Nothing General About It by Maurice Benard

Author:Maurice Benard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Beautiful Boy

As I learned after my stint in the mental institution, depression and bipolar disease are caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. More than twelve million people in the United States and sixty million worldwide battle these disorders, and there is no cure. It is a lifelong commitment to manage the symptoms with the proper medication. It isn’t just being “blue”—believe me, if you could just exercise and get the endorphins up, everyone who was afflicted would do it.

Diagnosing disorders can take a while, and accepting the diagnosis can take even longer. Pinpointing what combination of medication will help and the correct dosage is a crapshoot and can be frustrating.

If I’d only had this knowledge when I was young, maybe I wouldn’t have had several breakdowns. I wanted others to know there were answers, and I wanted to push back against the stigma that prevents people from admitting they need help.

Until that point, I had hidden my illness from public view. I had been made to feel ashamed of it and was warned early on in the business not to expect people to understand. I was fearful that I wouldn’t work if I disclosed my condition, so I had kept the secret. But after all these years, I was tired of that burden, and the recent scare my family had been dealt made it feel obvious I needed to act. I didn’t want to continue silently carrying around the reality of who I was, and I didn’t think others suffering from the disease should have to, either.

Even though it was scary, in 2000 I decided to do an interview in an obscure soap magazine that is no longer in print, discussing my condition. The response was overwhelming, and among the many thousands of people who sent letters about their own experiences, one in particular really impacted me. A kid wrote me a letter telling me his brother had shot himself in the head and he was finally able to deal with his brother’s suicide after I talked about bipolar and where the depths of depression can take you. So many times family members and friends feel as if they have failed if they can’t save you, and although their support is very important, the disease and the toll it takes are no one’s fault.

Because of that letter, and the huge response to the article, I knew it was time to do more, so I decided to start working with mental health organizations and became the spokesman for the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance (DBSA; formerly the National Depressive and Manic-Depressive Association). DBSA is the leading peer-directed national nonprofit organization providing support groups for people with depression or bipolar disorder as well as their friends and family, answering thousands of calls per month while distributing twenty-thousand educational materials free of charge. Their combined websites receive over twenty-one million hits and their online and face-to-face support groups have helped their members’ hospitalization episodes decrease by almost half. Their programs prove that the power of people banding together is truly undeniable.

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