Living with bipolar: 'I felt elated, super-pumped ... and then walked onto a motorway'

Date: Wednesday 23 Aug 2017

Brother Dan Keeley hopes to encourage men to talk about their mental health

"I don't want to be an evangelist for bipolar," says Dan Keeley, "but it was an enjoyable experience. It's almost like euphoria. But it comes with a price."

Five years after he thought he was the Messiah and a few weeks before he begins a charity run that will take him from Rome to London, Dan is telling me his story, communicating with real vividity what it is like to inhabit a bipolar mind.

''I started taking off my clothes, down to my khaki shorts, walking down the slow lane''

He tells me how he was always enthusiastic, always positive, delighted in 2012 to get a job in ski tourism. He developed a conviction that he could be helping people, that he should be helping people. He forgot to eat, forgot to sleep, frothed with ideas. Recounting his story, Dan speaks in soft-spoken, rhythmic sentences that build slowly but mesmerisingly.

 At a glance | Bipolar disorder
Bipolar disorder was formerly known as manic depression
The illness affects 1 in 100 adults in the UK
Bipolar is most commonly diagnosed between the ages of 18 and 24
The condition affects mood, thinking and energy levels; from mania, feeling high and full of energy, to depression with low and lethargic feelings
Symptoms of mania include not eating or sleeping, and making poor decisions on impulse
Bipolar moods are intense and can last for weeks, differentiating this from a simple bad mood

"In 2012 it started ramping up to another level, and my friends and family thought, 'Dan's just on it, yeah, he's just taken it up a gear, that's all it is’, so it wasn't until 2012 that it started to ramp up, and it's almost like Red Bull is sort of pumping through your body, you feel really kind of elated, and positive, like Carrie in Homeland, super-pumped, and all of my senses were heightened and all the rest of it. It's basically between January 2012 and that summer up until June, it was just six months of everything just dialing up and dialing up."

That June, Dan was on holiday in Italy with his then-fiancée, Georgie, and his self-belief became ever more outsized. With his friends and family warning him to slow down, he led her from hotel to hotel, buying wine for every room, telling her he was the next Steve Jobs and that he was going to change the world. Georgie knew she had to get him to a hospital, but she wasn't insured on their car. Dan had to drive, and under a blaze of Italian sunshine, he lost his mind on the motorway.

“I was saying: ‘I need to change the world now, I need to get this out of my system, if I don’t I’m going to explode,’ and then I scramble out of the car, and then I'm basically walking down the hard shoulder. It was crazy, Tom, I started taking off my clothes, down to my khaki shorts, walking down the slow lane.”

The traffic backed up for five miles as Dan stood in the way, addressing each stationary driver with injunctions to follow their hearts. “I can still picture the faces, people in their cars being like: ‘What are you doing?!’

“I started letting one car go at a time, and it cuts me up thinking about Georgie having no idea what was going on, because there’s no trace of it in my family or anything like that.”

''Dan fell into a depression so deep he considered taking his own life''

 The “it”, he knows now, was bipolar disorder. The “mania” stage ended with the arrival of ambulances and a sedated trip to an Italian psychiatric ward. Dan spent two weeks there, heavily drugged and drifting between perkiness and confusion, before being repatriated to a south London hospital.

“When I came out, that’s when the really low mood started to kick in. From the second half of 2012, I was in this really desperately dark place, where I’d had so much conviction but then felt like I was a complete burden on society, and I didn’t trust myself. It was just a really confusing, horrible time.”

Dan fell into a depression so deep he considered taking his own life. “I got to the point where I put my trainers on to go and recce where I was going to do it. Fortunately, I didn’t have the energy to leave the house.”

Georgie would go to work each day (Dan, unable to do the same, had been given time off) and come back to find him still despondent, still in bed. “If you can just go up the road to Sainsbury’s to buy some milk and some cereal,” she told him one morning, “I’ll be so proud of you.”

After hours of pressing the snooze button, Dan dragged himself to the shop, but found the choice and stimulation so debilitating that he spent 45 minutes trying to choose between Cornflakes and Bran Flakes.

“It was ridiculous. I couldn’t make a choice. So I made a decision in that moment that I needed to completely start again.”

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