A former Entertainment Attorney shares her life as someone with bipolar disorder.

“Manic Depression is not a safe ride.” Author Terri Cheney has written a thought provoking, thoroughly honest and straightforward memoir about her life as a person with bipolar disorder.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, Bipolar disorder affects approximately 5.7 million American adults, which is about 2.6 percent of the population. The average age for onset of bipolar disorder is 25 years.

Cheney knew something was wrong when she was 16 years old and unable to stop compulsively eating. She was still very slender, but knew something was wrong. She went to her father and told her it was all about self-control. He took her to a faddish behavior modification program in Los Angeles that used cattle prods as their primary method of getting people to stop smoking or stop overeating. All the program did was teach her to hide her symptoms by fasting after she binged. Ironically her father said her mood swings were “all in her head.”

Cheney went to Vassar and after graduation was an entertainment attorney in Los Angeles for 16 years. She represented some major film studios such as Universal, and celebrities like Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson. She was no lightweight in her chosen career. But the pressure was intense.

The symptoms of bipolar disorder include huge mood swings. Cheney would go to bed and just sleep for weeks at a time, barely eating. She would tell her employers or current boyfriends that she had the flu. On the other end of the spectrum, the manic side, she would spend all her money and become very sexually promiscuous. In between it all was a very real suicidal tendency. She never says the exact number of suicide attempts she made, but there were several.

The book starts with Cheney’s desire to end her life. Her father had recently died of lung cancer and, at age 38 she simply wanted to die. She says, “I was bone-tired, terminally weary and death sounded like a vacation to me. A holiday. A somewhere else, which is all I really wanted.” She swallowed approximately 300 pills, which she’s been stockpiling, (including her late father’s cancer and pain medications). Fortunately for Cheney, the locksmith who, earlier in the evening had raped her, came back to repair a window he’d broken, saw her unconscious, and called 911.

Cheney chose to go to Africa and found herself feeling depressed. She kept telling herself it was stupid to be depressed in the presence of a gigantic and beautiful sky, amazing animals and sunlight that "drenched everything." At the end of the safari their guide took the group to an isolated Masai village, which was very rare. She looked at the children covered with flies and the obvious poverty, and said, "What right? I asked myself. What possible right have you ever had to be depressed? I thought of my therapist's office and the thousands of dollars I spent each year, complaining about my life. I thought about the handful of antidepressants I swallowed each morning: one pill alone cost me almost four hundred dollars a month. Add to that the psychopharmacologist I saw every six weeks or so, at three hundred dollars per visit. All totaled, the price of my depression was staggering, more than enough to feed and house and clothe several Masai families for an entire year. What right, what right?"

At one point Cheney decided she had no alternative but to recieve Electroshock therapy, or ECT. Before the treatment she thought she was "mearly" depressed. Afterwards she learned that she was, in fact, bipolar. Whether because of the treatment, or a misdiagnosis is never made clear. She says, "Who knows what went wrong during that last ECT session? I personally think it was some strange kind of gift from the gods. I emerged from that chaos a different person, with a different identity. No longer depressed, but bipolar. The label mattered. It made sense of my erratic life. I had never before understood how, for several weeks or months at a time, I could function at such a high level of competence, only to be followed by equally long periods of hiding under my desk, under the covers, in the dark. To be honest, I'd never really been comfortable with the concept of "depression," no matter how articulately I defended it to my family and friends."

One of the most remarkable things about this book is the detail Cheney goes into about her symptoms. For a person with bipolar disorder to function, they have to pay very strict attention to what is going on with their bodies, mood swings, and minds. It’s very difficult to do. But she does it, and does it well. She can tell immediately when she’s swinging from a depressive state and into mania, (the hairs on her arms stand up at the least stimulation). Getting out of depression may sound great, but being bipolar means you never truly enjoy your happiness. You’re afraid to go into full-blown mania. If mania is left to progress on its own it goes into delusions.

There are a lot of books out there right now about bipolar disorder. Most of them are written by doctors with checklists for patients and families. They give people ways to handle living with the disease or living with someone with the disease.  And that’s a great resource, as it can be extremely difficult for all involved. But if you want to truly understand this mental illness from the inside out, read this sincere and direct book by Terry Cheney. It’s eye opening. Even if you don’t know anyone with the disorder, it will help you understand some of the problems facing the mental ill in our country today.

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed