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The Highs and Lows of Paul Dalio

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.

Please do check out this documentary when you can and I also highly recommend watching Dalio's film Touched with Fire when you feel like taking a break from this stressful finals week!

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