HM 506 - Living with Bipolar Disorder

welcome to healthy minds on dr. Jeff gornstein everyone is touched by psychiatric conditions either themselves or a loved one do not suffer in silence with help there is hope today unhealthy Minds I can never summon upwards or compare it to anything that I've experienced to give you a sense Kay Jamison was asked after just after her husband died is the morning of your husband a grief of your husband dying how does that compare to the depression and she said they don't compare depression is just a whole other level but then it went into a full psychosis and that's when it's really clear you go insane and the insanity is not like people really think or understand that's today on healthy minds healthy minds is brought to you in part by the American Psychiatric Association foundation the Graham Beck foundation in the New York State Office of mental health [Music] welcome to healthy minds I'm dr. Jeff Bernstein what is it like to live with bipolar disorder today I speak with filmmaker Paul Dahlia who shares his experiences with this condition his personal journey inspired his first feature film touched with fire I saw myself involuntarily last night yes you can't hospitals for sick people I'm not sick I can understand why you'd be here you look very sick to me there's no life in your face Paul's experience and perspective offers an important message of hope for anyone with bipolar disorder [Music] Paul thank you so much for joining us today it's an honor it's a huge honor I want to start off by asking you what it was like when you made the film touch with fire for you as a person who has bipolar disorder to present what it's like for people living with that condition it was like healing a deeply shared wound with with a lot of people who who go through it and it's it's a it's interesting because when when you go through a trauma that's extremely deep you're kind of forced to bring some kind of meaning and beauty to it to cope with it you know as a way of coping with it and it starts as a self healing thing but then when you when you create the actual story itself you're you're going through the process of trying to understand and bring the beauty and understand you know going what you experienced and you really only could do it after you came out of it because really the process of the film is allowing the character to come out of it to hopefully inspire others to come out of it but to actually in terms of showing what it's like to be bipolar and to have it it was tremendous because even films that I loved I wanted to humanize these people and show them in a way that no one who doesn't have bipolar could understand I felt like there was a huge duty as because there's not any bipolar filmmakers and I know of and you know you can only really convey something in its full depth if you have been in the skin of someone who has it so my biggest joy is when people started telling me they're envious of people with bipolar when they when they kind of rode the manic highs and the gifts and the beauty of it as well as the tragedies of this there was a level of appreciation where they were no longer seeing these people through a clinical lens but they were seeing them through a human lens through a broader perspective of pluses and minuses that any condition can result in for a person exactly and the unique thing about this particular condition that is a huge opportunity for people to see the beauty and the stigma is that there is this huge correlation between the artistic and the emotional brilliance and creativity and and beauty of these people that that goes with the with the condition which is why 30% of Pulitzer prize-winning poets were bipolar and you know why so why there's been Studies on its correlation and so it's it's it's in it's like in shaman cultures that they are the shaman you know the like they're not the sick ones they're the ones who have experienced something which is a little bit outside of the realm of the normal psyche that people in the culture value so it's not only just an opportunity to feel bad for these people or to even you know to pity them or to but it's an opportunity for these people to feel like they're looked up to and it's only when these people feel like they're looked up to and respected will it ever feel like the hell they went through is worth it and will it ever what I will they ever have something of fuel the human spirit because the human spirit isn't satisfied with pity I want to ask you to go back to when you first realized there might be issues that are different than people who don't have this condition when did you first notice symptoms or issues in your life actually the first thing I noticed that was different to be honest was um when I was in college I was at the dramatic writing program the screenwriting program and you know college is when you experiment and you're staying up late you're drinking and doing all kinds of stuff and in with writing you're experimenting with everything with writing and marijuana was one of them and I noticed that for some reason while while other people when they smoke marijuana they're like eat Ben & Jerry's and watch cartoons you know and be completely out of it for some reason that sped up my mind and that was a misleading thing because I didn't realize where that was headed but that was one of the things that took me towards hypomania and a hyper manic state is a state where your mind is moving on faster than most minds and then it's firing out connections between things more than most minds and so temporarily there's great writing that comes out of it and great insight but then it's believed reaches a level of activity of the brain that