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May the 4th Be With You – Remembering “Mental Health Hero” Carrie Fisher

May the 4th be with you. While Star Wars fans celebrate this unofficial holiday, it’s worth reflecting on the life of Carrie Fisher – icon to a generation as Princess Leia turned outspoken advocate for mental health.

In an opinion article for USA Today, the author of the biography Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge, highlights her role as “a mental health hero,” whose “advocacy was as important as her acting.”

Bipolar disorder, once known as manic depression, has long carried particular stigma, especially among women. Before Carrie Fisher openly admitted her bipolar I diagnosis in 2000, the only female celebrity to have done so was the former child actress Patty Duke, who wrote a 1992 memoir called memoir called A Brilliant Madness: Living with Manic-Depressive Illness.

But Fisher’s honesty and transparency rocked the world, as she forthrightly told Diane Sawyer about the chemical imbalance that caused her illness, her struggles with addiction, and the severe psychotic break she had suffered: “I am mentally ill. I can say that. I am not ashamed of that. I survived that. I am still surviving that.”

“She took the stigma against bipolar disorder and kicked it to the curb,” said Joanne Doan, founder of the magazine bpHope, directed to the 6 million Americans living with bipolar disorder.

She turned her stardom into advocacy. She inspired Star Wars fans at media events and conventions, where “made extra time, long after she was supposed to leave, talking to fans who were also bipolar,” said David Zentz, an avid Star Wars fan who saw her at more than three dozen events over the years.

She also paved the way for countless women to come forward with their own diagnoses. As biographer Sheila Weller notes, “After Carrie’s forthright declaration of her mental illness to Sawyer, it would be four more years before Jane Pauley dared write about her bipolarity, more than a decade before Catherine Zeta-Jones revealed hers and Demi Lovato admitted that she had been diagnosed, and nearly 18 years before Mariah Carey did.”

And she advanced public understanding about the condition. One of the most important things Carrie Fisher did, says Stephen Fried, an author who specializes in writing about bipolar disorder, is to stress its ongoing, cyclical nature: “just because a person’s symptoms are gone for a while, they are not gone for good — they will return.”

“She let you know that even when she seemed fine, she wasn’t,” Fried noted. “She deserves a lot of credit for pushing that truth’’ and humanizing those living with and managing the condition.

Read the full article here or watch Carrie Fisher’s groundbreaking 2000 interview with Diane Sawyer.

Learn more about bipolar disorder.

 

Weller, Sheila. “Carrie Fisher was a mental health hero. Her advocacy was as important as her acting.” USAToday.com, 26 Jul 2019, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/07/26/carrie-fisher-champion-mental-health-awareness-column/1820161001/.

Photo credit Wikimedia Commons