My name is Anthony Padilla and, today, I’ll be spending a day
with people with bipolar disorder to learn the truth about
this heavily stigmatized disorder
that causes extreme emotional highs and lows.
By the end of this video, we’ll find out, is living
with bipolar disorder a completely manageable
hurdle that goes almost unnoticed in most cases or are
the effects this disorder has on every aspect of life far
too psychologically paralyzing for anyone to fully thrive?
[music]
-Hello, Rivkah.
-Hello, Anthony.
[music]
-Joshua.
-Hey, thanks for having me.
[music]
-Tristan.
-Hi, how are you?
-What does bipolar disorder entail?
-We have very high highs and very low lows.
It’s like very dark in the low.
The high point, it can look like, "I’ve got everything together.
Everything’s fine. Everything’s great,"
or it can be like, "Have you drunk six Red Bulls?
Are you okay?"
-It actually looks like there’s a chemical going like pumping through your veins.
-Exactly.
-Can you explain the difference between mania and depression?
-Common misconception is that the mania is the fun part.
Like for me, the mania is not fun whatsoever.
Racing thoughts, "I got to do this, I got to do that.
Oh, my God. It would be so cool.
Why don’t I just build a bookshelf?"
I truly felt like I couldn’t stop and then some trigger from a traumatic
experience as a child or something would come up or a relationship
would end or I would get into a fight with one of my friends,
and then I would get that crash and then it’s hell.
It’s a couple of hours.
Sometimes multiple days of just being bedridden with depression.
-You have the same thought, which is
a delusion, which is, "This will last forever."
-Which almost perpetuates the length of time that you experience it.
-I’m always going to feel this way, which is not true.
After an hour, a couple of hours, you’re in a different state of mind.
[music]
-How does bipolar affect you specifically?
-Every nine days, it would cycle through, which is
looking back at it, I’m like, "How did I live that way?"
-Were you living like expecting that next up and expecting that next down?
-Yes, I knew it was going to happen eventually.
I used to be a pretty heavy drinker.
I’m like, "Okay, when I’m up, I’ll drink so I come down a little bit.
When I’m down, I’ll drink a bunch of caffeine to try--"
and that just doesn’t pay off long-term
and professionals call that "self-medicating," which is-
-- potentially dangerous.
-100% incredibly dangerous.
-They would always label me as like, "Oh, they’re just hyper,"
and then I would just crash and the crash would manifest
in this depression, in this just very sad, uncontrollable crying,
wanting to never leave my bed.
-My highs were where I lost control of myself and where I didn’t know what was
reality anymore and that can rapidly go into several days without sleeping.
Eventually, I’m hallucinating.
I don’t know who’s in front of me.
It’s also scary to be on the inside where
you don’t know if you’re dreaming or awake.
[music]
-When did you first start exhibiting behaviors
that you now know are related to bipolar disorder?
-It really kicked off when I was about 16 and it became very apparent.
-How did that present itself?
-Being very angry [chuckles]
and agitated and stomping around and having all
this energy and not being able to sleep much.
-Early elementary like third, fourth grade that I started
to be super hyper and then have those moments of crash.
I was overworked as a kid.
That would lead me to these crashes of like,
"I don’t want to learn lines today, Mom.
I just want to take a day-off."
-Well, I had my breakthrough episode when I was 16.
Yes, I didn’t come down for several days where I just kept getting more elevated.
Everything in the history of man was coming down to this one moment.
It wasn’t that I have a mental condition.
The history of humanity is all coming down to me.
-Are there any potentially dangerous aspects to having bipolar disorder?
-I definitely self-harm with the destructive behaviors
and something else is that it really does kill people.
It is dangerous to live with depression because in my darkest
days, I do deal with this trigger warning like suicidal ideations.
Untreated mental illness, untreated bipolar, untreated alcoholism,
untreated addiction, they’re all very, very severe life or death things.
I think that, again, it’s like people don’t treat
mentally ill people with the same compassion
and gentleness as they do people with cancer or physical ailments.
Mental illness is a chronic illness, right?
It is kind of a thing that you just live with.
-Do you remember when you were first officially diagnosed?
-I was probably about 24, 25.
There’s a service you can pay for out here in New York where
essentially during court cases, you can take a psychological evaluation.
Not having a court case, you can go to these people
and you can go, "I would like to be diagnosed, please."
That’s what I did.
