She built a toy empire while hiding a lifetime of existential depression

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/melissa-and-doug-toys-founder-depression/2021/04/26/8d4af4be-7ba7-11eb-85cd-9b7fa90c8873_story.html

by robg • 5 years ago

87 46 5 years ago

washingtonpost.com

tediousdemise7• 5 years ago

I don’t know this lady or her struggles, but the article paints a very clear picture of someone with childhood-onset bipolar disorder who has gone from manically creative highs to depressing lows.

Strangely, there was no mention of it, aside from “relentless anxiety and depression, eating disorders, exercise addiction, obsessive-compulsive tendencies.” All of these are common comorbidities in bipolar individuals.

ludamad2• 5 years ago

What's the advantage of labelled baskets of symptoms vs treating symptoms from first principles? Honest question

tediousdemise7• 5 years ago

Misdiagnosing bipolar disorder as a purely depressive disorder can have disastrous consequences, especially if prescribed antidepressants instead of mood stabilizers. [1]

[1] https://www.webmd.com/bipolar-disorder/news/20100601/bipolar...

whalesalad• 5 years ago

I wish more people thought like this. Treating from first principles should be the way - but lately it is not.

bosie• 5 years ago

do you mind expanding on what 'treating symptoms from first principles' means? I have a hard time visualising how that works in medicine

LatteLazy2• 5 years ago

The theory has been that if you could find a single underlying cause, you could just treat that, and then all the symptoms would disappear in one go. This would also let you treat symptoms that can't be treated directly (you can tranquilise away anxiety, you can't do much about hearing voices).

That theory has largely failed as we can't even really agree which groups of symptoms make which diseases. Hence the constant changes to systems like the DSM.

Full disclosure, I may be bias and I'm also an example: I have Major Mood Disorder. I used to have Severe Clinical Depression. Before that, I had Treatment Resistant Depression. Before that it was just Clinical Monopolar Depression (It's still called monopolar sometimes to differentiate it from Bipolar). My symptoms haven't changed. Nor has the treatments offered. But in the last 10y we've repeatedly renamed, recategorised, reshuffled etc just common depression. God knows what it's like in more complex, less common symptom sets...

The BBCs Life Scientific podcast discusses this very question in this episode if you're interested:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000sj7c

The wider series is also very good imho.

cpach• 5 years ago

Good question.

A unipolar depression is very different from a bipolar depression in many regards. E.g. likeliness to eat less vs. likeliness to eat more.

And a unipolar depression can possibly be treated and then be gone. (If the treatment works out.) If one has bipolar disorder, it won’t go away. One has to live with it the the whole life.

mola2• 5 years ago

That maybe important for a practioiner. But otherwise these labels don't have much meaning. Obviously her situation is unique. Although it may fall under the umbrella of some DSM definition, but the meaning there is only for a medical perspective and not "a human perspective". We cannot be reduced to some statistical artefact. We may statistically significantly share some common traits with other people, but it doesn't make us the set of these common traits.

The model is not reality especially so for the DSM, which was built in a medically theraputic context. And should be taken as such.

pmoriarty2• 5 years ago

Many therapists use the DSM only for insurance purposes, as insurance companies demand an official diagnosis before covering treatment. The DSM's role in therapy itself is highly questionable.

guerrilla2• 5 years ago

But otherwise these labels don't have much meaning.

Hard disagree, the experience of somone with bipolar is a lot different than somone who's schizophrenic or only has major depression or generalized anxiety. Mania and the specific difficulties it causes for psychosis are radically different than what the others have to deal with and so is the general unpredictability of life (for planning and commitment purposes) and especially the types of effects it has on relationships. Each of the disorders have totally different profiles subjectively and objectively and different things they have to deal with. It's definitely not just a "statistical artefact" dispite the possibility of multiple diseases causing the same symptom clusters.

watwut2• 5 years ago

If there is no official diagnosis, would it be ok for journalist to amateur diagnose her? Afaik, that is not considered acceptable.

IG_Semmelweiss• 5 years ago

A lot of these issues go hand in hand.

I havent finished reading the article yet but this really struck me as narcissism with some othee commorbidities that you mention.

What makes you think of BD?

blantonl• 5 years ago

There is no way a 5 year old wrote this poem:

The burden of myself

Has grown impossible to bear

Although rather than slip further

Down this mountain of despair

I will simply cry for help

And hope an angel hears my plea

Or I’ll not survive much longer

And succumb to misery.

tediousdemise7• 5 years ago

I had the same reaction, but then I remembered that child prodigies do exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_child_prodigies

wizzard• 5 years ago

It's not strictly impossible, but it's highly improbable. If she was capable of writing that at 5 her whole life would have been on a different trajectory.

hchz• 5 years ago

Sylvia Plath was publishing complex poetry at 8 and was already showing the intense and dark themes she's become an icon for at 14.

If you haven't dealt with what Plath or this woman has, or are some credentialed authority on early childhood development of exceptional children (or poetry), I can't understand why your speculation on this is worth listening to.

brandonmenc• 5 years ago

8 and 14 are not 5, and I'm also skeptical, but also not an expert in any of these areas.

