Aaina Singh
(Overall Bonus)
The PBS documentary I
chose to watch for this blog post is titled “Living with Bipolar Disorder” (see
link attached below) and it’s a conversation between American screenwriter
& director Paul Dalio – who has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and clinical
psychologist Dr. Jeffrey Borenstein, MD for a television series called Healthy Minds.
I chose to watch it initially out of sheer curiosity about what goes on in the
mind of a person with Bipolar disorder but it actually ended up raising some
intriguing questions in my mind about the perception of the disorder and its
relationship with creativity and artistic ability.
The conversation between
Borenstein and Dalio started off with them talking about his movie Touched with Fire, which is a story
about two people with bipolar who fall in love with each other at a medical
care facility. Borenstein asked Dalio what he felt about making a movie so
gravely connected with his own life and experiences, to which the latter
responded that he felt like he was doing something to share his experiences and
those of others with the disorder. He felt that as a consequence of his work,
people started seeing those with Bipolar from “a human lens as opposed to a
clinical lens”.
I found this point particularly
insightful as it made me stop to ponder over the role of art and films in
reducing the stigma around mental disorders. I thought of how listening to the
stories and personal accounts of the likes of Dalio and Kay Jamison through
their films, novels, interviews, etc. actually helps us gain a deeper understanding
of the lives and challenges of those with mental disorders through a first-hand
perspective. I realised how I had come to view disorders mostly from a clinical
perspective, which leads to a very restrictive account of the lives of people
with them, and pushes one once again into the trap of being unable to recognise
that the person is not their disorder. Watching such documentaries seems like a
great solution to this problem. (On this note, perhaps it might be beneficial
to include more documentaries and personal accounts of successful people
diagnosed with disorders as a part of the clinical psychology course in the future.)
Next in their
conversation, Dalio described his experience of hypomania, which I found absolutely
fascinating. He said that in a hypo-manic state all man-made objects start to
have multiple layers of meaning. To illustrate this he presented the example of
how an egg suddenly seems like the origin of life and the yolk becomes the sun.
He described how his eyes would start darting from one symbolic/mythological
meaning to another, interweaving them all to create one gigantic narrative.
He then went on to talk
about his depressive episodes and spoke about how it’s not pain that one
experiences, on the contrary he claimed that you actually miss pain and all you
feel is an abyss. A dark black and blue abyss. This reminded me of the point
professor too had made in class that the popular misconception is that people
who are depressed feel sad but actually they feel empty. Author Andrew Solomon
who wrote the book The Noonday Demon too
makes this point and claims it is a poverty of the English language that one
uses the word depressed to express the feeling of a lost football match just as
one uses it to describe this disorder.
Next, Dalio went on to provide insight into why people who experience depression and mood disorders in general
seem to sleep so much. He explained that the first thing one does is to try to
escape reality by sleeping. But it doesn’t really help because at some point
you wake up and realise you’re still alive in this life, and once that
realisation kicks in, whatever energy your brain has left is spent fighting the
thoughts of committing suicide and ending your life. Thus, it seems that their
lived reality feels so heavy and cumbersome to people with mood disorders that
they look for ways to escape it, ranging from sleeping to wanting to commit
suicide.
An interesting point that
their conversation raised was about how tricky it is to be able to distinguish
between the onset of a hypomanic episode and a regular/general state of feeling
happy/up. Borenstein asked Dalio what he does in such a situation and the
latter very candidly told him that it can indeed be very difficult, especially
because one does not feel like toning oneself down when one is experiencing a
high or happy moment. However, he said he usually relies on help from his loved
ones, particularly his wife who knows him very well and can distinguish between
his behaviour during a hypomanic onset and a general sense of elation. This
illustrated further the importance of social support and loving care from kith
and kin for those with mental disorders. It also further reinforced the notion
that people with mental disorders are fully capable of maintaining happy and
successful relationships provided they seek appropriate therapy, take their
medications, and maintain a healthy life.
The last and in my
opinion most compelling point the documentary raised was about the way Bipolar
affected Dalio as an artist and creative personnel. Dalio quoted Kay Jamison,
an American clinical psychologist and writer who herself has the same disorder
as saying “There’s no artist I’ve met that isn’t better after the diagnosis
than they were before it”. Thus, Dalio actually seemed to see his disorder in a
very positive light, claiming that it was perhaps providing him with a benefit
in some way. To this Borenstein wondered whether Dalio worries that his
treatment and medications will take away his gift or benefits. Dalio explained
that even though he saw his disorder as something that is potentially giving
him a creative edge, he also recognised that the only way to maintain it and
extract benefits was by keeping the disorder in check and maintaining a very
healthy lifestyle.
When asked if Dalio
misses his mania, he replied saying he creates works of his mania in order to
sustain it. By creating pieces that capture his experience and sharing them
with others he manages to hold on to the aspects of his mania that he found favourable.
This in turn means that he doesn’t miss the mania and can focus instead on
ensuring that disorder doesn’t get out of hand and stays in check.
The documentary thus provides
a refreshing lens through which one can look at Bipolar disorder, as not a
problematic and debilitating issue but rather as a potential tool that enables
one to have experiences that are away from the ordinary and create works that
may be awe-inspiringly creative for others…provided one ensures regulation and
proper treatment of it.
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