From there, I went to a psychiatrist and a therapist
and they were like, "Yes, can’t confirm." This is a frightening thing.
A lot of people don’t catch it until they’re in their 50s.
I can’t imagine going through more than half of your life
going, "Oh, I feel these ways and I don’t know."
There’s no explanation.
-I brought myself to a hospital because I was experiencing
probably the worst depression I had ever felt in my entire life.
I wanted to kill myself.
The doctor that I was working with went into another room
and then I got an email from this audition that I had booked
something and I instantly like, "Everything’s fixed.
Everything’s great. I booked it. I’m good."
I called my agent and I was just like, "Everything’s amazing.
I just booked this thing."
The doctor came back and was like, "You’re bipolar."
I was just like, "I know." [laughter]
-Did you have a sense of relief?
-I had suspected that I was bipolar.
For a while, I was afraid of the diagnosis.
When I got it, it was perfect in that moment of, "Thank God that I know
what this is now that I have a name for it, so now I can work on it."
-2001, parents are called, you’re taken from class, and you go to the hospital.
The doctors had to really sit with her and be
like, "He could jump out of a building." It could get really bad.
The conversation naturally came up with my very
first psychiatrist, which was like, "Well,
when do I get off these meds and when do I go back to being
me and just go back to school and go back to my old life?"
This condition is your life.
-It made it easier to take things in stride.
It made me look at it like a health issue rather
than some sort of moral or psychological failing.
-Can you recall any big moments in your life
that were clearly shaped by bipolar disorder?
-I went to this big event.
It was a reunion for a film that I was in when I was a little kid.
It was our 10-year reunion.
It was three full days of partying essentially.
I went back to school after the reunion, after all of that partying
with basically, I think, a combo of 12 hours of sleep over a week,
and then I had the crash and my body just shut down.
I couldn’t stop crying.
I simultaneously knew that I should eat but couldn’t get anything down.
I remember my dad coming downstairs and me just weeping.
I couldn’t get words out. It was so bad.
-Has bipolar disorder ever affected any of your relationships?
-Every single one, whether or not I’m aware of it.
I do this bit in my standup if it makes dating difficult because is it like sex?
Do you wait for the third date?
-Yes, what did you tell them? [chuckles]
-Initially, it’s fine.
As far as being rejected, if I’m going on a date
and go, "By the way, I have a mood disorder,"
and they go, "Oh, well, that sounds like something I don’t want to associate with,"
and I go, "Well, you sound like something I don’t want to associate with."
-I can come on as someone who is a suitable match in the beginning,
someone who’s humorous and who is personable and a good listener,
but then over the stretch of time when you see the full
range of emotions that I go through in a year or two years,
you might take a second opinion on, "Is this guy going to be your man?"
-You’re taken aback. You’re starting to reevaluate.
-I think the one thing I’ve learned about dating is that when I hold
those stories back, it never goes anywhere because they can sense
there’s this hidden history that I’m not divulging.
-Is there anything that helps you ease unwanted symptoms?
-At first, I took medication.
That was heavily monitored by my psychiatrist.
I have a bunch, a list of just activities that I need
to do that if I’m ever starting to feel low or I feel dark,
grabbing a book off my shelf and flipping to a random page typically,
it’s exactly what I need to hear or going outside,
going for a walk, grabbing a donut.
-Just practicing self-care, being kind to yourself, being more present.
-The number one thing for me is just acceptance.
This is probably something that I will live with for the rest of my life.
In order to be able to live with it without it overwhelming me
and getting absorbed and drowning in the waves of my emotions,
just using these tools that I’ve found
as a surfboard so I’m able to ride the wave,
and knowing that sometimes the wind is going to knock me off, right?
I will land in that water occasionally.
-We should be valuing ourselves based on how we react to things
like falling down instead of the fact that we fell down at all.
-There it is. I love that.
-You’re a comedian and a bunch of your jokes and routines
are centered around things relating to bipolar disorder.
Has that at all been helpful for you?
-I think that humor is the first step towards communication
and communication the first step towards empathy and empathy, understanding.
It’s a chain. If you can express yourself in a way
that’s palatable, it’s really helped bridge gaps.
-I just was on a quest to make mental illness funny again.
[laughter]
-Totally hilarious at one point in time.
-Doing a performance that is not just jokes,
but it’s also a cathartic moment for you.
It is very therapeutic and you don’t want your set to be just therapy.
