My life was going pretty well in 1988.

I was no longer living with my mom and had two roommates. I wasn't getting along with one of them. I was also somehow not getting much work done, and I thought the roommate situation was distracting me, so I moved out into my own place. I still had a lot of friends from the scuba diving class.

I was not medicated at the time.

I got along great with my shrink, he was one of my favorite people, one of my best friends.

Out of the blue, I started having a lot of really fascinating ideas and thoughts. Then I felt that God had proven his existence to me. Eventually, I hadn't slept for a couple of days.

I had a conversation with one of my former roommates, the one I had been getting along with better, where I told him in detail what an idiot he was. It was just so interesting how his stupidity worked, and in my mind I was doing him a big favor, because if he listened to my sage advice and changed his thought patterns, he could become much smarter. Surprise, surprise, he was not interested in being friends after that.

I hadn't slept for some time, and at 1:00 am, I was really thinking I ought to call my shrink, but I didn't want to wake him up. So things just kept getting more and more, well, interesting. I was thinking how much he would be interested to hear about all the fascinating, great ideas I was having.

So at 9:00 am, I felt it that was finally time to call my shrink and by then I was really raving bonkers. I told him how interesting things had gotten, and how he'd love to hear about all the wild stuff I'd been coming up with. I also started saying crazy things to him, insulting things, things I hadn't thought were true before I got manic, and that I wouldn't think were true after I came down.

He said I belonged in the hospital, but I wouldn't listen to that. He said "If I prescribe some meds, will you take them?" I said OK. Months earlier he'd also told me about something he'd done to his son once, and my father had done the same thing to me and I thought it was wrong and was yelling at him about it, and then we both agreed that I was really yelling at my own father.

So we agreed that I should call my father and discuss it with him. We hung up and I called my father and told him I loved him for the first time in my life and then told him everything he'd done wrong in our relationship.

I went to the pharmacy and got the medication my shrink had dialed in the prescription for, but by the time I got the meds home, something was telling me that if I trusted God, I wouldn't take the meds, so I didn't.

A bit later I called my parents again and my mom answered and I said I was going to commit suicide to glorify the Catholic church. The thing is, 3 days before that I'd been a completely stable atheist, and had I been choosing a church to go to, I almost definitely wouldn't have chosen that one. But now somehow I thought my dying would bring everybody to the Catholic church which, for some reason, was the right one and everybody's souls would be saved and I would be a big hero. This all made perfect sense to me, but mom was screaming.

I was interested in killing myself, but my thoughts were racing so fast I couldn't focus on anything long enough to put together a coherent plan to do it.

At least God wasn't telling me I was an asshole this time. I was on top of the world and going to save the whole human race.

Mom and dad were 1,000 miles away and this was before people had cell phones. While mom was on the phone with me dad ran next door and called the cops in my city from the neighbors' phone.

So the cops came into my apartment and I said "Boy am I glad to see you guys! I'm a suicide risk! Cuff me!" They were hesitant to do it, I think they might have been worried that I might have a weapon hidden somewhere, and it's kind of strange request. I knew that cops were really good at cuffing people so I was yelling "What's wrong with you? Why don't you cuff me? You guys are good at it!"

I was talking saying crazy crap, a lot of it highly offensive, in the back of the squad car the whole way to the mental hospital. Once I got there I went on raving and they strapped me down. I couldn't shut up and I knew I was hurting people's feelings with some of the things I was saying and I begged them to gag me so I could stop talking but they wouldn't do it. They had about 5 guys carry me into the room where they strapped me down and I was raving and the guys kept saying "Lithium!!!!! We've got a wild one here! This one needs lithium for sure!" (at that time, lithium was the only mood stabilizer available for bipolar illness).

After I'd been given an anti-psychotic and left strapped down alone in a room for awhile I calmed down and was able to stop talking.

They checked my insurance and a guy came in and asked me if I'd like to go to the same hospital in the country where I'd been last time. I said "Hell, yes!"

So that was the day I bet on God, and lost.

When I got depressed after my first episode in 1986, I told my family that I was "depressed", and my mom read a book about "depression". But when I told them that, I didn't realize that I was bipolar (or "manic-depressive", as it was called those days) so, even though she'd read a book about my problem, she had been totally unprepared for the manic state that I was in when I called her.

