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A clinical psychologist explores the American pervasiveness of hypomania, a genetically based, mild form of mania that endows certain people with high energy, creativity, and a propensity for risk-taking, in a study that identifies historical figures whose achievements may have been enabled by the condition.

About Author: John Gartner

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Case Studies

Jim Clark

Jim Clark, cofounder of Netscape, was described in Business Week by Netscape’s other cofounder, Jim Barksdale, as “a maniac who has his mania only partly under control.”1 In The New New Thing, Michael Lewis profiled Clark as a perpetual motion machine with a short attention span, forever hurtling at unsafe speeds in helicopters, planes, boats, and cars. When his forward motion is impeded, Clark becomes irritable and bored. In his search for the stimulation of the “new new thing,” he quickly loses interest in the companies he founds and tosses them into the laps of his bewildered employees. His Netscape IPO is credited with starting the Internet gold rush. After that it seemed he could do no wrong. When he pitched a new company, Healtheon, a medical Web site, his only business plan was a diagram with five words. His “magic diamond” put Healtheon at the center of four vertices labeled “doctors, consumers, providers, and payers.” That was it. His magic diamond, he claimed, was going to “fix the U.S. health care system.”2 It was going to be “bigger than Microsoft, AOL, Netscape and Yahoo!” As Lewis wrote, “Any other human being would have been thrown into an asylum for thinking such grandiose thoughts.”3 Those who followed Clark had faith in his messianic mission. “There was a feeling that we were about to change the world,” said one of Healtheon’s chief engineers.4

It is a temperament characterized by an elevated mood state that feels “highly intoxicating, powerful, productive and desirable” to the hypomanic, according to Frederick K. Goodwin and Kay Redfield Jamison, authors of the definitive nine-hundred-page Manic-Depressive Illness.7 Most hypomanics describe it as their happiest and healthiest state; they feel creative, energetic, and alive. A hypomanic only has a bipolar disorder if hypomania alternates, at some point in life, with major depression. This pattern, first identified only in 1976, is called bipolar disorder type II to distinguish it from bipolar disorder type I, the classic manic-depressive illness, which has been well known since the time of the ancient Greeks. If a hypomanic seeks outpatient treatment it is usually for depression, and he will define recovery as a return to his old energetic self. Not all hypomanics cycle down into depression. What goes up can stay up. Thus, we cannot conclude that someone has a psychiatric disorder just because he may be hypomanic. The most we can say is that hypomanics are at much greater risk for depression than the average population. The things most likely to make them depressed are failure, loss, or anything that prevents them from continuing at their preferred breakneck pace.

Mania = Motivation = Success

Relatives of manic patients, who have high rates of hypomania, have consistently been found to be far above average in income, occupational achievement, and creativity.15 Hypomania gives them an edge over the competition. If there is any one trait that distinguishes highly successful people, it is that they are, by temperament, highly motivated. From our studies of the brain we now know that mood is an intrinsic part of the apparatus that controls motivation. Mood is meant either to facilitate or inhibit action. When someone is depressed, he has no motivation to act. What’s the point? Nothing seems worth doing, he has no energy to do it, and it probably won’t work anyway. Hypomania is the polar opposite. The drives that motivate behavior surge to a screaming pitch, making the urgency of action irresistible. There isn’t a minute to waste—this is going to be huge—just do it!"

The Bipolar Religious Experience

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James studied the spiritual memoirs of figures such as Saint Augustine, Ignatius Loyola, Martin Luther, George Fox, John Bunyan, and Jonathan Edwards. He found a consistent pattern: The protagonist of each salvation narrative began in a state of severe depression, which was relieved by an exhilarating revelatory illumination, achieving heights of ecstasy “equal in amplitude” to their previous depths of depression.1 James likened these religiously transformed individuals to cases of “circular insanity,” an antiquated term for manic depression.2 For James, this did not invalidate religious experience. Instead, it elevated mood disorders into a potentially beneficial experience. Whereas modern psychiatrists describe depression as an illness that distorts perception, James argued the opposite. Depression, he felt, forced one to face the deepest existential truths of sin, suffering, evil, and death, which the more superficial “healthy minded” are able to deny. Depression can transform people into seekers of ultimate truth. The influence of James’s insights has been unrivaled. Written in 1902, this classic book is still the most frequently cited work in the psychology of religion.

Side Effect: Poor Judgment

The combination of extreme zeal, odd ideas, and poor judgment is the classic presentation of the hypomanic. Such individuals stir up controversy in any organization as they aggressively seek converts to their idiosyncratic way of thinking. They try, often in dramatic fashion, to take charge of the group and change its mission.

Dissent → Ascent

The standard hypomanic response to opposition is to speed up, escalate, crank up the volume.

Hypomanic Desire Attention

Hypomanics are driven to call attention to themselves. They crave attention, not only for the considerable pleasure it brings them, but because one must be noticed to advance.

Creativity

Great entrepreneurs often do not create original ideas—they grasp the significance of an idea, wherever it comes from, and leap on it with everything they have.

Support System

Behind every successful hypomanic entrepreneur there stands a long-suffering person of normal temperament who must counterbalance and compensate for his excesses.

Highlights

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Hypomania is a mild form of mania, often found in the relatives of manic depressives. Hypomanics are brimming with infectious energy, irrational confidence, and really big ideas. They think, talk, move, and make decisions quickly. Anyone who slows them down with questions “just doesn’t get it.” Hypomanics are not crazy, but “normal” is not the first word that comes to mind when describing them. Hypomanics live on the edge, betweeen normal and abnormal.

Book Summary & Highlights: The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America By John Gartner