The United States of Mental Disorders...Shades of Gray...

The video is the trailer for Silver Linings Playbook, which is a movie that portrays a typical rom-com situation that has been doused with mental illness, though it mostly focuses on bipolar disorder.  The film features bipolar disorder, some sex-addiction, and a dusting of obsessive-compulsive disorder (however I still can't figure out what disorder Chris Tucker has in the film).




As someone who has a moderate case of bipolar disorder, and plans to go into the behavioral health field, I definitely connected to this movie more than the average person.  One particular scene in the film, Bradley Cooper's character is searching for a video tape.  He spends probably 5 hours searching through the entire house, becoming increasingly more irritable, before he wakes his family to help him find the video.  By the time he wakes his family, he is searching/tearing-apart every shelf of every room and screaming at everyone, thinking that they are hiding the tape from him.  It eventually turns into a fist fight and the police have to come over.

While the other theatre-goers seemed to be in shock from the manic-episode, I felt a sense of amused-sympathy for the character because it had only been 1 week since I had my own similar episode, spanning 4 hours in the middle of the night and leaving my house in a disheveled-mess (I was looking for a stud-finder, though... not a video tape). The movie didn't show much about the "low poles" of bipolar disorder, but the "highs" were done very well.  Each pole has their own problems, though only the highs (mania) have any sort of "benefit".  On one end of the spectrum, you've got depression, to which everyone can relate; on the other there is the mania, a sort-of hyper-motivation to do everything, which is actually useful in terms of productivity but becomes a problem when you don't sleep for 3 days.

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I'm noticing that the awareness for mental health is becoming more common.  It seemed that, in times past, this sort of mental "weakness" was always kept behind closed doors for fear of public ridicule.  Now, people are starting to understand that these disorders are not curable and that it takes quite a bit of effort to cope with the effects.

It's helpful and reassuring when movies like Silver Linings Playbook, The Perks of Being a Wallflower and It's Kind of a Funny Story are released.  I'd even throw 50/50 on the list.  They show the public how difficult it is to manage chronic illness and the damage the illness creates in the person's life.  I'm waiting for a good theatrical movie about PTSD to come out, though the documentary Restrepo does a wonderful job showing the cause and effect of extreme war-time situations in the interviews.

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What I've come to wonder is, "Does anyone NOT have a disorder of some kind?"  All mental conditions are based upon 'shades of gray' so-to-speak.  My disorder is less than that of Bradley Cooper's character, but more than that of others.  Some schizophrenics have only auditory hallucinations, some only "shadow-people", and others see fully formed people that appear as real as any other person (such as in the movie, A Beautiful Mind).

So, I wonder again, do we all have some degree of mental "illness"?

• Are you a very motivated person? Maybe you have bipolar disorder or ADHD.
• Do you feel sad more often than others? Maybe you have depression.
• Do you spend more time thinking logically than emotionally? Maybe you have Asperger's disorder.
• Do you identify more with emotions than logic? Perhaps you have borderline personality disorder, or you are codependent.
• Are you organized? Obsessive-compulsive disorder.
• Are you messy? Depression or ADHD.
• Do you drink a lot? Substance Dependency.
• Do you drink a little? Substance Abuser.
• Do you see people that aren't really there? Schizophrenia.
• Do you NOT see people that ARE there? Well... that's blindness... seek an optometrist instead of a psychiatrist.

The defining criterion seems to be whether-or-not the personality trait causes disruptions in school/work/relationships/health.  The disruptions themselves, however, are ALSO shades of gray... if your "need-to-clean" causes you to be 5 minutes late to class, then it's not so bad... if you didn't go to class for a week because you were scrubbing the entire house with a tooth-brush, then it's really bad. So at what point does it become a problem?

Either way, I'm getting the feeling that we all have personality traits that make our lives easier and traits that make our lives harder.  I think over-classification may do harm by telling everyone that they are basically broken... But maybe if everyone thought that they ARE a little bit broken, they would seek out methods of coping with the problematic trait... still more shades of gray.

"So I had a choice between going to jail or going to a bughouse like a nice young middle-class student.  so I chose to go to a very polite mental hospital.  When I left eight months later, they said, 'You were never psychotic.  You were just an average neurotic.' - Allen Ginsberg