YOU KNOW that one friend who tells you depression shouldn’t be treated with medication, because you could just cut out gluten or eat more kale?
Touched with Fire is 110 minutes of that friend, and it’s just as insufferable as you’d expect. Ostensibly a love story between poets with bipolar disorder who meet in a psych ward, it is actually an extended infomercial for the book it’s based on (by psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison) and also maybe for not taking your meds, even though Jamison herself doesn’t advocate that.
Also featured prominently: Winter as a metaphor for depression! No discussion of insurance coverage or the difficulty of accessing mental health care! Katie Holmes and Luke Kirby chomping the scenery, as their characters somehow publish books with alarming frequency, despite never writing anything worth publishing! (I suppose inane rhymes about the sun and moon technically qualify as poetry, but in real life, they’d deservedly end up in a slush pile.)
It all boils down to an offensively cartoonish depiction of bipolar disorder as a gift that needn’t be medicated—which, like, have you ever known someone with untreated bipolar disorder? It’s not all flights of boundless creativity and reckless passion. Untreated mental illness is debilitating.
Breaking down the stigma attached to mental health disorders is a huge, important undertaking, and this is not the way to do it. The crazy artist is a stereotype, right up there with the hard-drinking artist. Addiction and bipolar disorder are diseases, not artistic best practices. Drinking did not do Ernest Hemingway or David Foster Wallace any favors. Clinical depression was not what made Sylvia Plath’s poetry great; it was her incredibly disciplined drafting process. The idea that taking care of yourself is somehow the antithesis of making art is an insidious myth; one can’t exist without the other. That isn’t romantic, but I guess neither is breathing? Both are required if you hope to have a sustainable career.
The world is hard enough on artists, and by romanticizing the very things that kill good art, movies like this one make it even harder. If you want to watch an ill-conceived screed against taking medication for bipolar disorder, and a massive oversimplification of what it’s like to live with mental illness, please enjoy Touched with Fire.
But if you want a story that takes mental health seriously and depicts the challenges of seeking treatment, you’d be much better off staying home and rereading The Bell Jar. We should envy Plath’s genius, not her pain.
Megan Burbank you treat mental illness in a simplistic cartoonish way. The issue with mental illness is that it is hurriedly put away in a box labeled ‘understood’. The whole issue with mental health is that it is so much much more complicated to treat than simply assigning a label and medicating accordingly. The issue with emotional distress is that it has to do a lot with trauma and upbringing, and to change distressing ways of feeling/thinking/acting involves so much more work than what society is willing to do for the sufferers. So the healthcare system just opts for the quickest, most profitable solution: pills. Everyday. For the rest of your life. Because your distress is an incurable illness of the brain. It’s a simplistic way out of a problem that just doesn’t go away, just lingers around, hopefully more quietly.
Maybe you don’t agree with her viewpoint, but I wouldn’t begin to label it as either simplistic or cartoonish.
And if I may, meds have helped lots and lots of people, including myself. So it’s fine if you take issue with them being a blanket cure for all, but if you’re one of those Resist Psych Meds assholes, you’re the one being simplistic and cartoonish.
well look i used the terms she used to condemn a film to disagree with her viewpoint… and you choose an insult to disagree with my viewpoint. so maybe those meds did not work all that great for you?
p.s. the movie looks hideous i agree on that
Thanks for the review, Megan. Having come from a family where profound mental illness (bipolar, borderline personality disorder, chronic severe depression) was minimized and even romanticized as “an artistic temperament,” I hear you. There’s nothing romantic about being a child dependent on adults with severe, undiagnosed, and untreated mental illness. And there’s nothing romantic about living with it yourself, either (PTSD and chronic depression here.)
I’m saddened that the film is feeding notions that feed stigma and memes that help discourage folks from seeking the help they need. Just thinking about the magnitude of the unnecessary human suffering that occurs due to fear of stigma and persistent beliefs not based in sound science makes me want to cry.
I wonder how Dr. Redfield Jamison allowed the title of her memoir to be lent to such a thing?! Her memoir was terrific – I’d recommend it to anyone who’s experienced the disruption that severe decompensation can bring, because she’s an exampled of someone who has recovered (a few times), thrived, and made an inspiring career path for herself (she’s a psychologist whose work has focused on bipolar.) But she’s also VERY clear that for her, medication is absolutely necessary to manage her illness, and it will likely be a necessity for the rest of her life.
Her memoir was part of what helped me get over the idea that one takes meds until you “get better” so you don’t need them anymore – for some of us with severe, relapsing conditions that began in childhood or young adulthood, that’s not something likely to happen. Depressions will, more likely than not, recur, but the right medication for you can help soften its edges so that you’re less likely to slide into the pit of despair again.
Boo, hiss at this movie. =/