it can't sustain that level of activity and the level of cognition is too great for the physiology to support it and so it burns out your brain and exhaust the chemicals and I went into a temporary funk depression and I hadn't gone into the full psychosis until after that shortly after that I was coming out and then I was even higher and greater than I was before but then it went into a full psychosis and that's when it's really clear you go insane and the insanity is not like people really think or understand where you just are experiencing full delusion what happens is that you see and actually there was a this is what I experienced and also a brain it's like a scientist on creativity in the brain confirmed it but what you do is every kind of manmade object around you which has a simple meaning to it that's described by contemporary culture kind of vanishes and in their place comes flooding layers and layers of timeless mythic meanings that would reoccur across cultures and mythologies and so an egg wouldn't just be an egg that you eat it would be the origin of existence you know and the yolk would be the Sun from where all life began so it'd have multiple layers of meanings including the one that we have but what happens is your mind is starts your eyes start darting from one of these images to the next interweaving their meanings and suddenly you start spiraling into this mythic story in which you're you're falling into what is symbolically deep and insightful and profound but you take it literally and that's where you go insane you know you think you're in the apocalypse you think you're even though the apocalypse is a metaphor for something bigger so that's when it was clear and when you experience those symptoms what happened what would what what happened to you so I was in hey I went out to get a job with a producer out in LA and I was just kind of getting out of the funk you know of and I was kind of desperate to get a job so I started writing all these scripts and submitting when I finally got it when I went out there I remember I was sitting in the hotel and I was I was celebrating and I was in the middle I was like halfway through this joint inhale because I kind of went back off of back into the sort of creative state that was danger I knew was dangerous and that's when it kind of struck me like a bolt of lightning to my brain and I did go into seeing those symbols and they did take the form of the apocalypse and it did escalate where I was running through the streets thinking I was seeing signs and symbols being laid and then that eventually spiraled into me thinking that the producer the that brought me out there to get the job was staging a fictional apocalypse through the media you know and that he wanted to cause it in the media to sort of scare people back to good and create that you know life rewritten but that spiraled into me thinking that he brought me out there because I was the Antichrist and he thought I was the one who was going to execute it and then that spiraled into that he really didn't want to cause the apocalypse and eventually in a in terror and panic I went to I was in the lobby of the hotel and in the lobby of the hotel they happen to have this glass case where the they put these women to just hang out there and on one level of represented like the decadence of Hollywood that like felt like it had to be killed off but in a flash in my mind I saw a bottle like two glasses and I saw an image of that I was going to be put in there and I was going to be forced to sleep with this woman who was supposed to be the Angel of the Apocalypse and she would give birth to the Christ figure that would be born reborn from my room and they would kill kill me and drink my blood to toast to the rebirth that would occur so which is basically just a culmination of all these myths which were and then and I threw this steel case that the there was no one in there but I threw a steel case at the glass case and that's when I got arrested okay so that's how it's gonna ask you because you're having all of these really intense thoughts it made you frightened yeah you're in a panic at some point when you think you're gonna be sacrificed naturally you're going to you become panicked and so so somebody looking from the outside wouldn't understand why is this person throwing something yeah where is internally to you you have good reason to be doing so given all of these thoughts that you're experiencing yeah and that's a big problem with society because I was brought to a place for the criminally insane which is one of the 10 worst prisons in the US rated with severe abuse and and these are supposed to be totally criminally insane brutal people I was charged with assault when I didn't throw it at anybody and so I was supposed to have my court date six months from when I entered and when I went in there these are some of the most sensitive people that I've ever met and there was it was a beautiful exchanges we had I mean they were just cracked they're broken but but they were not like we think they are and so I think to myself that I was in a panic and terror of what I was experiencing and they interpreted as assault I think to myself how many of the people in there are being abused for years and years because they were just misunderstood right people may be having certain experiences that result in behaviors but it's not out of evil intent it's because they're having symptoms of whatever condition they may be experiencing that's right you spoke about being in a funk prior to that tell me a little bit more about that about the depressed kind of feelings yeah the depressed is I can never summon up words that match the level of Hell or compare