Through a stellar career in entertainment law, where she represented such celebrity clients as Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones, and Universal and Columbia Pictures, Terri Cheney secretly struggled with manic depression. But after a suicide attempt in 1999, she abruptly walked away from the law to write about her illness, both as a form of therapy as well as to encourage others with mental health conditions to tell their stories. Her book, Manic, became a New York Times bestseller, and has recently been optioned by HBO for a series.

Cheney is a member of the Community Advisory Board of the UCLA Mood Disorders Research Program, the nation’s largest nonprofit research consortium regarding manic depression. She also founded a weekly community support group at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute. Recently she met up with ABILITY Magazine’s editor-in chief in Beverly Hills, Califonia, to talk about her very bumpy—but still very interesting—ride.

Chet Cooper: You don’t like the term bipolar disorder.

Terri Cheney: It feels too politically correct to me. Besides, bipolar makes it sound like there are only two poles, and only two places you can go—either manic or depressed—when in fact there are many different places you can go.

Cooper: Maybe a better term is multipolar or polypolar.

Cheney: Polypolar. “You’ve gotten polymorphously perverse” is a phrase that Woody Allen used to love. I think manic depression is better than bipolar because it just spells out how you feel. But even that term gives you a sense of the states being limited to the two. I think they should just call it a mood spectrum disorder to fit all sorts of different categories.

Cooper: It’s like autism. There’s a spectrum.

Cheney: Spectrum is a pretty word.

Cooper: Rainbow works, too.

Cheney: Yeah. Bipolar rainbow. I like that. That’s better.

Cooper: I think a lot of people don’t realize there are other states between the two poles.

Cheney: Well, the most common one for me is hypomania, and that’s the best part of being bipolar, where you’re really charming and creative and energetic but you haven’t lost your judgment and you don’t do incredibly reckless things the way you do in the manic phase. I think of it as the stage right before mania, although you can also switch back and go into depression. I functioned at a hypomanic level most of my life. That’s how I was able to function as a lawyer and in my daily life.

Then there’s what they call the mixed state, which is the worst part of being bipolar. That’s mania combined with depression. You have all the energy and recklessness of mania, but you’re incredibly depressed. So you have the drive and the ability to carry out suicidal thoughts. I always want to break glass, for some reason, when I’m in a mixed state. I want to smash things.

Cooper: It has nothing to do with the ceiling that women are looking at financially?

Cheney: (laughs) No. That would be another good reason to smash glass.

Cooper: What is the depression state like for you?

Cheney: In most of my depressions, I get physically paralyzed. They call it psychomotor retardation.

In a mixed state, I do have more energy, I can move around a little more, but I’m so irritable that you wouldn’t want to deal with me. I try not to do emailing or phone calls when I’m in a mixed state. It’s like when the Santa Ana winds blow, really hot and intense—you have that kind of edge to you. Very irritable, very reckless.

Cooper: Are there some states where you’re—I’ll use the word lethargic—where you can make it to the office, but you can’t seem to get anything done?

Cheney: I think of it as, there’s a point where I am still capable of pushing myself. Back then, when I still worked in an office, I would show up, sit there and stare blankly at the walls. I wouldn’t really do anything, but I would be physically present. But then it will go into a state where I just can’t get out of bed. That doesn’t happen as often as it used to, thank God.

Cooper: What was driving you to go to the office?

Cheney: My paycheck. That was about it.

Cooper: So you were rational enough to realize, I have to get there or I won’t get paid.

Cheney: Right. Well, for me, I think it was, I have to get there or else people will find out there’s something wrong with me. It was all about a façade when I was practicing law. It was very much about nobody knowing that there was something wrong with me. I thought that would be the end of my career and the end of my life as I knew it. That’s why I would show up.

Cooper: But you talk about other times where you weren’t able to show up. Times when you didn’t go to work for 30 days. How did you get away with that?

Cheney: Why did I not get fired? I think about that all the time. I’m writing another book now about growing up bipolar, a childhood memoir, and I realized I’ve had this pattern as far back as I can remember—periods of just not getting out of bed, not going to school, not going to work, followed by various high-functioning periods. And I think people just noticed the high functioning. If you get straight A’s, they don’t think there’s anything wrong with you. I did well in school and I did well in my career, so I think people looked at that. I always came up with these physical excuses for being sick. I claimed to have a lot of asthma attacks. I said I had the flu a lot. I said I had dental appointments all the time, but they were really therapy. I made up things, basically.

