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The following two videos done by Robin Mohilner provide superb descriptions of the manic phases of manic-depressive (aka bipolar) disorder. The second video focuses on the manic phases' effect on the person's romantic activities.
Mohilner writes a website called Thrive With Bipolar Disorder. There she describes herself as follows:
It is my passion as a therapist to provide resources and tools for people affected by bipolar disorder and other related disorders.You should watch both videos before you read the rest of my post here.
It’s been almost 20 years since I had my first bipolar full-blown mania and depression when I was diagnosed and began treatment. Since then, I graduated from UC Berkeley, achieved my Masters degree and earned my license as a Marriage and Family therapist in 2012.
I have worked intensively one-on-one with clients multiple times a week as a teacher of illness education and coping skills to people with mental illness and their loved ones. I was a coach of important principles and a mentor of how to fulfill needs. My hope is to help people get on their feet. ...
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Eleanor Bergstein seems (to me) to portray in her works female characters who suffer from manic-depressive disorder, Type 2. Her works do not portray the depressive phases, but do portray the manic phases.
However, I still have not read Bergstein's 1973 novel Advancing Paul Newman, and I do not know enough about it to diagnose any of its characters.
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Bergstein wrote the screenplay for a movie titled It's My Turn, which was released in 1980. The movie's main character is a mathematics professor, Kate Gunzinger, who is trying to make major breakthrough in mathematics and who falls in love with a retired professional baseball player, Ben Lewin.
I have written blog two articles about the movie. There I called the movie "lousy". Afterwards I regretted using that word and began calling it "atrocious" instead.
Now, however, I think it's an excellent movie if it is understood to be a movie portraying a woman with the manic-depressive disorder.
The movie depicts Kate's trip from Chicago to New York for a few days. One purpose of the trip is to attend her widowed father's wedding to a new wife. During those few days, Kate's behavior is impulsive, reckless and risky.
Kate meets her new step-mother's son, Ben, at the wedding's rehearsal dinner. Later that night, she begins a sexual affair with Ben, who is about to become her step-brother. On the following day, Kate squabbles irrationally with her father's fiancée. After the wedding, Kate tells Ben she wants to continue her affair and begs him to change his flight plans so that the can have sex again in some other city before he returns home to his wife.
After Kate returns to Chicago, she breaks up with her long-time boyfriend, who seems to be a very nice man. Kate cannot explain rationally to him the reason for her decision to break up.
After the breakup, Kate seems to be satisfied with her single life, because she feels free to devote herself to making a major breakthrough in mathematics in the near future.
This movie was marketed as portraying Kate as a feminist role model. I think that most men watching the movie would judge her behavior to be morally despicable, atrocious.
Although the movie starred Michael Douglas and Jill Clayburgh -- both of whom were big stars at the time -- the movie flopped at the box office. Douglas refused to promote the movie.
If you watch Mohilner videos about manic-depressive disorder and then watch Bergstein's movie It's My Turn, it will be obvious to you that the movie depicts mathematician Kate Gunzinger going through a manic phase during and right after her visit to New York.
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In this post here I am going to skip over the 1987 movie Dirty Dancing. I will devote a separate article to my argument that Baby Houseman seems to suffer from manic-depressive disorder, Type 2.
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Two years after Dirty Dancing was released, Bergstein's second novel, Ex-Lover, was published in 1989. I have not read the novel, but I have written a blog article that quotes extensively from three reviews of the novel. The novel's heroine, Jesse Gerard, is a 33-year-old playwright who is suffering depression following the recent deaths of her parents and of her best friend. The friend committed suicide.
To try to distract herself from her depression, Jesse is writing a magazine article about the making of a movie. Jesse is watching the filming of a scene where a stuntwoman is being pushed on a gurney. Jesse impulsively shoves the gurney over, and the stuntwoman is injured.
Although Jesse is happily married, she begins an affair the the movie's director of photography. She befriends the man's girlfriend in order to learn more about him.
Jesse befriends also the movie's leading actress, whose first name is Sylvie. Jesse feels that she and Sylvie are very similar -- that they even resemble each other physically.
A couple of the book reviews describe, as follows, Jesse's perception that she resembles the actress Sylvie.
In the past year, the cerebral Jesse has lost her mother, her father, and her best friend, so she plans to weave together a quirky, on-the-scene magazine piece ... She [Jessie] is an emotionally scarred survivor writing about a movie that is about a survivor ... [that] stars the notoriously superficial Sylvie. .... She [Jessie] also grows closer to Sylvie, seeing more and more similarities between the star and herself.... and ...
An adulterous affair with the young director of photography moves Jesse into intimate connections with the crew and cast, including the movie's star, whom Jessie has always resembled.The book reviews indicate to me that the character Jesse Gerard is a manic-depressive. Because she has been feeling depressed, she watches a movie being made. Then she begins a manic phase, in which she injures a stuntwoman, cheats on her husband with a director, befriends the director's girlfriend, and then decides that she herself is similar to an actress named Sylvie -- who has the same first name as Sylvia Plath. The actress plays a character who is depressed about her own mother.
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The third movie based on a Bergstein screenplay is Let It Be Me, which was released in 1987. I have analyzed that movie in an article in this blog. There I concluded: "I liked the movie and was delighted by many of its moments."
The movie's main character is 29-year-old Emily Taylor, a school teacher who is engaged to marry Gabriel Rudman, a psychiatrist. To prepare for their wedding dance, Emily and Gabriel take lessons at a dance studio. It turns out by coincidence that the studio is owned by Emily's high-school boyfriend, named Bud (his family name is not mentioned).
(In Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar, the main character Esther Greenwood has an ex-boyfriend named Buddy Willard.)
When Emily was in high school, she got pregnant from Bud and got an abortion without ever informing him about her pregnancy.
Gabriel's belated discovery that Emily used to be Bud's boyfriend causes jealous arguments. Although Emily already has purchased her wedding dress and mailed all the wedding invitations, she breaks up with Gabriel and cancels the wedding. Later, however, Emily changes her mind and marries Gabriel after all.
Although I liked the movie Let It Be Me, I was bothered by some of Emily's actions, which in my article I called implausible. Now I would say instead that her actions were irrational or manic. If you want details, you can read my article about the move.
Bergstein also directed the movie -- in addition to writing the screenplay. After the movie was completed, she got into some mysterious argument with the producer. As a consequence, the producer made the movie disappear for many years. The movie was shown essentially in just one theater for one day. That was the end of Bergstein's career of writing and directing movies.
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It seems to me that Bergstein tends to write stories in which the heroines are manic-depressives, Type 2.
I will diagnose Baby Houseman in Part 8.
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