Mindscape: Oscar-winning Actor Richard Dreyfuss on Living with Bipolar Disorder

hello everybody welcome back to our series of podcasts called Menninger mindscape I'm dr. John Oldham chief of staff at the vinegar clinic and it's really wonderful to have a very special guest today richard dreyfuss welcome Richard thank you Richard is here actually to be a speaker at our annual beniker signature luncheon where we really value the important ambassador really representation of what it's like to have a psychiatric condition a mental illness and Richard has been very open about living with bipolar disorder or sometimes called manic depressive disorder for many years although it probably was in its initial stages happening without your knowing what it was right I figured out I figured I started calling myself a manic-depressive when I was 14 because I was always in conversations where I would get louder and standing up and louder and faster and louder and faster until some one of my friends would say well let's get the circus cables and bring him slowly back to earth and that's when I knew that I was in a kind of rant a manic state which I enjoyed until the end of one when I looked around and it did look like I'd made some rude noises or lost your audience yeah what did you use the term yourself or did you really think it was a medical term I knew it was a medical term and I can't tell you now whether or not my earliest psychiatric therapy situations nailed it but by the time I was 19 20 years old I would say that to my doctor - and they would accept it well what what got you to the doctor in the first place it was when you were 19 yeah yeah the first part of it seriously was entertainment that I knew that I would be allowed to talk about myself for an Alan and that's something that was not socially acceptable and I also knew not you know when people say I looked up at the stars and I realized how small I was well when I looked up to the stars I realized how big I was and and I knew that within me was a universe an enormous vast territory that was ultimately put together as Richard and I wanted to get to know my brain my soul my inner life yeah but see that says so much about you as a person not somebody with an illness but you as a person and this idea of going to see a therapist to learn about yourself was very appealing that is not the case for a lot of people right a lot of people are very afraid of it they fear it makes them anxious and they worry and we talked about the word stigma not something you've really felt right but a lot of people do I did feel in the years before I went to things one was that feeling you get on the night before a test when you haven't studied good and you get a kind of anxiety that grows and grows and becomes untenable and which I had named I called him old anticipate re dread really a pirate that kept coming climbing up to kill me and that became my unacceptable Nassif I felt that anxiety I would do anything take any drug alcohol anything not to feel that and and I would feel it because on top of whatever else was going on I only did and I'm not exaggerating I only did 12 nights of homework in 12 years of school I could not write I could not I could talk like crazy but I could not write out my homework assignments and ever so that what someone had to beat me up with a crowbar and I had one teacher who did said you're not going to get away with that in my class and so I did the work but it was the most unpleasant horrible experience at a price had a terrible price and I knew that that wasn't normal that wasn't right and so one of the reasons that led me to therapy was that why can't I write anything down I can tell you a whole novel I can talk to you a whole novel that's in my head but I can't write it down interesting interesting well that's a separate discussion we might have because that's that's something that was a challenge yeah there was a huge challenge I got out of my high school without an absolute requirement I took algebra and got a D then I took it again and got an F then I took it again privately got an F and so they put me in geometry and after six weeks they said you have zero zero zero zero point zero record and I said if you think that I'm ever going to get geometry I'll be here when I was 60 so they let me out of school without it they let you go well okay but that's a very early pattern of anxiety sort of around performance that may have been a part of you that really didn't have that particular ability in the way the school's system required it you had your own style but that didn't fit right with what the system required and I didn't fall into the trap of hating myself you know which is often what happens right I mean they've got a kid with a learning disability for example or attention deficit and that's not recognized then there's a huge secondary problem that comes with a sort of misfit feeling that the develops but one of the reasons I said that my manic depression worked for me was that I was able to turn every bad thing into a good thing when I was not a good academic student I became the best glib talker in class and I they couldn't fail me because I was too vivid when I and then when I found my passion which was theater and acting I blew everyone off the table so that and I also knew and this was known to me as a part of an illness I was absolutely certain 100% certain of my success when I was nine years old interesting and no I never entertained any doubt and I knew as strong as that made me it was not normal well the Richard we talk about things like resilience and strength we sometimes