Bipolar manic episode, caught on camera in a 1980s psychiatric interview. Judy was in her 40s, she’d just survived a 13-hour Greyhound ride to her 25th class reunion, and for 6 straight minutes she rocks, nods and laughs so hard she can barely get the words out:
“I was on a high I’ve never been on in my life.”
At 5 in the morning she was on the phone in someone else’s kitchen. The woman she was staying with got so angry she walked out of her own house, and her boyfriend called to tell Judy off. He called her “crazy manic.” She told the doctor: “He doesn’t understand me. But neither do I.”
Her luggage never showed up, so she bought a yellow dress, “a knockout,” because yellow “does more for my personality and confidence than any other color.” At a lake party, she says, 4 or 5 men begged her for “an Esther Williams number,” called her the “sex pot of the class” and asked when she’d be in Playboy.
In the video below she jumps from luggage to dresses to swimsuits to compliments without stopping, laughs at her own jokes “like Joan Rivers,” and never once notices anything is wrong. Her last words: “I was right on top of the world.”
About 4.4% of American adults will have bipolar disorder at some point in their lives. A manic episode has to last at least 7 days to be diagnosed, and it usually starts around age 25. In the 1980s the main treatment was lithium, approved in the US in 1970.
Is she the happiest person in that room, or the sickest?
