What is Mania?

Mania is a symptom of something going wrong in your head. Mania is what happens when, metaphorically, your brain 'catches fire'. Just as fire produces heat, and heat causes more things to combust, once the brain veers into mania, that mania precipitates more mania, until the entirety of your Mind goes up in smoke. Something like that.

But just as a real fire is a 'symptom' of the cause of events leading to it, so mania is likewise a symptom of some Mind/brain process that leads to it. I'll discuss this issue more in detail in the mania≠mania page here.

Mania and Psychosis

When your brain 'catches fire', that fire can dominate everything within your Mind. This can easily lead to you becoming detached from 'normal reality', hence what is called psychosis. Like mania, I consider psychosis to be a symptom of 'something that went wrong', much as a 'segment violation' error is a symptom of something going wrong in a program.

Causes

Just as merely knowing that a fire has happened is not enough to infer what led to the fire, knowing that something is considered 'mania' or 'psychosis' is likely not enough to infer its cause. Moreover, even with same person, mania and psychosis may be reached by multiple routes. In a sense, the route into mania is different every time, what in homage to The Chronicles of Narnia, I call the Narnia Principle that: "You never find your way to mania in the same way twice".

How Do I Understand Mania?

I'll write my thoughts on separate pages. For now see Understanding Mania 1.