If everything you knew about bipolar disorder came from television, what would you know? From the TV-movie about Mary Kay Letourneau, you'd know that bipolar people may have poor judgment and engage in inappropriate and risky sexual behaviors. From several episodes of the NBC series Law and Order you might have gathered that bipolar teens and adults are more likely than the general population to commit murder, and news stories over the past few years might have reinforced that impression.
Now the top-rated NBC-TV series ER is tackling the subject of bipolar disorder by introducing the character of Maggie, the manic-depressive mother of resident medical student Abby Lockhart (played by Maura Tierney). Maggie suffers from Bipolar Type I, with major manic episodes and major depressive episodes, and when she first strode into the emergency room, she was wearing a flamboyant outfit and talking nonstop, barely allowing anyone else to get a word in edgewise. But when Abby claimed not to know her, Maggie began charging around the area screaming her daughter's name in a rage.
We learned about the childhood that had made Abby so resentful of her mother. Maggie admitted that she had stopped taking her mood stabilizer, as she had done often before, because she hated the side effects.
Having told her mother to go home again to Florida, Abby later found her weeping in a cold rain on a bench at the train station. Maggie babbled half-coherent apologies, and Abby found herself rocking her mother in her arms.
The next episode began with Abby dropping Maggie off at the bus station with a ticket back to Florida. Maggie was calmer but plainly did not want to go. Soon Maggie showed up at the ER again, insisting she and Abby needed to talk. She admitted that she had lost her job and been evicted from her Florida apartment, so had nowhere to go. Abby still wanted nothing to do with her, but at the end of the program, after a variety of events including one that left Abby slightly injured, the two went home together.
"I'll just be happy if they don't make her out to be an abusive mother or a murderer. That's usually how we're thought of by the general public. ER could do us a great service if they show her as a kind, loving individual with a human flaw, this disease."
Jade
Next => Part 2: What ER Did Right => Part 3, Part 4
Updated 5/21/06