That’s not fun, but all performance is therapeutic even if you’re
doing some silly stuff that doesn’t mean that much to you.
-Before we continue learning about the world of bipolar disorder.
How do you wish people in society would
perceive and treat people with bipolar disorder?
-As God.
-I just want to take a moment to reiterate that these videos
are not intended to diagnose any condition or disorder.
I encourage anyone who feels that they might relate to any diagnosis
of the guests in these videos to do some additional research and consider
a proper diagnosis from a licensed professional.
That brings me to our sponsor, BetterHelp, who
I’d like to thank for our continued partnership.
I’ve talked a bit about how therapy has been really helpful for me,
but therapy can be customized to whatever is right for you and can be really
useful in providing tools to help with motivation
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Thanks again to BetterHelp, who are giving I Spent a Day With viewers
and listeners 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com/padilla.
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Now, back to the world of bipolar disorder.
[music]
-How do you wish people in society would
perceive and treat people with bipolar disorder?
-As God.
-As God, worship.
We have a God in the room, ladies and gentlemen and everyone in between.
-[laughs]
Like what are you talking about?
We’re normal people understanding a person’s
problem and looking at it objectively.
-Hafsa_X wants to know how you react when people
say anyone with any kind of mood swing is bipolar.
-I think this is happening across all mental health labels.
I think people are just more familiar with what OCD or ADD
is and they’ll say, "Oh, I’m feeling a little bit that way."
I think that’s all okay to use those descriptive terms.
It destigmatizes it where people normalize
those terms as just descriptive ways of being.
-It makes it, I think, more socially
acceptable, but it might not exactly help folks.
It’s this very specific judgmental thing.
Also, it turns a medical condition into a personification.
If you say that person’s bipolar, that’s different
than saying that person has bipolar disorder.
-It would be a mislabel to say, "That’s a bipolar person"?
-Absolutely and it’s only natural.
It’s categorizing things as how we survived as a species.
It’s instinctual. I understand it. It’s just maybe not helpful.
-If there’s anyone watching who feels like they might have bipolar
disorder or they do have it but they’re afraid to talk about it because
of all the negative stigma surrounding it, is there anything you want to say to them?
-Don’t be afraid to ask for help.
I think those three magic words, "I need help,"
are the most honest and vulnerable things that we can say
and they don’t get said a lot and it doesn’t make you weak.
-It’s actually a sign of self-respect, I think.
-It is a sign of self-respect, a sign of self-love, and a sign of acceptance.
-Are there any aspects to having bipolar disorder that you are thankful for?
-It’s given me definitely a lot of courage because to get
up in front of people and say I’m bipolar on the internet,
that takes a lot of chutzpah as my dad would say.
-Translation.
-Like balls.
-[laughs]
Not what I was expecting. [laughs]
What do you think the biggest misconception is about bipolar disorder?
-It’s that it’s constantly up or down.
We sit on the surface a lot of the time.
We’re riding those waves.
-It’s not all on or off. There is some in between.
-Bipolar people shouldn’t be trusted and they’re
not someone that maybe is worth your time.
I think it’s important to recognize
that everyone has something going on with them.
Everyone has personal experience that they are trying to get through.
Whether that they have a label or not is really up to them.
-All right, you got five seconds to shout out or promote
anything you want directly into the camera, go.
-You could find me at Mad One Media at madone.me.
-Twitter account TristanJMiller1, tristanjmiller.com.
I do a podcast The Amateur Detective Club.
-I host a podcast called Where Are We Now where I get
to connect, chat, and kiki with other fellow former child stars.
-Click the button. There’s a button somewhere.
It’s below most likely. I’m not sure.
This has been fun for me. It should be fun for you.
-It’s fun for me, especially when I click the Subscribe button.
After spending the day with these people who have bipolar
disorder, I’ve come to understand just how important it is
to encourage open conversation and understanding regarding
mental health as everyone deals with so much more
behind the scenes than we could ever truly understand.
[music]
-When I was a younger person in my teens and early 20s,
I’m still in my 20s, so take that, older people.
-Yes, you [beep] 30-pluses, disgusting.
-[laughs] Yes, I’m never going to be old.
-Yes, I’m never going to be 30. I’m totally under 30.
Don’t look at my Wiki.
-Brag [?] Wikipedia thing.
I’ve gone in and tried to make my own and Wikipedia’s like,
"Don’t do that. We will delete it."