For comparison, here is the "complex poetry" Plath had published at age 8 (titled simply, "Poem"):

"Hear the crickets chirping

In the dewy grass.

Bright little fireflies

Twinkle as they pass."

MeinBlutIstBlau• 5 years ago

I agree a noticed that too. Even excellent kids in kindergarten with me could barely read and write, let alone make something of that quality.

anoncake• 5 years ago

https://archive.is/HkkhU

RcouF1uZ4gsC3• 5 years ago

But when she did Bernstein was able to stop hiding — and hating — so much of herself. “My therapy has been in accepting the paradox that light doesn’t come without dark and highs don’t come without lows,” she says. “That if I want to be creative to the extent I am, then it’s going to have a dark side. And it does.”

I think the big danger in trying to put a medical diagnosis on everything is that it gives a false sense of what is normal and abnormal. When I hear statements like xx% of people have issues with depression, one thought is, what if depression isn’t an illness, but just a variant of normal.

Throughout history many, many of the great people, especially creatives struggled with depression. The Greeks actually had melancholy as one of the 4 humors and accepted that a certain percentage of people would be melancholic.

Modern psychiatry and psychology seems to have a norm in mind and people who don’t fit that norm have an illness. See for example back when the DSM classified same sex attraction as a mental illness. Now we realize that it is just a normal variant of human sexuality and not an illness to be treated. Similar thing with ADHD. We are seeing 3 and 4 year olds put on medication. If you look at the life of Thomas Edison it seems he may have had what we would today call ADHD. If he had been medicated to be “normal”, would he have been able to do all those prodigious accomplishments?

Sometimes, there can be great benefit in seeing something not as a disease but just a variant of normal with some advantages and disadvantages compared to the typical, and accepting it.

JoeAltmaier• 5 years ago

That's putting lipstick on a pig. Chronic depression is debilitating. A person without depression functions better than a person with depression.

RcouF1uZ4gsC3• 5 years ago

But Melissa in the article clearly isn’t debilitated. She functions better than 99.9% of all the people out there. In fact her depression, may actually contribute to what makes her so successful.

tediousdemise7• 5 years ago

There is also the consideration whether the abnormality causes distress to the patient.

As an example, the average gay person may not be distressed about being gay. However, the average trans person may feel uneasy about their physical body. This is why the DSM-V describes gender dysphoria, previously known as gender identity disorder. [1]

Feelings be damned, I think that anything that causes a person to feel bad, particularly bad feelings that stem from internal causes, should be considered a disorder. This is not a bad thing, since recognizing a problem is usually the first step to fixing it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_dysphoria

staticman22• 5 years ago

I listened to a lecture on psychology by The Great Courses and the lecturer said historically they stopped labeling gay people as having a mental illness because the patients did not respond to treatment, so the logic at the time was not whether the patients were not suffering.

The lecturer pointed out this made no sense because in other contexts doctors would not say if they can't treat it, it's not a disease.

I'm guessing the patients thought they were going to hell, or thought society was going to abuse them, or they wanted to be heterosexual so they could have kids or whatever and said "please make me not gay, doc". So they were suffering.

If "treating the gay" worked it might still be considered an illness today I guess.

My point is only the disease labels are arbitrary. And there's a downside to labeling things, especially thing you cannot effectively treat. Also, trusting Doctors without a dose of skepticism can be a mistake.

pmoriarty2• 5 years ago

"I think that anything that causes a person to feel bad, particularly bad feelings that stem from internal causes, should be considered a disorder"

What if someone feels bad when they hurt someone else?

Should that be considered a disorder?

This is not just a theoretical question, as I've read that the military has been funding research in to whether drugs can be used to assuage feelings of guilt and distress some of their trained killers suffer from when they hurt/kill other people.

The military wants their soldiers to be more efficient killers and pesky feelings of guilt or suffering when they hurt/kill others gets in the way of that.

So should every source of negative feelings be extinguished, and should we all try to live life with a smile on our faces even when we engage in unethical or hurtful actions?

guerrilla2• 5 years ago

Modern psychiatry and psychology seems to have a norm in mind and people who don’t fit that norm have an illness.

This isn't it. The diagnoses usually have criteria for the symptoms being a problem for the persons functioning. People don't seek help because they're a bit diffeent but because they're suffering to the point of having difficulty living.

throwaway481048• 5 years ago

I know mental health is not HN’s primary focus, but the lack of attention to this story is (in my opinion) reflective of the state of mental health stigma in the US.

Even with Bernstein achieving the ever-elusive “American dream”, conversation surrounding this particular article’s topic is wearisome to some and even warrantless to others.

We need to do better. Publishing and discussing stories like this is just a start.

Mental health is real, and if you are struggling, please know that you are not alone, never will be, and should seek help to make you as happy as you deserve. There is nothing wrong with this, just like the maintenance necessary for anything utilized routinely.

okareaman• 5 years ago

I have bipolar disorder and I would generally tend to agree with you, but this article reads more like a PR piece for her toy company. "Existential Depression" is more of a pop diagnosis. If you google it you'll see a lot of articles about gifted people and existential depression - it's the depression you can feel good about because it implies you are gifted.

She built a toy empire while hiding a lifetime of existential depression

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