Why I’m me

It’s only since watching Stephen Fry’s brilliant Secret Life of the Manic Depressive (BBC2, Tuesday) that I’ve begun properly to understand why I am the way I am. Lots of people have suggested to me at one time or another that I should see a psychiatrist. ‘You’re so successful,’ they say. ‘How can you possibly think your life sucks?’ But in the past I’ve always put this down to their pitiful underestimation of just how much success I deserve. Now, though, I’m prepared ever so slightly to concede that maybe, yes, I do have a mild form of mental illness which on some days gives me wildly inflated expectations of how wonderful life ought to be for me all the time, and on others makes me realise that in fact I am utterly talentless and worthless and that everything I do is doomed to fail.

Fry seems to have it much worse than me. In the second of his two programmes, the camera caught him having a down episode, and he was so fearfully gripped by the black dog he could barely speak. His manic intervals are pretty wacko, too. We saw him go shopping during one of them and buying up the contents of a classical music shop (mostly stuff he had already, only in different formats) and a computer store. He owns five sat-nav devices and about 20 iPods. In the Eighties he had 12 cars. ‘But then, why not?’ he opined when a CBT therapist tried to reason him out of it. ‘I work so f***ing hard I deserve it.’

This is an aspect of manic depression (bipolar disorder, as the Americans will call it) that I’d never seen properly articulated before — this idea that ‘yes, it’s a problem. But damn it, it’s my problem. And it’s part of what makes me me.’