Maria Bamford is one of the top comedians in the country, but like many other people she suffers from bipolar disorder. Maria has discovered a website that helps her cope with the stigma of treating mental illness by using humor and community.
Black Box is dumbed down, like most of what they know about bipolar disorder is directly from Wikipedia. Over simplified. Extremes without meds, everything is fine with them. Not how it works for most mentally ill people. Also, hallucinations are really uncommon in manic depression. It happens, but not to most people. Most of the first episode was literally them listing off all possible symptoms like every bipolar person has every single one of them.
She skipped one dose of her meds and within two or three hours she was in a creative Wonderland (more like the meth kicked in than her psychs wearing off). Then her wonderful boyfriend talks some sense into her (cause you know how manic people like to have others remind them that what they’re doing is wrong?), and she’s like, “Oh yeah, I SHOULD take my meds,” then she’s immediately mostly okay again.
Then she goes to work at a specialist facility and bitches about how other doctors do their jobs without getting suspended or fired for her extremely erratic behavior. Cause that’s how it works.
My understanding is most people don’t ENJOY mania/hypomania. It tends to be rather unpleasant. It’s not all sex and creativity and grandeur. It’s also confused thinking and psychosis and suicide attempts. You don’t get to act that way and be a practicing neurologist.
I’ve never had an enjoyable experience with mania. Maybe because I only have mixed episodes, but the things that it brought out were all bad. I like the up swings when I only need four or five hours of sleep. But that’s not really mania. My bpd is mild compared to most, and it’s pretty well managed with meds… and I still have a really, really hard time keeping an easy-peasy job.
The acting is mediocre and feels forced and unnatural. I gave it a shot. It’s about as horrible as I expected. Strike that. Worse than I expected.
I wonder, lately, if my mood stabilizer really does that much to improve my mood… or if it just dries up my tear production so that it’s harder to have a good cry.