Jeff Climbs On Rooftops

In late 2021, Jeff Brown joined the Bipolar Recorder podcast for a long conversation about what it’s like to live above and below normal mood — and to keep working anyway.

The episode title gives away the through-line: a manic episode in which Jeff literally climbed onto rooftops, the kind of story most bipolar people only tell each other in private. The Bipolar Recorder is one of the few spaces where it gets said out loud, on the record, without a sanitizing frame.

Over the hour, the conversation covers hospitalizations, the difference between a bipolar I and bipolar II story arc, and the working version of equality — what it means to keep a career while a brain runs at altitudes most workplaces aren’t built for.