The Rapids: Ways of Looking at Mania

Review\n‘The Rapids takes the reader by the hand and lays out the realities of mania, up close and personal – what it's like to wrestle with and how the brain navigates its swiftly tilting universe.’ -- Anna Mehler Paperny, author of Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person\n‘As with all great first-person works on mental health, Twyford-Moore’s The Rapids generously weaves his experience of mania through his critical scholarship without purporting to offer any sort of final, clinical clarity. Twyford-Moore’s work – at once critical, personal, and historical – thrusts our misconceptions of mania against the rocks, casting both light and shadow: revealing shapes where there was once mystery, and placing mystery back where shapes once stood.’ -- John Elizabeth Stintzi, author of Vanishing Monuments and Junebat\n’The Rapids is a beautiful narration of the beauty and heartache inherent in madness. A humorous and considerate self-reflection on the way our private worlds are inextricably informed and vulnerable to culture, art and music. A personal account and generous contribution to the expanding experiential and scholarly work of Mad studies.’ -- Lucy Costa, Deputy Executive Director of The Empowerment Council, an independent service user rights-based organization in Toronto, Canada, and co-editor of Madness, Violence, and Power: A Critical Collection\n‘An important work, The Rapids is about what it means to write and represent madness across media, such as film and literary critique, and how we come to know ourselves through these media, and how they in turn come to inform our understandings of our own experiences of madness, both in constrictive and constructive ways.’ -- Jijian Voronka, School of Social Work, University of Windsor\nThe Rapids is an exploration of manic depression (also known as bipolar disorder). With reflections on artists such as Carrie Fisher, Kanye West, Saul Bellow, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Spalding Gray, Sam Twyford-Moore takes readers on a literary and cultural tour of mania and what it means to live with a diagnosis of "bipolarity" in contemporary society. He also looks at the condition in our digital world, where someone’s manic episode can unfold live in real time, watched by millions.
His own story, told unflinchingly, is shocking and sometimes darkly comic. It gives the book an edge that is not always comfortable but full of insight and empathy. Smart, lively, and well-researched, The Rapids manages to be both a wild ride and introspective at once, exploring a condition that touches thousands of people, directly or indirectly.