Back in the eighties me and a friend of mine, a manic depressive personality ( as it was current then to call them then) named Richard Morgan, would enjoy weekly bar room chats where we discussed high philosophy, low cabbages and middling Kings. Richard had an easy manner about him and was well liked by all. Once he told me about his periodic bouts where he felt acute alienation from his immediate surroundings, this, he said, was characteristic of some forms of manic depression. He said that during these spells he felt no point of reference to an interrelated existence with the external world. He said that this was a feeling that was beyond death that had no words. He said that the clinical term was "deja va" and his psychiatrist had said that it had an exact opposite meaning of deja vu.
The last time I saw Richard he was drinking Jack Daniels with tears in his eyes. He kept saying, "Why! "Why not a void!" And if you fine people were there to hear the wail of his tormented soul, you would beg for balm, and give a dollar or so to the church.
Richard died young with a heart attack, abetted by the mix of his manic depression medications with alcohol.
I've checked the medical dictionaries before and after WO'N posed this question and can't find the term listed. But I know this; At that time and place Richard Morgan visited hell many times, and Richard and his psychiatrist knew that hell as "deja va".
