You wish a lot of things for a first novel, but for me, my hope, is the readers find the depiction of mental illness to be true.
I was diagnosed with manic-depression (as it was then referred to) as a teenager in 1975. It would be another fifteen years before I accepted the diagnosis and agreed to stay on medication with the help of a psychopharmacologist. I think one of the most misunderstood aspects of bipolar illness is why people either won’t go on medication or fail to stay on them. From my own experience, I would say that people generally ‘go off their meds’ because they can’t tolerate the way they make them feel. Either that, or once they feel better, they believe they don’t need them. I’ve tried, in my character of Ollie, the bipolar older sister in Shred Sisters to explore such a person.
One of my pet peeves is the way bipolar disorder is characterized in film and TV. I think the worst culprit was the TV show Homeland where Claire Danes’ character purposefully goes off her meds to access ‘special powers’ and solve crimes. It doesn’t work that way. When people go off their meds, they quickly destabilize and are often suicidal. Mania is not a superpower. And as we all know, what goes up must come down. The best depiction I’ve seen by far is the British TV show, Big Mood. The main character played by Nicola Coughlan gives a nuanced performance of the behaviors associated with bipolar disorder: alienating friends, grandiosity, racing thoughts, blurred lines about what is appropriate, hyper-sexuality and alternately depression and isolation. She neither has superpowers nor is a caricature of ‘madness’. Rather what we see is a young woman struggling with a confusing and at times crippling mental illness that impedes her life and negatively impacts those who care about her.
The more we see and read about mental illness that neither romanticizes nor demonizes the illness, the better we will be at helping both the people who suffer and their family and friends who, too often, are rendered helpless. I didn’t set out to be a crusader to better understand mental illness when I sat down to write this book, but I’m really glad if it helps the cause.
Betsy Lerner’s debut novel Shred Sisters about mental health can be found here.