Bipolar Today

I have been covering the television show Homeland quite a bit over the past few months, as the show is currently one of the most popular and highest quality representations of bipolar disorder on television today. Carrie Mathison, the main character on the show, is actually inspired by a real person, journalist Jamie Stiehm. She is the bipolar sister of Meredith Stiehm, a writer and consulting producer on the television show. This week, she wrote a fascinating article about her own experience with bipolar disorder, and how it relates to the experiences of Carrie Mathison. Like Carrie, she had a manic episode in which she believed that there was something major that was going to happen soon that only she was able to see coming (in her case, it was in Baltimore). She discusses the ways in which the sense of special insight that comes with manic episodes can lead bipolar people to think that they have special knowledge, and shows how Carrie’s obsession with Nicholas Brody is grounded in her own, real-life experiences. The article is a fascinating read.

Commentary

I wasn’t aware that Homeland was based on a real person, much less a reporter from Baltimore, but it certainly makes sense that it was. Carrie’s experience is one that many people with bipolar disorder share, including myself at earlier, improperly treated stages of my disease. Hypomania gives us the ability to see connections between things, that can often spark a great deal of creative thought and genuine insight. However, the downside to this, especially when things slip into mania, is that we often see connections that aren’t really there (or whose real connection have no causal relationship to our apparent insight). When things slip into mania, everything can seem like it is connected, and we can easily slip into believing in a giant narrative where a) we are the only ones who can see the underlying pattern, and b) we are the only ones who can do anything about it. Hearing Stiehm’s experiences and how they inspired the actual story of Homeland make clearer some of the plot and psychological points the show was trying to make and really provides more insight into what the show is trying to say.

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