pay so much attention to the problem sign that we don't look too carefully at what the resources are that people have and you were lucky there yeah because you had a lot of them so fast forward for a minute since we're never going to have enough time well when did you begin to really feel that it was not something you could stay in control of and when did you then really get into treatment that eventually helped you and what was it that helped you I began to suspect that I was being set up by life or by the gods or something because nothing bad ever happened to me or if it did I turned it into a good thing and I was given my conscientious objector status for Vietnam without even being questioned when that was simply impossible and I really began to get terrified that I was being set up and I was because I had no coping mechanism for anything negative and then one day the girl I loved didn't love me and I lost her and the loss was so unbelievably profound that I I fell in love with loss I was I was just a little bug so that was a real fall off the cliff yes and that's when I started therapy the only other time was many years later when I was married and had children and my marriage ended and when my marriage ended and my children were raised without me I actually shrunk down to the size of about a spite her honourable and I was always saying to doctors I'm ready to die I've done everything I'm supposed to so it was that bad you just thought life wasn't worth living I just thought well I I've done everything I want to do so if someone hits me in a car accident it would be okay and my daughter who is a formidable person when she heard me say not about me but about suicide that thought she became so grim and angry that I thought oh I'll never be able to do you know pull this off or else I'll just piss my daughter off too much and so I didn't when I might have yeah you were close or at least it was in your head yeah at that point and that's a terrible way to feel yeah terrible what if you but you've managed to climb back out yet hold and we're seeing psychiatry then and getting some therapy help and I said to my doctor one day how I was ready to die and I I hadn't who cared and I heard a little voice inside my head that said Richard they're going to be studying your work in two hundred years so how bad could it be and I remember that voice is being very far away so I could hardly hear it but it was saying you're wrong you're nuts you know hold on to me and I did and I got back and then were there later times when you got back into the medic side which got out of control and did that lead to talking to your Doc's about medication and did that help I had been talking to doctors about medication since I was 19 because I had been medicating myself I didn't know that term I've been taking drugs since I was 14 well you're described while ago how you would do that in order to calm yourself down right so you were medicating yourself right but I didn't use that term and then and then one day a doctor really explained why I was doing what I was doing with what drugs and he made me understand and then one very very bright guy said to me Richard somewhere in your brain there is a faucet that is dripping either too slowly or too quickly and we can help you you're just doing where to put and I I can't tell you the relief of guilt that swept away from me because it wasn't me it was the structure it wasn't me my soul my Richard it was the structure of my body and that plus the line that Randy Newman wrote it takes a whole lot of medicine from me different for me to pretend that I'm somebody else and what that means really is when I feel terrible awful shitty I'll do anything including feeling worse as long as the worse is the drug and not me mm-hmm interesting interesting and that makes sense yeah it makes sense but then you later got to a place where you didn't need the drug but had a pretty successful steady state which you still do and I did need I've I have a protocol drugs that I take and I never stray I do not go off my meds I have friends and that's because you know it's a bad idea yes that's because I've seen I have friends who've gone off your meds and ended up and in manager you know I I don't want that to happen to me so I live I've always wanted to live on the planet Earth with my feet on the ground a good father a good husband a good actor a good activist whatever citizen and a lot of what was preventing me from all of that was my own inability to find the right protocol of medication and it became a spiritual question I would say to my doctor am i Richard inclusive of my drugs or am i Richard and the drugs are an add-on and to me the answer was obvious that I was Richard inclusive of my drugs that I was born with certain problems and certain drugs help me becomes that yep yep yep yep and now we're going to have to stop shortly so what what can you say to the people who are going to see this podcast about what is so so common in such an obstacle for others to get to the kind of help you've been able to achieve that shame and fear and anxiety that leads people to keep all of their worries and problems secret because they don't want to be quote labeled as a mental patient I've been trying to come up with an equivalent shame and the only in my life my shame was my weight if I got really fat I would be so ashamed of myself and I wouldn't want to leave the house but other than that I've never understood why people who have what I have or something worse could not find the diamond in the soil because in a manic state you are always in a incandescent ecstasy