“It's lithium and Haldol and Haldol and lithium” she chanted in front of her laughing studio audience, and then ot them all to sing along. “Can't do without those pals, doll, and Ljust live withium.” She had had to get used to the word bipolarity, because both her mother and grandmother had called it manic depression, and so manic depression felt like the right term for what had inherited from them, the dangerous darkness sitting every day and every night in the corner of one eye and the blinding brightness in the corner of the other one. The meds had controlled the monster within, just about, but there were bad moments, such as when, during a trip to San Francisco, the elevated mood, the hypomania, seized hold of her and she started running around town buying a slew of expensive artworks – an ancient wooden mask from Cameroon, a set of rare pornographic ukiyo-e drawings from Japan, and a small late Cézanne which her young assistant, also occasionally her lover, had to return to the galleries later that evening, atter explaining her condition to them delicately when she wasn't listening.
After this episode her attending health professionals had expressed concern that her condition might be becoming treatment-resistant and suggested the possibility of electroconvulsive therapy: ECT.
“Shock treatment? You want me to have therapy by voltage?” she demanded. “But my dears, don't you know by now that I'm unshockable?”