us through some original ideas about mania. I hope that you’ll learn a lot from me, from yourself, and from one another. To join, drop me an email to ericmaisel @ hotmail.com, let me know that you’re interested, and provide me with the email address that you’d like to use for this group.

Mania is one of the great unexplored subjects, provocative in our lives and yet studiously avoided as a subject of interest by contemporary psychiatry and psychology. Let’s change that a bit and have some smart conversations about mania!

I’ll be taking the position that mania is not a medical sort of thing, not a mental disorder sort of thing and not a so-called symptom of so-called bipolar disorder but rather a terrific, terrible challenge resulting from the very fact that we have life energy—life energy with which we must do something. That something might be wolfing down food, shopping online all night, racing down the road at a hundred miles an hour, talking without interruption, or, when we try to suppress that energy, boring ourselves to death and sitting there handcuffed and depressed.

Psychiatry, which has a vested interest in a certain profitable, illegitimate paradigm, would like you to think that mania is a “symptom of the mental disorder of bipolar disorder.” The many interesting ideas about mania that circulated half-a-century ago, following on Freud’s speculation that mania was a certain defense mechanism used to avoid awareness (of our sadness, of our difficulties, of our shame, etc.), have been supplanted and erased by psychiatry’s pseudo-medical posturing. Let’s return to some interesting thinking!

This subject is far more important than it might seem at first blush. Dealing with our personality is one sort of issue. But dealing with our life force and our pulsing energy is its own huge challenge. “Mania” as I’ll be describing it is implicated in many of your most pressing issues. It is implicated in irritability. It is implicated in the way that chaos takes over. It is implicated in the way that sensible plans rollercoaster off the rails. It is implicated in depressions, obsessions, and addictions. Let’s tease this apart a bit!

If you’d like to join the group, please drop me an email to ericmaisel @ hotmail.com, let me know of your interest, and provide me with the email address you’d like to use for the training. Hope to see you aboard!

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