Living with bipolar: 'I felt elated, super-pumped ... and then walked onto a motorway'

"I don't want to be an evangelist for bipolar," says Dan Keeley, "but it was an enjoyable experience. It's almost like euphoria. But it comes with a price."

Five years after he thought he was the Messiah and a few weeks before he begins a charity run that will take him from Rome to London, Dan is telling me his story, communicating with real vividity what it is like to inhabit a bipolar mind.

He tells me how he was always enthusiastic, always positive, delighted in 2012 to get a job in ski tourism. He developed a conviction that he could be helping people, that he should be helping people. He forgot to eat, forgot to sleep, frothed with ideas. Recounting his story, Dan speaks in soft-spoken, rhythmic sentences that build slowly but mesmerisingly.

"In 2012 it started ramping up to another level, and my friends and family thought, 'Dan's just on it, yeah, he's just taken it up a gear, that's all it is’, so it wasn't until 2012 that it started to ramp up, and it's almost like Red Bull is sort of pumping through your body, you feel really kind of elated, and positive, like Carrie in Homeland, super-pumped, and all of my senses were heightened and all the rest of it. It's basically between January 2012 and that summer up until June, it was just six months of everything just dialling up and dialling up."

That June, Dan was on holiday in Italy with his then-fiancée, Georgie, and his self-belief became ever more outsized. With his friends and family warning him to slow down, he led her from hotel to hotel, buying wine for every room, telling her he was the next Steve Jobs and that he was going to change the world. Georgie knew she had to get him to hospital, but she wasn't insured on their car. Dan had to drive, and under a blaze of Italian sunshine, he lost his mind on the motorway.

“I was saying: ‘I need to change the world now, I need to get this out of my system, if I don’t I’m going to explode,’ and then I scramble out of the car, and then I'm basically walking down the hard shoulder. It was crazy, Tom, I started taking off my clothes, down to my khaki shorts, walking down the slow lane.”

The traffic backed up for five miles as Dan stood in the way, addressing each stationary driver with injunctions to follow their hearts. “I can still picture the faces, people in their cars being like: ‘What are you doing?!’

“I started letting one car go at a time, and it cuts me up thinking about Georgie having no idea what was going on, because there’s no trace of it in my family or anything like that.”

The “it”, he knows now, was bipolar disorder. The “mania” stage ended with the arrival of ambulances and a sedated trip to an Italian psychiatric ward. Dan spent two weeks there, heavily drugged and drifting between perkiness and confusion, before being repatriated to a south London hospital.

“When I came out, that’s when the really low mood started to kick in. From the second half of 2012, I was in this really desperately dark place, where I’d had so much conviction but then felt like I was a complete burden on society, and I didn’t trust myself. It was just a really confusing, horrible time.”

Dan fell into a depression so deep he considered taking his own life. “I got to the point where I put my trainers on to go and recce where I was going to do it. Fortunately I didn’t have the energy to leave the house.”

Georgie would go to work each day (Dan, unable to do the same, had been given time off) and come back to find him still despondent, still in bed. “If you can just go up the road to Sainsbury’s to buy some milk and some cereal,” she told him one morning, “I’ll be so proud of you.”

After hours of pressing the snooze button, Dan dragged himself to the shop, but found the choice and stimulation so debilitating that he spent 45 minutes trying to choose between Cornflakes and Bran Flakes.

“It was ridiculous. I couldn’t make a choice. So I made a decision in that moment that I needed to completely start again.”

He discarded invitations to do part-time work, invitations to stag parties, and focused instead on simply trying to leave the house every day. He gradually built up to jogging, and explained his predicament to his friends and family. He paid regular visits to his counsellor, who guided him to a better understanding of his changing moods, and worked out which medications were working and which weren’t.

In January 2013, Dan went back to work. “I’ve been in a really positive place more or less since then,” he says. “I do have slight fluctuations, but I’m pretty aware of when they're coming. Sleeping is really important, making sure that I'm eating enough is important, and so is being wary of spending a lot of time in the sun.

“You know, it's taken time, but now, like five years on from 2012, I'm feeling in the best place I've ever been in my life.”

In 2014, Georgie went from his fiancée to wife. “There was so much love over the course of that wedding weekend. It was a real celebration of arriving at that point together”.  Settled again at home, at work, and in his mental health, Dan, now 32, will next week embark on a 1,250-mile sponsored run from Rome, the scene of his breakdown, back to the UK.

It will take more than two months and will require him to cover about 20 miles a day, staying in hostels when possible and a lightweight tent when not. “I hope to play my part in normalising the conversation surrounding mental health issues,” Dan says, “to give hope to others suffering out there, to thank all the incredible people who have supported me over the past five years, and above all else to encourage others, particularly guys, to speak up when they’re struggling the most.”

Running 1,250 miles might sound like a similar struggle. But as far as Dan’s concerned, if he can choose between Bran Flakes and Cornflakes, he can do anything.

Dan sets off on Friday August 25. You can sponsor him here.