Cooper: When did you seek therapy?

Cheney: I tried in college when I realized there was something more than just the blues going on. I was taking psychology, and I knew there was something wrong with me, but I didn’t know what. But therapy didn’t really work out. Around 1987, when I was about 27 years old, I was diagnosed with major depression—unfortunately, a misdiagnosis. I got medication for depression, not for manic depression.

Cooper: What’s the difference?

Cheney: Well, if you’re bipolar, you don’t want to be on antidepressants, because they can trigger what’s called cycling, where you move up and down between mania and depression. That’s a bad thing. You want to try for stability. But of course the first knee-jerk response when somebody comes into a doctor’s office and says they’re depressed is to prescribe Prozac.

Cooper: When you say “doctor’s office,” are you talking about psychiatrists or just a general MD?

Cheney: Either one. I always wanted to see a specialist. I never received a prescription from a regular doctor. I find it kind of shocking that people are prescribed so much psychiatric medication, anti-psychotic medication, from regular doctors.

Cooper: I would think that a generalist would work with a psychiatrist for med management.

Cheney: Medications are so complicated. I have an amazing psychopharmacologist that I’ve been with for years, and he’s like the quarterback of my team. I run every medication I take by him. He talks to my other doctors. He knows what else I’m on. That is critical.

Cooper: Have you ever had electroshock treatment, or what they call ECT?

Cheney: I had it in 1994, and it was a mixed experience. I know now that things have really changed. I run a group at UCLA for dual-diagnosis patients—people who have both a mental illness and a substance abuse problem. There, I see people all the time who have had ECT, and they are doing so well that I’m just amazed. They don’t seem to have the memory problems that I had when I went through it.

Cooper: How do you know?

Cheney: How do I know? (laughs) That’s a good point! Maybe I just can’t remember…And how do they know—they might not be telling me everything.

Cooper: I’ve heard that most of the memory problems with ECT are short term.

Cheney: They affected me long-term.

Cooper: And yet you’re writing a memoir about your childhood.

Cheney: (laughs) It’s coming back slowly as I write. It’s been a really useful exercise to write about my childhood, because I thought I had forgotten it. As I write, things begin to connect. Some memories trigger others. So maybe writing therapy is something that all ECT patients should try.

Cooper: What inspired you to begin writing Manic?

Cheney: I was hospitalized at UCLA in 1999 for very severe depression after a suicide attempt—an attempt that obviously wasn’t successful. I was in the hospital for quite a long time in an outpatient program. I noticed that there were a lot of very articulate, bright people who were not getting better because they just couldn’t describe what was going on with them. There were no words to describe the inner life of bipolar disorder. There were a lot of clinical terms that we all bandied about, but there were very few personal accounts of what it feels like to be bipolar.

A few years before, Kay Redfield Jamison had written An Unquiet Mind, a book describing her experiences first as a patient with bipolar disorder, and then as a researcher studying it. That’s an amazing book. But I found that there wasn’t much else out there that told me what the condition was like from a personal perspective. I thought, there needs to be a book about bipolar disorder from the inside out. And I just started writing. Seven years later I had a manuscript for Manic.

Cooper: Do you have a writing background?

Cheney: I have always wanted to write. But at 21, when I got out of college, I didn’t feel like I had the material. I knew I could write, but I didn’t know what to write about.

Cooper: You hadn’t been hospitalized yet.

Cheney: (laughs) Right. I needed my diagnosis. I needed more crazy life experiences.

Cooper: For a while you spread your wings and moved away from your parents and Los Angeles. What brought you back?

Cheney: My parents got divorced, and my mother was having a really hard time alone. They lived out here. As I was going into law, I thought I should do entertainment law, because I like going to the movies and I like movie stars. UCLA has a really good entertainment law program, so I chose to go to law school there.

Cooper: What did your parents do?

Cheney: My father was a real estate developer; he died in 1997. My mother was a registered nurse before she retired.

Cooper: As a nurse, did she pick up any signs of your condition?

Cheney: You’d think so, but she really didn’t. I got straight A’s, which really blinded my parents. And I got into good schools and.... continued in ABILITY Magazine

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June/July 2009