I often try to picture that.

I understand that creativity, depression (used to be called dejection, despondence, melancholy, among other terms), suicidality, dark thoughts, feeling on top of the world, anxiety, impulsivity, rage and irritability, dysphoria and euphoria are states that do not depend much on how we live in the modern world.

But what about shopping sprees? Say, if you were a bipolar person living on a farm and producing your own food and sewing or mending your own clothes, where would that spree impulse take you?

I also understand that some of the stressors of the modern lifestyles and some of its aspects are conducive to bipolar - e.g. most of us (except for those living on Manhattan without a car) do not have exercise built into their routines by way of necessity - we have to commit to exercising instead. If you have to walk a mile to get drinking water, there is your minimum exercise and you do not have to even think about it. So to the extent to which exercise relieves depression and anxiety, the rural living was better. There was less sensory stimulation... no noisy stores... etc.

but still, the illness is powerful and we know that it was present in the past. I have not yet red Touched with Fire, but it is partly about how bipolar was experienced in the past.

And there were no medications.

So what did people do to channel that hypomanic energy in the absence of stores? Did they take on many crafts projects only to abandon them when hypomanic state would subside?

Or the impulse to start risky ventures. Say, an Egyptian slave could not start any ventures. So how did the symptoms manifest in a slave?

Does anybody else wonder out loud about that?

When I was pregnant with my daughter Julia, there was a problem during the pregnancy that would have necessitated a C-section. The problem resolved by itself shortly before term and I delivered vaginally. But during those months when I thought I would NEED a C-section (not opt for one, but NEED), I realized that had I lived a long time ago in a rural area, I would have had only a few months left to live.

I guess after that I am given to speculating about how I or other people I know, under different circumstances, would have lived if born in the past.