it to anything that I've experienced before that when I was saying that would match the level of Hell to give you a sense Kay Jamison was asked after just after her husband died is the morning of your husband a grief of your husband dying how does that compare to the depression and she said they don't compare depression is just a whole other level but it's so overwhelming above me on anything else going on yeah in your life yeah your that there's a reason why people want to commit suicide and the reason is because people can't fathom that but it's the only option you see to get out of that hell and anything that exists in what happens after that suicide be it imagining you go on to another life or imagining your existence just completely stops is a relief to avoid that pain so the person feels at that moment yeah and it's even beyond pain you don't even experience pain you miss pain like pain and what we consider to be pain which is where you actually get to have an emotional experience of it's it's worse than pain it's like it's health meaning it's like there's everything just vanishes and you're just in this abyss this dark black and blue abyss you know and how did you cope with that when you were experienced experiencing it the best thing I did was I get a job I got a job in construction because it was a way of getting my mind off the suicidal thoughts you know cuz you just I bet you what you do at first is you try to sleep that's your way of coping you try to just escape your reality and your existence and you try to but then what happens is when you're in the midst of that sleep you wake up and all of a sudden the truth sinks in of oh my god I'm still alive in this life and then the little energy that your mind has is spent fighting the idea of suicide and those thoughts Fester's you're lying there just all the fantasies that how to do it and trying to convince yourself not to do it but then that the other voice convincing yourself to do it so getting a job in construction was a way of just kind of going and doing something physical that's out in the world and just focusing on the task and you know just kind of you know whether you're sawing something or doing something you're just by having your mind focused on that task it pulls you out of the thoughts the suicidal thoughts that helped enormous Lee so really going to work exercise physical activity you can't exercise with you don't have the brain chemistry to exercise like it was harder the strength to really go in actually it's hard for people to fathom this must a catch-22 if you did go for a run it could help you but it's hard to get to do that what have you done to be able to move forward with your life maintain your health with the diagnosis of bipolar disorder but move forward with your life what what how do you do that the first thing was hope that was the first thing that there actually been any hope of getting somewhere that wasn't just getting by that that I could thrive and that was through meeting Kay Jamison when she told me that she doesn't know any artist who's not more creative after bipolar than before bipolar as long as they're on the meds that was basically telling me you could be more creative than you were before all this happened you could be better than you were before this happened and that hope allow me to fight for it and when I fought for it the next thing was severe determination and what I mean is like you're always looking around every corner for another health habit to incorporate you know and you just keep collecting them and anything it takes to do it you know anything like running cold showers sleep nine-to-five meditate Transcendental Meditation slight box you just pick up so many in the and the thing is the key is to to just be so focused on and the the benefit of this is that the the brain that bipolar brain is a hypersensitive brain where things that bring other people down bring you much lower like if you have too many drinks or you know if you stay up late you know if you eat too much sugar you'll go way lower than most people but things that bring other people up can bring you much higher than a lot of other people because there's just such a sensitivity of the brain so if you start living by healthy habits you feel invincible like you could do anything and your life starts changing you know you should and that's when I was able to be creative again I was able to start a family I was able to to do these things and now I feel that it's a gift just because I never would have forced myself into that state had I not had no choice you know had the options been you could be in the hell you were or you could be much higher than you were but you you have to you know because it's a lifelong tightrope it never stops you're just always trying to stay vigilant you always slip but you just get better at catching yourself other early warning signs that you are aware of in yourself that maybe I'm trying to become a little bit depressed or starting to become a little bit manic and what are those signs and what do you do when you experience them yeah they it's tricky because they they definitely will always come you just gained more experience managing it the first times it would happen it would be difficult to even want to acknowledge that there was particularly with the hypomania if the spring came and I'm feeling great and my energy is going up I'm feeling happen I want to go out and have a good time I wouldn't want to say you know what you have to go indoors and shut the lights and not go out this afternoon and this you know and you might have to raise the meds for a couple weeks where you're gonna feel a little bit numb until the hypomania comes down and you