Manic Hollywood tales are never in short supply: crazy agents screaming into the phone, out-of-control actors driving drunk, starlets creating outre public spectacles or insomniac writers, holed up in hotel rooms for weeks, hammering out the perfect screenplay. This is not natural behavior, except in L.A., where it is almost expected.
The city provides the physical and emotional backdrop for a new book by Terri Cheney, a former entertainment lawyer who exposes the more clinical side of all that out-of-control energy. "Manic: A Memoir" chronicles Cheney's decades-long struggle to come to terms with and manage her bipolar disorder.
The book is not the first to give an autobiographical account of living bipolar. It joins the ranks of Kay Redfield Jamison's "An Unquiet Mind," Carrie Fisher's "Postcards From the Edge" and "The Big Awful" (two novels based on her life) and Andy Behrman's "Electroboy: A Memoir of Mania," to name a few. But set in a glamorous world saturated with money and celebrity, the book not only describes Cheney's individual struggle against this disease -- which afflicts 5.7 million adult Americans of every age, gender and social class -- it also provides an apt metaphor for the bizarre psychological terrain of Hollywood.
"Hollywood is an industry of extremes," said Cheney, whose clients included Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones. "It is feast or famine, euphoria or despair. Everything has got to be faster, bigger, more, and right now! In a way, you need to be manic to survive."
Therapists and psychiatrists around L.A. tend to share Cheney's view.
"We are not talking about a town where being married and going to church every Sunday is highly valued," said Rebecca Roy, a therapist who estimates that 75% of her clients are musicians, actors, producers and writers, and advertises her practice with the slogan "Stay Sane in an Insane Industry." "L.A. is about reaching for the heights, for whatever is possible. That is kind of a manic view: the idea that there is always a carrot on a stick in front of you and if you can just gear yourself up for it you can get it. Millions and millions of people come here for that reason."
No one knows what percentage of people living in Los Angeles are bipolar, but studies have shown that there are very high rates of bipolar among people in the arts, which includes musicians, poets and writers.
