Bipolar & Multiple Personality: In “All That” by David Foster Wallace, a boy hears autonomous voices with distinct personalities, and sometimes feels ecstatic.

If this posthumous short story (1) were autobiographical, it might indicate a dual diagnosis with a childhood onset: 1. bipolar disorder, with a manic phase described as “ecstatic,” and 2. multiple personality, with at least two alternate personalities, described as rational, autonomous voices. These two conditions would later have been complicated by drug and alcohol abuse, all ending in suicide.

from “All That”

“I ‘heard voices’ all the time as a small child. I was either five or six, I believe…the ‘voices’ I heard as a child never worried me or caused me to fear that something was wrong with me…

“My surfeit of religious interest also had to do with the frequency and tenor of the ‘voices’ I regularly heard as a child (meaning up until roughly age thirteen, as I recall it). The major reason that I was never frightened about the voices…involved the fact that the childhood ‘voices’ (there were two of them, each distinct in timbre and personality) never spoke of anything that wasn’t good, happy, and reassuring…these voices were—or appeared to me as—entirely real and autonomous phenomena…with manners of speech and accent that nothing in my childhood experience had exposed me to or prepared me in any way to ‘make up’ or combine from outside sources…Indeed, one of the voices’ favorite topics consisted in their assuring me that it was of no importance whether I believed they were ‘real’ or simply parts of myself, since—as one of the voices in particular liked to stress—there was nothing in the whole world as ‘real’ as I was. I should concede that in some ways I regarded—or ‘counted on’—the voices as another set of parents…and yet also as fellow-children: meaning that I had no doubt that they and I lived in the very same world and that they ‘understood’ me in a way that biological adults were incapable of…

“Sometimes the experience of the voices was ecstatic…the experience of the real but unobservable and unexplainable ‘voices’ and the ecstatic feelings they often aroused doubtless contributed to my reverence for magic and my faith that magic not only permeated the everyday world but did so in a way that was thoroughly benign and altruistic and wished me well…” (1).

Bipolar disorder, substance abuse, and multiple personality can be a lethal (suicidal) combination, especially if the multiple personality is never diagnosed and addressed. Of course, I don’t know that this short story was autobiographical. It was published as fiction.

1. David Foster Wallace. “All That.” The New Yorker, December 14, 2009. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/12/14/all-that-2