LE BAS, James

Beyond Bipolar

Imagine that you wake overseas one night and think you are in hell. In this darkness you fight oriental demons and dodge laser beams. You are strapped to the bed of a baffling building, tended by people you don’t recognise. Then imagine you are home again, and that you gradually get better on no medication. You take a year off to travel.

What would you then think and feel? Far from being broken you finish a medical degree and study psychiatry whilst holding on to your secret. Spin forward forty years after a career in community psychiatry. You decide to study and Beyond Bipolar- Ancient Realms New Directions is incepted, about living mood and psychotic disorders from the inside and the outside.

Australian born psychiatrist Dr James Le Bas PhD is the author of Beyond Bipolar, Ancient Realms, New Directions. As a sufferer himself, his career was awakened in a basement ward in Manilla, the first of four hospitalisations for psychosis, depression, and mania. His new book explores the role of ostracism in the determination of what he has termed the tripolar disorders and incorporates the models of Jaak Panksepp and Jeffrey Gray. In his new book he deals with the difficult issues – love, addiction, and loss, as he faces up to the mystery of mental illness, both at large and within himself, with his new mode of understanding – the Tesseract.