The Beautiful Way These People Are Coming Out About Mental Illness
In the greenroom, Pickett and her fellow performers nervously crack jokes and try out dance moves (the Whip and Nae Nae are dissected at length) before doing deep-breathing exercises and vocal warm-ups. Out in the Spectrum’s airy, glass-walled entryway, a couple dozen ticket buyers mill about, their chatter mixing with the Doobie Brothers ballad humming through the ceiling speakers. Today’s event has several sponsors and partners: pharmaceutical companies, a psychiatric treatment center, a local chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the grocery store chain Wegmans (because everybody’s gotta eat). Some have set up tables stacked with pamphlets. Instead of ushers, counselors in matching teal T-shirts wait in the lobby, ready to speak with any audience member who might become distressed midperformance. Attendees can nibble on chocolate chip cookies while they browse info provided by a crisis hotline.
Almost as soon as the show starts, the crying starts, too. (Before the day ends, three audience members will ask the counselors for help.) The 13 performers—including an education consultant, a nutritionist, and two students—sit together onstage; they range in age from 16 to 57, and they’re here to talk about everything from bulimia to post-traumatic stress disorder to clinical depression. Touring musician Eric Scott sings a lovely, unadorned song—his own composition—called “Break Me Open,” dedicated to his therapist. Annie Powell, a Virginia personal trainer who has bipolar disorder, struggles to focus her teary eyes on her essay, as sniffles echo back from the theater seats. Sixteen-year-old Sidney Wollmuth reads a poem about her battle with depression—”I am sick, PLEASE / someone free / me from my / free will”—and her intensity stuns the audience into silence. But there are also moments of wry rapport and real humor. Knowing smiles appear throughout the theater when Pickett, summing up the experience of caring for two small kids while battling the urge to permanently hide in the bathroom, says simply, “Some days…it fucking sucks.”
This Is My Brave is the creation of Jennifer Marshall, a mom and writer who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in spring 2006, after she was hospitalized twice with bouts of mania, staying awake for days at a time. (During one episode, she hallucinated that she’d seen a ghost in her baby’s room.) She’s been hospitalized two more times, once while still a breastfeeding mom, the other while pregnant. In both cases, she’d tapered off her medication because she feared it might cause medical issues for her kids.
In 2011, back on steady footing, Marshall began blogging about her experiences on a site she titled Bipolar Mom Life. But she never shared her identity. “My family and friends all said, ‘Get your story out, but don’t put your name on it because people will discriminate against you.’” She stayed anonymous for a year and a half, until a parenting website invited her to blog. Marshall gave the site permission to use her name and photo; after her first posts went up, she was inundated with calls, texts, and emails. “People who I didn’t even know had their own struggles were saying, ‘Thank you, I’ve gone through something similar.’” The experience gave her the idea to put on a show that would bring true mental illness stories to live audiences.
Marshall enlisted Anne Marie Ames, a communications specialist and friend whose son suffers from depression, to work with her on the project. After pricing venues and marketing plans, the two created a Kickstarter page in October 2013. They’d hoped to raise $6,500, but they received more than $10,000 in only 31 days. A few months later, they held auditions, chose performers, and put on the first This Is My Brave show, outside D.C. At the reception afterward, Marshall was approached by an emotional audience member with an urgent message. “She said, ‘I drove all the way from Philadelphia to see this. I found your blog in my darkest moment, and your writing saved my life.’”