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This filmmaker made a movie about the aftermath of her bipolar diagnosis
Brut America
Follow
6/13/2022
“If someone has bipolar disorder in your life, help them grow.”
She was a freshman when she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Now, Alex Heller has made a film about the year that followed ... #tribeca2022
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🛠️
Lifestyle
Transcript
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00:00
I think if you find out that someone close to you or in your life has bipolar disorder,
00:06
you should definitely be there for them, care for them, give them some empathy and give
00:10
them some slack, but also, like, help them grow.
00:16
A diagnosis like this is something that everyone takes on around you.
00:31
It's not just your life that's being affected, it's people who care about you, definitely
00:38
people who live with you, but I think, I just have so much gratitude for my own family
00:48
and I have so much compassion for other people's families and just, everyone knows someone
00:52
who has a mental illness, it's like, it really affects everyone you know, in a way, like
00:57
everyone close to you and everyone who cares about you.
01:08
It sounds like you're experiencing episodes of mania and depression.
01:13
What I'm leading to is bipolar disorder.
01:22
I remember being diagnosed with bipolar disorder very clearly and that scene in the movie
01:27
is almost exactly pulled from my experience.
01:32
It's a fictional story, but everything about mental illness and the nitty gritty parts
01:37
of the treatment are all pulled from my life.
01:40
I had had a long journey with mental illness before that diagnosis, like in high school,
01:48
but I kind of went through different diagnoses and different medications and I was in therapy
01:56
since I was 15, but nothing ever really quite worked for me and then I went to college and
02:05
I decided to just forget it all and leave it behind me and then I had a massive breakdown
02:09
in my freshman year.
02:10
I found through my own research that a lot of people are diagnosed with ADHD before they're
02:17
correctly diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
02:20
So I came across that realization writing this paper for school and I was like, I have
02:26
check, check, check, check every single symptom of this or whatever.
02:30
So when the doctor told me that I almost definitely might have bipolar disorder, it was, it made
02:37
complete sense.
02:49
It's become such a community because I have thousands of followers and I just, I interact
02:56
with these people every day and we like laugh about this stuff together because it, you
03:07
have a chronic illness of any kind, like it's never going away.
03:13
There's nothing you can do about it.
03:15
It's hard.
03:16
It sucks.
03:17
It's hard on your body and it's expensive and so what can you do other than kind of
03:23
build a community and find some sort of relief?
03:28
For me, that's, that's through laughing about certain things.
03:31
Before the shoot of our movie, I would have probably said to my 16 year old self, like,
03:40
you are a damaging human.
03:45
You are about to go through some really hard years and do a lot of bad, but you'll get
03:52
through it and then you'll be fine.
03:55
But after this, after this shoot, I probably would just want to give my 16 year old self
04:02
like a hug.
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