- Mental illness equals weak,
or mental illness equals ugly or bad.
I would use drugs, alcohol, people, food
to just numb it out.
Yeah, it got muddy.
Hi, my name is Becca Brown and I am a person living
with bipolar II.
(mellow music)
I am an actor, a musician, a writer.
I do comedy.
I've been performing since I was a little kid.
One of the just best things about my life is that I get
to get on stage or in front of a camera
and play a character, or even be myself. (laughs)
(sad piano music)
When I was in middle school, I would get these bouts
of just existential dread and sadness and terror,
and wanting to isolate, wanting to be alone.
But since I was in school I didn't have that option
and I would just really feel in it
and didn't really have the words to explain what that was.
But then that matched with anxiety
and little spurts of rage and, at times,
just a day or two in a row of feeling amazing.
The first time I felt mania, I felt hyper
and I felt energized and just ready to go
and it sometimes feels like you've just had
a lot of caffeine and it's not fun.
Sometimes, in a manic episode,
I would just decide to clean my entire house,
rearrange the furniture, stay up all night writing something
and then the next day I would look
at all the things that I wrote and be like,
"None of that makes sense, none of it is good."
There's a common stereotype that,
when a bipolar person is in their mania,
it's their fun side.
It might look fun, but it's actually
just really exhausting and impulsive
and you're like, "Why can't I stop?"
And then the crash (loud crash)
just shortly after that.
Every person's depression looks different.
For me, it's just isolation, despair,
and sometimes paired with agoraphobia.
I don't wanna be around other people,
I don't wanna go outside.
You know, the only time I'll get out of bed
is to go use the bathroom.
Self-sabotage, just thinking terrible things.
I really just felt these feelings
but couldn't really talk about them
because it just wasn't something
that we talked about in our family.
Nobody talks about it because I think
that there's this internalized stigma of
mental illness equals weak
or mental illness equals ugly or bad.
A lot of people in my family dealt with mental illness
on both my mom and my dad's side.
My mom, I think, struggles with depression for sure
and I remember just, when she was in it,
my dad would say something along the lines of,
"She's in one of her moods, just leave her alone."
And that was kind of how we dealt
with her mental illness.
So when I started to think that I might have
similar patterns to my mom,
I just wanted to keep it on the down low.
And I would use drugs, alcohol, people, food
to just numb it out and just try to be like,
"Everything's fine, look at how hard I'm working"
and "look at this relationship I'm in" and
"look at how fun I am,
"there's no way I'm going through anything dark or bad."
But, eventually, that caught up with me
and it became harder and harder to fight that
and to numb it out.
I hit a pretty low emotional bottom
and when I was 19, I tried to commit suicide.
(sirens wail)
I was hospitalized for a couple of days
and my dad told my sisters that I had a stomach ulcer
to protect them from knowing the truth,
even though everyone, I think, kinda knew the truth.
And I think that lying and pretending
and manipulation is kind of what triggers it even more
and makes it even harder to be open about this stuff.
Over the course of college 'til when I was
about 25, it got pretty dark,
and eventually, after just knowing there was something wrong
with me for so long, I reached out,
I asked for help.
In the winter of 2017, I went to a psychiatrist.
They suggested that I might be bipolar,
but they wouldn't be able to really diagnose it
if I was continually using drugs and alcohol,
so I stopped drinking and using drugs
and, a couple months later,
they were able to diagnose me with bipolar II.
The difference between bipolar I and bipolar II,
it's determined by what the mania looks like.
For somebody with bipolar I, the mania
is much more intense, longer periods.
For bipolar II, it's called hypomania,
where it's a shorter period of mania,
but we do still have the very high-highs
and the very low-lows.
But thank god I have therapy for that. (laughs)
I see a therapist regularly and then,
every once in a while, I'll see a psychiatrist
to talk about my medication
to discuss whether I need to go up
or stay where I'm at just to keep everything regular.
Not numb, not perfect, but manageable (laughs).
When I first got diagnosed, I thought,
how am I gonna be a good artist
without all this stuff that I needed,
I thought I needed, to be funny.
I thought I needed to be depressed all the time
to write good comedy.
I thought I needed to be wild and have crazy experiences
and go on these drug benders
and, you know, sexually impulsive sprees
to write good material.
But, the material I've written now
since getting sober has been so much better
than the stuff before.
I actually sometimes will listen to old sets
of my stand-up from before
and I kinda feel bad for me three years ago
who was just obviously screaming for help,
but didn't know how in a healthy way.
Today, living with bipolar II is much more manageable
because I know I have it and I know
what to do when I start feeling the symptoms,
when I start feeling the mania.
Maybe I need to meditate or,
when I'm starting to feel depressed,
maybe I need to step outside or go on a hike
or go for a long walk with my partner.
So, it's not perfect, it's not all sunshine and roses
and rainbows, but I don't wanna kill myself and,
for me, that's manageable. (laughs)
That's huge for me.
So, if you think you're bipolar,
if you know you're bipolar, if you know
you have any mental illness or you think
you might have a mental illness, you're not alone.
There're a lot of us, there are resources out there.
Don't be afraid to ask for help.
I know it's awkward to ask for help but, you know,
sometimes that's all it takes
to feel a sense of relief.
I ask for help everyday.
There are people that are out there
that are willing to give you help.
Having a mental illness is not ugly,
it's not a sign of weakness, and just know
that you're never, ever alone.
(laid-back folksy music)