of creation and it's not just bull Carrie Fisher says in her show about herself you know you're a manic-depressive when the ideas that you have are great because you're having them and Kari and I are talking about that yeah it's great and I knew that I had I have been a creative font I have ideas novels performances things that I was able to achieve or perceived because of my manic state and I glommed on to them i i relly gated the embarrassing parts to just embarrassing anecdotes and I emphasize to myself all that was good and ecstatic about it that that's really interesting abut but that probably wasn't so possible when you were in those deep holes of depression no as a matter of fact there's in my public career as an actor I can point to X number of performances where I say those are the result of my being depressed centers and not good so there are plenty of people who have severe depression but don't have the other end and don't have the manic episodes harnessing those for your kind of career is really wonderfully creative and I could that's a really special way to look at it but the message I think to the people with all kinds of things and not that pattern of illness I I would say and just trying to see if you would agree to work hard to get to shed old attitudes that may have surrounded you that there's something shameful about having something like depression or anxiety these are medical conditions these are part of your body they're just like people have hypertension or have diabetes and you go get help right that's the most important thing is that people for some reason think that when you go to get help like in therapy you're being told oh you're totally not and you're hopeless the fact is that going to therapy is like a ride at Disneyland and it's good and bad and up and down but I do know it's one thing to talk up from the point of view of basically 50 years of a manic state of hi about the depression the darkness of depression you have to learn the difference between self-hatred and humility because when you have self-hatred it's because you believe something that someone told you a long time ago your dad your mom whatever and you reinforce that self-hatred humility is where you know I've got a problem and I'm open to getting up and out and I have to keep my ears open for those what I call bubbles of opportunity that pass you by and you got to be able to grab onto one someone's going to say something or a look or an experience and glom onto it and when you do that you have a better percentage of getting the hell out of there yeah and whatever the mix is sometimes it will be more painful than others and when it's really painful then the message is to go get some help it doesn't mean it's all going to click you were telling me about some of your Docs before you got to keep persisting and find the right fit so that you feel comfortable that you can work with this person and get the help you need and that's the kind of thing we hope people will take away from hearing you talk about what you've been dealing with and turning into a really very successful part of understanding who you are it's like if you can understand that nobody's perfect and that's not just a phrase you're not perfect I'm not perfect if I'm not perfect that means I'm improvable and I'm going to go to someone who can help me get there when you're dark it when you're in the midst of the darkness of depression you feel like there's nobody there and there's no hand reaching out to you and the thing is take it on faith the same faith that's in Indiana Jones and the silver chalice whatever it's called where he stepped out on a bridge that he couldn't see that's depression when you step out on a bridge you can't see and feel it you'll know that it's there and you don't have any fear that you're just going to keep falling then you reach out and you get the help yep okay well let's stop on that note I wish we had more time but thank you so much you are an ambassador for the field of mental illness and psychiatry and for the enormous number of people who are out there struggling and suffering and your message is what I hope many many people can hear because they need that kind of help to just nudge them forward let me tell you one quick story sure as a kid it was a newly arrived student in a school and the teacher in his homeroom says to go to the principal's office and to sign some document and he goes and comes back and as he puts his hand on his homeroom door he knows that while he was gone the teacher told the rest of the class the secret of life and all of us who were there in that room that heard that story for the first time we all went oh oh yeah because everyone believes that everyone else knows something and the fact is it's true everyone feels that not just you everybody so a great way to end we're looking forward to hearing your remarks tomorrow at the luncheon but thank you for sharing these thoughts because we hope many people will be able to benefit from what you've just told us my pleasure and thank you all for joining us once again we'll see you next time you

Channel: The Menninger Clinic

Views: 494,340

Keywords: Menninger, The Menninger Clinic, Richard Dreyfuss (Film Actor), John M. Oldham, Bipolar Disorder (Disease Or Medical Condition), Bipolar I Disorder (Disease Or Medical Condition), Bipolar II Disorder (Disease Or Medical Condition), Mental Illness (Disease Or Medical Condition), Houston (City/Town/Village), Texas (US State), Academy Awards (Award)

Id: AsE6c4XkiAc

Length: 22min 6sec (1326 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 01 2015