can raise it you would never want to acknowledge you had it and so at first I didn't and I would then rely on my wife who knows me so well and so counting on loved ones who can really be there to to see it and then trusting them and and then you then you will eventually start to know it you start to feel the difference between being happy and up and being a little hypomanic so the hypomanic for the person you've experienced it can actually be very pleasant and upbeat you'll like it it leads in a direction that if it spirals gets out of control so it's really being able to step back and say this may seem good now but I know what's gonna happen in some ways having experienced that allows you to step back from it yeah yeah and it's almost like the depression is the opposite side of the coin where you have to evaluate okay what what's happening that's making me starting to feel bad because I mean how do you catch yourself early like so it could be for instance I'll catch myself eating junk food and not like to boost my brain chemistry and like not exercising and suddenly like my energy was slipped down and suddenly I won't be as vital with my kids and I won't know why that happened and I'll realize looking but tracing my steps it was cloudy this morning this particular morning and I didn't do the light box and so it was like a slipping effect of one thing unravels to the next so then you know do the light box your brain chemistry's of the lower so then you eat some junk food so then you don't work as well with the same clarity and and that can unfold lower and lower and lower if you don't if you're not able to nip it at the bud and but the thing is the more you go through life the more you can see it early and you can manage it you know so you know exactly what to do it sounds like you have a very good sensitivity to yourself and you also rely on others such as your wife what's it like for your wife how does how does she help you and what's it like for her the fortunate thing is she's actually a little bit attracted to craziness so when we and when we met at film school I was not in my worst shape you know I was I was like in a low place but it was more like numbness from the meds I wasn't dysfunctional I was like able to get by but I was very antisocial and I remember the first time we met we were at a film school in the first like week and everyone's socializing and she's like social Center just talking to everybody joking around and I come in the room with like a black hood on like blasting rap music like totally alone not even taking the headphones out and just sit down in front of her and like no one's talking abut she reached forward and like pulled the hood off of my head and like smiled and that would really be a metaphor for what she would do in my life she knows you well enough and you trust her well enough to that if she's saying you're moving in this direction or that direction you know that she's right and take the steps whether it be the light box or some other steps to help you with that that's right and she saved me multiple times because of that so she'd say it and she said early and I would say okay you know I do whatever I to do one of the things that sometimes blocks people from treatment from getting help is concerned about losing that creativity well I'm more creative now than I was before but it took a lot of patience and it took a lot of work and it was really the hope that I know it could happen because of what Kay Jamison told me that I was able to fight for it I wouldn't have fought for if I didn't think there was any chance and Kay Jamison for people who don't know of her is a psychologist a researcher a clinician who also has bipolar disorder your creativity is enhanced by the experiences that you've had but maintaining a level of control over it so that it doesn't get out of control become a manic episode but taking advantage of some of the experiences that you've had in the hypomanic state yes getting there but making use of that experience creativity that's a totally perfect metaphor because it's your way to never lose the magic of the mania it's your way to preserve it and capsule it in a way that can be sustained in a way that other people can experience it through you and through whatever you create so you don't miss the mania well you pull a very inspiring and I want to thank you for sharing your experiences both in terms of what you've gone through and creatively to really reach people in a way that's very meaningful so thank you so much for all that you're doing thank you so much for having me I'm inspired by Paul's message of hope how he's able to live a full productive and happy life with bipolar disorder and how with treatment and the support of his family he's able to thrive and feels even more creative than before the onset of his onus Paul's experience shows that with help there is hope until next time on dr. Jeff Bernstein goodbye [Music] do not suffer in silence with help there is hope healthy minds is brought to you in part by the American Psychiatric Association foundation the Graham Beck foundation and the New York State Office of mental health if you would like to watch our expert interview in its entirety log on to be be our foundation org slash healthy minds you

Channel: Brain & Behavior Research Foundation

Views: 69,899

Keywords: schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, autism, post-traumatic stress disorder, ptsd, obsessive-compulsive disorder, ocd, adhd, brain research, narsad grants, symptoms, recovery, behavior research, warning signs, treatments, cure, diagnosis, hope

Id: 7MmXBzjTlQc

Length: 26min 59sec (1619 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 24 2020