By the time I got to the mental hospital in the country I was making reasonable sense. I remember saying "I had a pretty neat-o life going there, why'd I have to blow it?"

In the hospital they medicated me on lithium.

Before I'd had those 2 roommates move in with me, I had the whole house rented and was interviewing roommates through an ad in the newspaper to fill the 2 empty bedrooms. And there had been this one applicant, a really neat guy, who owned an airplane, but he was a gun owner, and one of my rules was that I didn't want any guns in the house, so I rejected him. That was definitely the right call -- if he'd been my roommate when I went manic in 1988, I probably would have gone into his room and grabbed a gun and killed myself to make the whole human race Catholic (when I hadn't been the least bit interested in the Catholic religion a week before).

I had lost all interest in religion by the time I was done with the hospital. I had gone from completely uninterested in religion, to completely insanely fanatical, back to completely uninterested in the course of a week or two. This convinces me that the level of interest one has in spirituality and religion is strongly chemically influenced. It probably runs in families. Which religion you pick depends mostly on who raises you, but how devout you are probably depends more on your biological parents, if you're adopted. I'll bet if psychiatrists really wanted to, they could create pills that made people more or less spiritually inclined (I don't think it would be a good thing to create such pills).

Many years later, I've been involved in atheist organizations, and a lot of the people there are just completely unable to relate to anyone who has spiritual feelings. Spiritual inclination is a real, human feeling, but it varies a lot from person to person.

For about a month after getting out of the hospital, I was in a really good mood, and very sentimental about a lot of things. I remember working on my photo albums. Then I slowly sank into a serious depression. My shrink asked me if I was suicidal, and I was, so he had me check into a mental hospital. The hospital was quite pleasant, it wasn't a locked unit, the people were less ill than in the hospitals I'd been in before that, and we played games like Pictionary a lot. After 3 weeks, my anti-depressant kicked in and I started feeling better.

I was well enough to leave the hospital but not well enough to work. I took some time off on disability and started doing volunteer work to get out of the house, pushing a broom around a homeless shelter. Eventually I returned to work.

My shrink was so offended by the crazy insulting crap I said to him over the phone that he wanted me to start seeing someone else instead, but I really, really liked him and begged him to stay with me, so he reluctantly did.

Unlike the first breakdown, there wasn't as much of a story or narrative to this one. Life was going along pretty well, and then in a very short period of time I went really wacko and was totally irrational, and then once they medicated me I went right back to normal again.

Years later, I was on vacation with my parents, and I was reading the Gospels. My mom didn't want me getting anywhere near a Bible by this point. I told her "Well, if I go crazy again, maybe if I actually know something about religion, I'll be better equipped to deal with the situation." She said "When you were on the phone, you were so irrational that I can't see how more knowledge of any kind would have been useful to you."

Some of the things I said to my shrink when I was raving were crazy, not things that I felt were true before or after I was psychotic.

But what I really regret was some of the things I said to my parents when I was raving at them on the phone. Some of them were fairly true, but they were much better left unsaid. It's really hard to take those things back.

One thing that this episode convinced me of was the value of mental hospitals. When you're manic, you're liable to say wild things massively harmful to your relationships. It's pretty important, if you feel that you're going insane, to check yourself in to one for awhile, just to prevent you from destroying your life.

Years later, I would think of the disgraceful things I was yelling in the hospital when I wanted to shut up but couldn't and I begged them to gag me and they wouldn't. Looking back on it, I was so deeply ashamed of what I said and humiliated that I thought that if the meds quit working and I started going that crazy again I'd rather kill myself than go through it.

It took a conscious decision later on to decide that if push came to shove and I wound up like that again, I'd choose to just weather it and somehow survive the shame and go on living.

Unfortunately, now that I was on lithium, I was significantly slower at getting things done at work. I would be on lithium until 2001, and I had a lot of trouble meeting reasonable programming deadlines during the whole time. It completely destroyed my career. Nearly all my friends were work friends, and I lost almost all of them. But that was the only mood stabilizer that worked on me at the time, and mania is life-threatening for me -- going off my meds would have been taking my life in my hands. God definitely would've talked me into killing myself by now if I hadn't spent those years on lithium.