Granted, I was behaving rather erratically--flying from New York to Tokyo to Paris on business three to four times a month, counterfeiting art and smuggling tens of thousands of dollars back into the United States. At the same time, I was drinking heavily and indulging in drugs (self-medicating my mental illness), engaging in sex with complete strangers that I would meet in bars and clubs, staying up for days on end, and in general living on the edge. But my disability remained an invisible one.
Friends and family were convinced I was functioning just fine because I was efficient, productive, and successful. I had everybody fooled with my illness. While my manic depression remained undiagnosed, I secretly wished that my disability was a physical one--one that others would notice. Maybe people would be supportive and help me if I had diabetes or, God forbid, cancer. Maybe I needed to show up to the next family function in a wheelchair to get somebody's attention. I was helpless living with this invisible illness.
Once I was diagnosed, though, and given what I refer to as my "death sentence," things changed quickly. And no, my family and friends did not come rushing to my side to support me in battling against my illness. Somehow I fantasized that this was going to happen.
All of a sudden I realized the stigma of having a mental illness--it hit me smack between the eyes. And the stigma was almost as bad as having to come to terms with the fact that I was mentally ill and needed treatment.
The stigma, I realize now, "started" with me. I initiated it. It was my own fault and a result of my own naiveté at age 28.
When the doctor diagnosed me and used the words "manic depression" and "bipolar," I had no idea what he was talking about. "Manic" sounded like "maniac" and "bipolar" sounded like "polar bear," so I was completely confused.
I was under the impression that the illness was degenerative and that I probably wouldn't live to see my next birthday. I asked the doctor how many other people there were like me--2.5 million people in America alone.
He tried to calm me down and talk me through the diagnosis, but I was self-stigmatized by my new label. And then, of course, he had to remind me that I was now part of a category of people called "mentally ill." Oh, God. I was a lunatic, a freak, a psycho, a crack-up, and a mental case.
When I left his office on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and walked home across Central Park that snowy morning, I imagined being forced to have electroshock therapy like Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I persuaded myself that I was overreacting, taking this too far. That could never happen to me. But actually, I wasn't taking it too far. Less than three years later I found myself in the operating room of a psychiatric hospital in Manhattan, lying on a gurney with electrodes attached to my head and receiving electroshock treatments--200 volts of electricity through my brain.
The stigma first hit me from the "outside world" with a little help from the written prescription my doctor gave me. It was filled out for medications thought to control my manic depression. The prejudice began then.
On seeing it, my own neighborhood pharmacist remarked, "Your doctor's putting you on all of this medication? Are you okay?" I didn't respond. I paid for my four prescription drugs and left the pharmacy wondering exactly what he meant by "all of this."
Was I some sort of "mental case" because I was now taking four different medications? Did the pharmacist know something about my condition that I didn't know? And did he have to say it in such a loud voice, just hours after my diagnosis? No, he didn't. That was unkind. It seemed that even the pharmacist had an issue with mentally ill patients--and trust me, mentally ill patients in Manhattan were the "bread and butter" of his business.
Next I had to tell people about the diagnosis. Scared to death, I waited a week until I got up the nerve to ask my parents to dinner.
I took them for a meal at one of their favorite restaurants. They seemed suspicious. Did I have something to tell them? They automatically assumed I was in some sort of trouble. It was written over both of their faces. Assuring them that I wasn't, but had some news that might surprise them, I just spilled the beans.
