Dear Jennifer Connelly:

Posted on August 12, 2005 in Stigma

I saw the very brief article in The Huffington Post which described how you cruised the Internet or talked on the telephone while having sex. Your behavior ignited a faint glow of self-recognition because, you see, I am bipolar. In a word, you enter a manic state from time to time. And that’s OK as long as you recognize it.

When I look at the two of us and at my other bipolar friends, I am struck by how shameless you appear to be about your disorder. Very simply, you have preserved or developed a sense of self-value: whatever your mind does, you accept it. Not every thought that passes through, not every experience should be acted upon, but I think you know this and have boundaries. (Though I wonder about your press agent!)

Today, I was talking to a friend who has been having auditory hallucinations. Her worry was that she was cracking up. The voices sometimes pay visits to me, too. When they do, I say to myself “Oh, that stuff again” and go about my life. It’s similar to what you say to Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind. Learn what is real and what isn’t real. Get the help of others. And do not be ashamed of yourself because you have this disease.

Being publically mentally ill puts one in a hot light. Look what Tom Cruise did to Brooke Shields. To say that you suffer from any kind of mental disorder is to suggest to people that you might be a killer, a rapist, or a thief. You may be the most harmless person in the community, but many will ostracize you on account of the diagnosis. This puts you in a quandary. Do you come out or not?

If you are bipolar, you haven’t. And I don’t blame you. If I were to obtain conclusive proof such as psychiatrist records that you were, I would not release it. Only you can tell the world that you have the disease. I am only guessing here and I don’t think any less of you. The article made me laugh. Yes, we do those things. And people can be downright mean when they hear of them.

When I did a search on “Jennifer Connelly bipolar”, I uncovered a site which included the phrase “I lived in a group house with a bipolar shrew”. Evidentally, the association existed because the roach included your name as well as those of several other female stars as a traffic trap. It demonstrates the way that the diagnosis can be used to attack us, to disenfranchise us, to run us down until we feel like burnt, splintered matchsticks. Many hate us. I don’t know why. Do they hate themselves? Were they hurt as a child? Were they just taught to be cruel or not guided towards compassion? Or are they hiding their own mental illness?

I don’t pretend to know. Symptoms seem plain to me as in your case, but I have never understood this kind of nastiness. They do it so effortlessly. When I try, I do it badly. I always have.

Let me conclude by thanking you for the work you did in A Beautiful Mind with Russell Crowe and Ron Howard. That film did much to convey to the public the pain and the value of the mentally ill. We’re not all going to win Nobel Prizes, but it was nice to be reminded that we could retain our dignity after years of living in the illness. I am not alone in loving this film. True, it did not tell the story exactly as it happened. It did, however, establish what it meant to live in a world that our brains superimpose on the real one.

I am not a crazed fan who wants to stalk you. I am happily married. We will probably never meet and that’s OK with me. I just wanted to put this out where others who struggle can see it. I wish you well in your career. And, dear, take some time off the Internet and take a walk, will ya?