I knew little about bipolar I disorder before Ruth Manning approached me about doing a developmental edit on her memoir, When Brilliance and Madness Collide. Ruth came to me because I specialize in working on books about healing from illness, trauma, and loss, and because I specialize in books that are “weird.” She assured me that her memoir was both, and after reading her brief description, I was intrigued. Three different robot narrators and an in-depth, firsthand account of a psychotic episode…how could I resist? I checked out Ruth’s website, ruthforthebroken.org, and discovered a comprehensive, compassionate site full of information, advice, and resources for people dealing with a variety of mental health diseases and disorders. This was obviously an author who knew how to do research, how to write, and, perhaps most compellingly, an author who cared deeply about helping others living with mental illness or caring for a loved one with mental illness. I knew this was a project I wanted to help bring into the world.

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As I went through the manuscript, I laughed out loud, I teared up…and I learned a lot. There are many wonderful books and online resources out there about mental illnesses and about bipolar disorder in particular. But this book offers a unique perspective by bringing the reader inside the head of a person experiencing mania, paranoia, and psychosis. By taking copious notes during an acute psychotic episode in 2018, Ruth was able, in its aftermath, to reconstruct what she was thinking and doing and write it down in a format that is both fascinating and entertaining. 

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This in-depth account sheds light on an often misunderstood disorder. Before reading this book, if someone had said “psychosis,” I would have imagined an extremely violent individual, stripped of all social conditioning and completely out of control and out of touch with themselves. When Brilliance and Madness Collide shows a different aspect of psychosis: an individual compulsively doing good deeds for others and obsessing about how to make the world better. Readers will come away from this account with a more nuanced understanding of the different forms psychosis can take and deeper insight into the state of mind of a person experiencing psychosis. 

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I was fascinated to see how the imaginings/delusions during the psychotic episode sometimes mirror the types of make-believe games and stories that children make up (for example, the author’s subdivision was Eden, or Heaven, or Jerusalem, and different places in the subdivision represented different places in these imaginings). It’s almost as if the mind in a psychotic state taps into the person's childhood sense of reality, when make-believe could feel real, before the child’s sense of “concrete reality” was fully formed. The author’s psychotic delusions also resemble dreams in their sense of “logic” and organization, as if, perhaps, the unconscious mind that is responsible for dreams takes over one’s waking life during psychosis. The chapters that introduce and frame the psychotic episode allow readers to get to know the author, so we see how the delusions she experienced during the episode related to the rest of her life and interests. The creative way Ruth has written about the experiences in these chapters allows a reader who doesn't suffer from bipolar disorder to relate in some way to the reality she was living in, since everyone dreams, and everyone remembers what it was like to be a child, when the border between reality and imagination was thinner—at least, I hope everyone remembers that feeling!

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An account like the one you are about to read offers those of us who do not live with mental illness a way to relate to and understand, at least in some small way, those who do. This more personal understanding cultivates compassion—the essential human trait that allows us to care for one another. This memoir is indeed a “wild ride,” entertaining and enlightening, which succeeds in its mission to educate and inspire readers to change how we think about and care for those living with mental illness. 

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Buckle up!

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Deborah K. Steinberg

San Francisco, 2023