I have had a cough for a few weeks, and the doctor prescribed a short course of steroids. On the initial, high dose, I became unusually optimistic, idea-rich, and chatty. While in this odd state, I picked up an issue of People (August 20, 04) and found a short account of Jane Pauley's steroid experience. She took steroids to control a rash, experienced some of this "hypomania" high -- including the temptation to start her own clothing line -- and ended up hospitalized for three weeks, on a wild emotional ride between high ups and deep downs: the steroids had apparently provided an opening for an underlying bipolar disorder. She was behaving most of the time within the normal range for high energy, high salary smart women from New York, and yet her husband and boss both decided there was something wrong here and encouraged her to seek aggressive treatment. She said after things were more or less under control that the experience taught her some things about herself.
There is ethics encoded in this story. Lying about on the ground of many traditions is the advice: not everything that feels good is good, not everything that leads to improved performance is good. But to describe a syndrome like this, involving so many different points of decision: treating the rash aggressively or moderately, enjoying the new Jane or sending her off to the hospital, using up the the new energy in new projects or questioning its source and trajectory -- that all is real ethical progress, or analogical ethical progress. Jane experienced a biochemical event that tracks very closely morally significant events in our lives that we don't immediately describe as biochemical. There are very interesting crossover suggestions here.
One example: I love to watch the MTV bios of rock stars and Hollywood folks and their marriage and spending antics. Recently, I was remembering some stories by Paul Linebarger (aka "Cordwainer Smith") about an effective government in the far future that has identified a few real threats to humanity, against which it proceeds with unimaginable ruthlessness. In these stories, one of the most terrible, edgy moves that the government makes is to refrain from curing someone's mental illness because some of the manifestations of that illness are very useful. In Linebarger's world, this is a last resort, a truly terrifying choice. In this society, people do it for amusement and they do it to themselves. Jane was remarkably lucky.
Posted by shea0017 at November 2, 2004 9:43 AM