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Destigmatizing Bipolar Disorder

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The word bipolar is, like narcissism, thrown around a lot these days. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve been asked, “Are you fucking bipolar or something?” when I’d get annoyed over smelly socks on the floor or not feeling like going out on a given night or just suffering from the monthly hormonal shit. And to be completely honest, I’ve referred to my car’s heater as bipolar (you digitally set it at a certain temperature, but man, 78 degrees is definitely not consistent in my old lady mobile).

Bipolar disorder is really not something to joke about, though. Once called manic depressants, those who live a bipolar life have a tough go of it, usually depending on medication and psychiatry to maintain some semblance of a normal life. This might be especially true of …

… celebrities, who often live under a veritable microscope.

And I was really surprised to see some of the names on Everyday Health’s recent piece, “9 Famous People With Bipolar Disorder.”

Vivien Leigh
Best known for her iconic Oscar-winning role as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, Vivien Leigh also captured the public’s attention with her marriage to fellow actor Laurence Olivier. However, Leigh was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and her unpredictable behavior eventually ruined her professional reputation and destroyed her marriage to Olivier. “In her day there were no pills, there were no clinics, there were no publicists, there was nobody between Vivien and an outside world which she found chilly, hostile, and sometimes, because of her mental state, could not cope with,” said her friend Sheridan Morley in a BBC documentary.

This is not meant to be a joke, I swear, but I always thought that Scarlett O’Hara was a trifle bipolar … for some reason, that made it more understandable to me that Vivien Leigh also suffered from it.

Carrie Fisher
Carrie Fisher’s portrayal of Princess Leia in the original Star Wars trilogy turned her into a pop-culture icon. However, partly due to her tumultuous childhood, she struggled with drug and alcohol addictions. In her early 20s Fisher was told she was hypomanic, but she didn’t believe her doctor. Over time, however, she came to terms with her condition and became a bestselling author in the process, writing books such as Postcards From the Edge and Surrender the Pink. Becoming a mother was the impetus for this change. “Prior to having a child, I really did feel, it’s my business if I wanted to stop my medications,” she told bp Magazine. “I no longer feel that’s so.”

Like Fisher, a lot of bipolars use alcohol and drugs to pretty much self-regulate a condition they don’t even know they have. It’s really scary when you think about it.

Jean-Claude Van Damme
[Van Damme] was divorced four times, charged with spousal abuse, and addicted to cocaine. However, things started to come together after his diagnosis of rapid-cycling bipolar. He told E! Online, “You just have to take a little salt [the drug sodium valproate], and since I’m doing that it’s, like, BOOM! In one week, I felt it kick in. All the commotion around me, all the water around me, moving left and right around me, became like a lake.”

To give Van Damme credit, it’s rare and refreshing to see a guy publicly admit to having mental illness. I wish he hadn’t beaten his wifeves on his way to the realization though …

Linda Hamilton
Actress Linda Hamilton is best known for her role as Sarah Connor in Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Hamilton struggled with symptoms of bipolar disorder for 20 years, a time she calls the lost years, before overcoming it. Though she initially worried that treatment would diminish her talents, she is now on medication and speaks openly about being bipolar. “Somebody needs to come out and make this okay for people to talk about and get help and take advantage of the resources,” she told the Associated Press.

Interesting how, once so many of these celebs have their shit together, they are willing to speak out about the importance of medication … it’s a valuable lesson.

Sinéad O’Connor
Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor often made headlines in the late ’80s and ’90s with her Grammy-winning songs and rebellious attitude. O’Connor talked openly about living with this condition on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2007. “Every pore of you is crying and you don’t even understand why or what,” she said. “I actually kind of died and got born again as a result of taking the meds and having a chance to, you know, build a life.”

Love her music, thought she was off-the-wall, and once again impressed by a famous name undergoing treatment and then sharing her story.

Jane Pauley
At the age of 50 Pauley began experiencing episodes of depression and mania. It is thought that steroids used to treat hives kick-started her symptoms, which were diagnosed as bipolar disorder. She describes her experiences in her bestselling memoir, Skywriting: A Life Out of the Blue. “If we’re lucky the next generation won’t drag around that personal stigma,” she told bp Magazine. “They also are going to grow up with a wider array of medications that addresses whatever causes this malady of ours.”

So, yeah, maybe you can wake up one day being bipolar. Jane Pauley gives us a good reason to keep an eye on our older friends and relatives as well.

Also mentioned are names from the past such as painter Vincent van Gogh and writer Virginia Woolf, both of whom exhibited symptoms of bipolar disorder but lived in a time when the condition was neither identified nor understood … and both committed suicide, van Gogh with a gun and Woolf loading her pockets with stones and walking into a river (and incidentally, it’s a good thing that this didn’t happen in today’s sue-happy time or Woolf’s relatives would have had hard-core lawsuits against William Shakespeare because of Ophelia’s suicide-by-drowning … can you believe that Hamlet isn’t a universally banned book?).

Bipolar disorder should not be a dirty secret, and sufferers should receive treatment instead of descending into spirals of drug abuse, violence, sexual promiscuity, or even suicide. I applaud these celebs for speaking out about this all too prevalent condition, and I very much hope that their words and experiences can make a difference for anyone who may have bipolar disorder.


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