We are excited to be back with a new season of Collaborative Endeavors! Beginning next month, we will be dropping fresh episodes, starting with a 3-part series featuring Major General Gregg Martin, who recently released his memoir, The Bipolar General: My Forever War with Mental Illness. Joined by UIC professor of psychiatry, Dr. Alex Leow, we will discuss common concepts in bipolar disorder and how they can manifest in real life as the general recounts the highs and lows of his struggle with bipolar I and his road to recovery.
Major General Gregg Martin, PhD (retired)
The Bipolar General: My Forever War with Mental Illness
The University of Illinois Chicago Center for Clinical and Translational Science is supported by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, National Institutes of Health, through Grant UL1TR002003. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
0:00 Voiceover:
Hello listeners! We’ve missed you! After a one-year hiatus while I was out having a baby, we are excited to be back with a new season of Collaborative Endeavors. Beginning next month, we will be dropping fresh episodes, starting with a 3-part series featuring Major General Gregg Martin, who recently released his memoir, The Bipolar General: My Forever War with Mental Illness. Joined by UIC professor of psychiatry, Dr. Alex Leow, we will discuss common concepts in bipolar disorder and how they can manifest in real life as the general recounts the highs and lows of his struggle with bipolar I and his road to recovery.
To give you a taste of what is to come, here is General Martin recounting a time when an incident of reward hypersensitivity dramatically disrupted his social and circadian rhythms…
0:50 General Martin:
The one that comes to mind first is the trip in June of 2014 to go to my son Patrick's special forces graduation at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. So we were in DC, and we had to drive. It's about 6 hours or so down to Fort Bragg. I had gone out early that morning and done PT, physical training, and I was still in my gym clothes when the president of the National Defense University Foundation Board walked by our house. He saw me and said, “Hey, General Martin, you know the board is meeting right now. I know you're going on this trip, but could you just come over and say a few words? They'd love to see you. They'd love to hear from you. You know, just say hi for 5 minutes and then head out and go get ready for the trip.” I said, yeah, I'd love to do that, not thinking there was any danger involved.
We were supposed to leave for Fort Bragg at 9 o'clock. That was the plan. I walked with the president over to the meeting room and had a cup of coffee. Everybody's in business suits. I'm in my gym clothes, and so I'm dressed improperly, but I thought it was worth it to say hi to them. So I start talking, and I knew I was only supposed to talk for like 5 minutes, 10 at the most, and I just couldn't stop talking. That reward urgency- I just thrived, and I got dopamine rushes and endorphin rushes by talking to these people who were interested, and, you know, believed in me as their leader and that kind of thing. So I kept talking and talking, didn't realize that I had gone on for about a half an hour, and then finally the president pulled me aside and said, “Hey, sir, we gotta start the meeting. You gotta go home and get ready for your trip. Thanks a lot, that was great.” Everybody clapped, and I walked out the door.
Well then, I start seeing students and faculty members and interns and administrative staff, and I was so charged up that there was this this positive urgency that I had to talk more, and I had to say hi to everybody. And I had to tell them about Global Security University and how it was the key to world peace, and this was the a brilliant idea that was gonna take National Defense University and the Department of Defense to the next level. And I literally roamed around the half dozen college university buildings, just going into classrooms and taking over and giving a little lecture. And this went on. I didn't have my cell phone with me. I lost total track of time. I didn't really know where I was. I just knew I was loving it, and I was having a blast, and I was so happy and so intensely manic.
Then suddenly my aide, who was a young naval officer, he came running up to me, said, “Sir, I've been looking for you for hours. I had no idea where you were. Maggie's been calling me. She doesn’t know where you are. She's in a panic because you were supposed to leave hours ago on your trip. Sir, you have to come with me.” And he grabbed me, and he basically dragged me back to our house, which was on the base thankfully. And Maggie was furious. She was so mad at me. We were supposed to leave at 9, it's now 4pm. We have a long drive in front of us, and now we have rush hour traffic in Washington, DC. And she's like, “I can't believe you did that. That's so rude. That's so inconsiderate.” And now I'm trying to avoid the negative urgency of getting yelled at by my wonderful wife. And my son Connor was there. He's like, dad, I can't believe you did that. That was so selfish and so wrong. Finally, I said, well, I have to go pack for the trip and get some food; I'm starved because I hadn't eaten all day. And Maggie said, “No, I've got food in the car, and I've got clothes for you. Just get in.”
We started driving, and things kind of settled down. Then I started furiously doing stuff on my phone. Just tons of emails and messages and calling people. And then the phone started running out of juice. I said, oh, my god. I have to have a phone. I'm a 2 star general. I'm the president of NDU. I said, you have to pull over at this place, and I need a new phone charger for the car. So then that killed another 20 to 30 minutes, but I got it. Then, I'm doing my texting and everything, and there was road construction and now we're in a huge traffic jam. Maggie's following the rules in the traffic, and I said, get off the road! Go into that construction road, just go, pass all these cars. I was just so urgent that I said, if you're not gonna do it, I'll do it. Let me drive. And she said, “no, the cops will pull us over.” And I said, yeah, let them pull us over. I'll tell him I'm a general, and I'm going to a graduation at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and they'll let us go. She said, “you're crazy; they won't let us go.” We finally drove all the way there. I was mostly manic. I had totally succumbed to all the urgency, it had completely disrupted the social rhythm, and then it completely annihilated my circadian rhythm because I didn't sleep for 10 seconds that night. I was up all night, out power walking to the gym early, talking to people on the phone. We missed my son's graduation party. We made it to his graduation the next day, but the trip was a terrible fiasco.
06:30 Voiceover:
Listen in throughout the month of November to hear more stories from General Martin and learn more about the valuable role everyday people- and some not-so-everyday people- play in informing better mental health interventions, approaches to care and teaching us how we can be more supportive friends, family and neighbors.