[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Thanks for sticking with us on The Takeaway. More than 2 million people in the US live with bipolar disorder, but these days, popular culture and social media are squarely focused on just one person with the condition, Kanye West or Ye, which is his official new title. Kanye's Twitter pleas to his wife, his threats towards her current boyfriend, and his very erratic public behavior has elicited scorn, laughter, and delusion while launching dozens of memes and characterizations of the artist as crazy or unhinged.

Now, bipolar disorder is a challenging condition typically diagnosed in early adulthood and it is widely misunderstood, both among the general population and even among clinicians and professionals and sometimes those living with bipolar disorder. Mocking Ye may seem like harmless celebrity chastening, but for others living with the disease, this language can be isolating and distressing.

With me now is freelance journalist Kiana Fitzgerald, who recently wrote a post for Vox titled Bipolar disorder is complicated, and so is how we talk about Ye. Kiana, welcome.

Kiana Fitzgerald: Thank you so much.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. Let's just start so that folks will have a basic shared understanding here. What is bipolar disorder?

Kiana Fitzgerald: According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, there are several types of bipolar but the most common are type I and type II. They're both identified by the highs of mania or hypomania, which is a really ramped-up state in the lows of depression. It looks different for everyone, but mania tends to involve grandiosity, over-optimism, and impaired judgment, and sometimes hallucinations and delusions, which I've experienced as someone with bipolar type I.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You've been drawing our attention to some of the language that we've been hearing and that folks have been using to describe Ye. Walk us through what some of that language has been, and the nature of that stigmatizing language.

Kiana Fitzgerald: Sure. For the past several weeks, I've been online doing my job as a freelance journalist just trying to keep my finger on the pulse of the culture. Obviously, Kanye has been doing and saying some things online, in real life that are drawing attention to him. Some of the things that he's done have caused people to call him "unhinged or psychotic or insane, or other iterations of the word crazy".

This, again, as someone who lives with bipolar, it's really triggering for me, because I have been in situations where I have not always done the best thing, or I have not acted like myself, or I have not just used the right judgment because I've been in a manic state, and I have not had people say that about me. To see that being said about him just causes me to wonder like, "What is the difference between us?" I understand he's very famous, and he has a very potent personality, but it still gives me pause.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Say more about that pause. Is it your sense that people are thinking but simply not communicating that to you as someone with bipolar?

Kiana Fitzgerald: Yes. I think that's a part of it. I started a TikTok about a year ago, where I've built a community of 20,000 plus supporters. They have reached out to me, people who experience bipolar as well, and they've told me, "I relate to you, I deeply feel what you're saying. I too have, in some instances, completely changed my life because of behaviors that I've done, and I've also experienced these very religious and spiritual highs. I'm trying to figure out how to integrate all of these things into my life."

I think about those people, I think about my community of folks who are trying to just get an understanding of where they are. When I see those words being flung around online and in real life, it just makes me want more for people who are seeking more, seeking more connection, seeking more understanding of the situations that they're going through.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It seems to me that there are at least two, certainly more than that, but at least two fundamental challenges we're facing here. One is that abusive behavior on the part of Ye is being written off as simply explained by his experiences with bipolar disorder. There's potentially a lack of accountability for abusive actions. We know, of course, that people living with mental illness, large, are much more likely to be the victims of abuse, the victims of violence, for example, than the perpetrators of it. Simply describing his actions as resulting from the bipolarity, it seems to me removes a need for accountability on his part.

Kiana Fitzgerald: Yes. I'm not here to absolve him of anything, and I'm not here to influence people to explain away his behavior. What I am here to do is just get people to understand that he is not alone in his behaviors. I can only speak for myself, and I know that when I had my first manic experience in 2016 I was dating someone, and the following year, I had another episode and I just completely obsessed over that person, and I contacted them.

I wouldn't call my behavior abusive, but it definitely was out of the way, and I had to learn over the next couple of years that that wasn't okay. I thought I was meant to be with this person, I thought that this person was my own didi. It was like a very, very ingrained emotional feeling and to separate yourself from that is extremely difficult. I understand that his behaviors are not ideal, to say the least, but I just want people to understand that, yes, there can be some accountability, and I, myself, take accountability for my previous actions.

I just want people to understand that he is doing some things that are affected by his condition, and then there are some things that he's doing that he needs to take accountability for. I'm not saying that he shouldn't, but I think that this is just a really murky area. As a culture that doesn't really talk about mental health in very interconnected way, this is going to be difficult for us to navigate for at least the next few months, if not years.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I so appreciate your point. I want to be careful here that as I'm thinking about this responsibility-taking that, of course, the other side-- It seems to me that these pieces are, as you point out, interconnected, in part, because of our lack of vocabulary, and also perhaps our lack of empathy in our public discourse around these issues. On the one hand, there's a question of not simply removing accountability as a result of suffering from bipolar, but on the other hand, is some level of compassion, understanding, empathy, and simply accuracy about bipolar disorder.

Kiana Fitzgerald: Yes. I think you just said it all. Is so much space that is left for us to explore when it comes to having real, meaningful conversations around not only Kanye West, but around everyone who lives with a disorder or everyone who lives with anything that is not on the scale of "normalcy" and that extends far and wide.

I think that the fact that we're even having this conversation is a step in the right direction. I also feel like I'm someone who has been writing actively and talking very loudly about life with bipolar ever since I was diagnosed because I just hate feeling alone. In the beginning, I just felt like nobody understood me, and I felt like nobody could simply comprehend the highs and the lows of what I experienced, even though millions of people in the US live with this condition.

I feel like, because of that, we should be trying to make strides toward understanding, toward empathy, as you said, toward compassion because I think we're going to look back on this moment in a couple of years and be like, "Wow, we were really uneducated, or we really did not know what was happening with people." Every year that I live with this disorder, I learn more about it. It's not like one and done. There's always something to be learned about this experience.

I just encourage everyone to just, if you have people who live with a condition like bipolar, like schizophrenia, any of those conditions in your life, even depression, listen to them and just be there for them because that's the most important thing for folks who are going through something like this.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What are some words that you'd like to ensure that we don't use again in either our writing or our talking, not only about Kanye West but about bipolar in general? What are the words we can just excise from our public conversations?

Kiana Fitzgerald: [chuckles] Yes. Absolutely. Crazy, unhinged, psychotic, insane. Any of these words that have a pathological connotation to them, I feel like we should just get rid of completely because this is a condition that we're still learning about in real-time, and we're still learning how it affects people across all the different lines of humanity. Anything that we can do to just stay on track in terms of talking about each other as human beings is going to be the most ideal thing that we can do.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Kiana Fitzgerald, a freelance journalist, thank you so much for joining us today.

Kiana Fitzgerald: Of course, thank you for having me.

[music]

Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.