When manic-depressive persons are in their manic state they don't sleep much and sleep depravation might even improve their feeling of being on top of everything.

I think that the normal 'mild' manic depressive cycle is a built in feature of evolution. A person under constant depression is unable to do things and won't survive. A person who is happy all the time will not change things. Therefore nature produces an artificial depression which forces a person to reassess the current situation and look for improvements.

Excessive manic behavior is a vicious cycle of rewarding events happening in a closed positive event chain. You only need one positive entry object to land in the closed manic chain circle. The automatic repetition of the rewarding events automatically raises their importance to be dealt with next. This means the longer you stay in the chain the lower the chance to escape.

Although the events in the manic chain produce tiredness this is overruled by the importance of the event in respect to the reward. Sleep depravation accelerates this process.

Because dreaming is also limited to the manic chain events the amount of sleep required is shortened in comparison to normal sleep.

A typical pattern in manic behavior is repetition. The repetition makes the manic cycle events so important that all other recognition are more and more suppressed. The lack of sleep prevents the normal reloading of the recognition chains for the senses which means that a manic person cannot properly react to normal communication.

When the situation gets extreme the manic person will go into the reward cycle stay in there for about 20 minutes and then pass into a completely passive state of confusion in which nothing is recognized. This seems to be a complete resonance breakdown similar to unconsciousness.

The person will return into the manic cycle after about 5 to 10 minutes. It seems to me that this is a period of forced disengagement, a sort of a fuse blown to enable the brain to recharge. I assume that because only a short time after this period (when the person stops staring into nowhere) there is a little time window in which you can reach them through communication.

The only thing to stop the cycle is medication that forces a long sleep and further medication that suppresses rewarding resonator chains. Because this cannot be done locally it will affect the whole brain, making the person's life locking dull. The biggest mistake is to stop medication too soon. The person will be invariably back in the manic cycle in a short time.

The best therapy is to reflect on the entry points of the manic cycle - which are always a rewarding event. To think about the entry event brings it into the conscious part and allows a person to make a decision that reduces the importance of the entry event.

WARNING

Experiences made in meditation can be very rewarding. To improve the reward some teachers use depravation of other senses (speech, eating etc..). I recommend seriously to stay away from these harsh methods. In advanced monasteries students never start meditation before they have learned what it is all about - and that may take 2 to 3 years - for a good reason.

If a student takes meditation too seriously - and we Westerners want to do everything perfect within the minim time frame - this can end up in a manic event chain that requires hospitalization or in many cases (the 'milder' version) causes deep depressions after a meditation course. Students get depressed because they unsuccessfully try to remain in the high alert state, not knowing that this is impossible.

A teacher with little experience in teaching meditation will not be able to recognize the danger before it is too late. It will rather be the other way round. He will at first be delighted by the progress of his student and the efficiency of his method, until he finds out that his student landed in the closed unit of a psychiatric hospital. Of course he will not blame himself or his method, but the innocent student that trusted him.