I'm curious what kind of drugs were involved. Crazy chick, traveling the world, doing shamanistic rituals (which often use drugs), sleep depriving oneself until hallucinating, etc.
He doesn't say it outright but had he not taken part in these damaging things, he may not have had the psychotic episode and wouldn't know he was bipolar.
I thought this too, I won't deny it. I suppose two counterpoints would be:
1) If you really can work days and days on end without feeling tired or feeling the need for sleep (as someone who works very, very excessive hours, I can safely say I spend most of that time yearning for my bed), in all likelihood you are going to come crashing down at some point;
2) You can definitely start hallucinating purely from lack of sleep, after "only" a couple of days, without the assistance of any hallucinogenic drugs.
I've never done illegal drugs, but for years suffered with depression and occasional had "amazingly productive" periods.
After one particularly bad bout of depression, I decided to see a doctor. One of her questions was something to the effect, "Has anyone ever accused you of having been on drugs when you weren't?"
The funny thing is, during one of my previous "amazingly productive" periods, I had a coworker who -point blank- told me she was convinced that I was on drugs. I just felt high on life and told her as much.
The doctor ultimately diagnosed me as bi-polar, and we found a drug that would reduce the depression and not trigger hypermania or manic episodes (apparently a common problem with drugs that treat regular depression is that they can exacerbate bi-polar).
Fast forward a few years and I had to have knee surgery. Thankfully, my mother was taking care of me and knew I had been diagnosed bi-polar, but I'd never had a full blown manic, so she didn't know what that looked like. It took three days for her to realize what was wrong, but almost immediately after the surgery I had slipped into a full-blown manic. In the end, it turned out the pain medication and the bi-polar medication combined were triggering the manic episode.
I've since had to have several other surgeries and have learned that strong pain killers have a tendency to trigger manic episodes in me. In a way I'm lucky, because I've never gotten addicted to any pain killer, and I'm coherent enough to let my providers know whether I need manic-inducing pain killers (i.e. I rather be manic than in that much pain), whether I can take less effective pain killers that don't trigger manic episodes, and when I can just suck up the pain.
So, yes, drugs can trigger episodes, but it isn't necessarily illegal or 'bad' drugs that do so.
1) If you really can work days and days on end without feeling tired or feeling the need for sleep (as someone who works very, very excessive hours, I can safely say I spend most of that time yearning for my bed), in all likelihood you are going to come crashing down at some point;
2) You can definitely start hallucinating purely from lack of sleep, after "only" a couple of days, without the assistance of any hallucinogenic drugs.