“I’ll say sorry for what I’ve done but never for who I am”

That is newest housewife Leah McSweeney’s tagline on Real Housewives of New York this season and it seems to be true always for her, but is painstakingly so during this past week’s episode (spoiler alert). 

In it, Ramona Singer finds out that Leah has a history of bipolar disorder and tells Sonja Morgan about it. She says that she should not be drinking on her medication because you cannot “mix alcohol with medication,” and implies that finding out about Leah’s mental health history, “explains it all.” To Ramona, this means her diagnosis can be “blamed” for everything she perceives as “bad” behavior from Leah, including “throwing torches,” “acting crazy in Newport,” to “now my birthday.” She later says to Leah, “Maybe I am trying to make an excuse for your behavior.”

When Leah finds out her mental health has been used as fodder for gossip, she says it crosses a line and explains, “for her to be talking about [my mental health] in this way is despicable.”  She also uses what is perhaps one of the funnier lines of the season telling Dorinda Medley, “Don’t talk about my vagina and don’t talk about my mental health.”

But, Leah is not hiding her diagnosis from discussion due to shame or silence. In fact, she openly wrote about it herself in HypeBae in 2016. Instead, she feels it is just not anyone else’s story to tell. 

She explains, “It’s not really anyone’s business. It’s not a gossip…It’s not something to be used against someone….I wasn’t trying to hide it at all, obviously, I wrote [the] article about it, but the fact that it was brought up in this way and not by me…It was my first season on the show and if I wanted to talk about it, I think that I should be the one bringing it up.” 

Here’s the real story, according to her.

On Her Bipolar Disorder

Growing up, Leah struggled with addiction, but says she had never been diagnosed with anything or taken psychiatric medication until she got sober at the age of 27 and started to have panic attacks. She explains her initial experience with mental health was not the best as she felt like “people dealing with addiction issues tend to get lumped in sometimes, and sometimes doctors don’t know exactly how to deal with them.” Then, in August 2012, when she was 30 and 3 years into sobriety and 2 psychiatric medications, she experienced hypomania. She says, “I wouldn’t even need to eat, like I was so thin that summer and…I would have so much energy, but the downside is there is going to be a crash afterwards.”

After that one episode of hypomania (which she says “for whatever reason I never had again”), she was diagnosed with bipolar 2. She describes it as a “gray area” of diagnosis, but one that has stuck. In 2016, she ended up checking into a psychiatric hospital for depression. She says “I was there for 5 days, and it was the best thing that ever could happen to me.” This was, in part, because she met her doctor there (who is still her doctor to this day) who took her off the medications she was on that were not helping and found the medication, an antidepressant only, that does. She clarifies that she is in no way anti-medication and she has been and still is medication shamed by friends and says, “I think that’s the worst thing ever.” But, for her, those medications were the wrong medications and just like any other kind of medicine where you might try something else or get a second opinion, Leah feels you want to find what works for you for your mental health.

That also includes lifestyle changes. Leah said she learned that “there were a lot of situations I was putting myself in that were making me depressed and anxious that I could control. Some things I can’t, but I realized that there were some things that I could.” For her, this was primarily sleeping, exercising, and toxic relationships. She realized she might be different than someone else in how she reacts to those things, but that was OK. She explains,“Maybe someone else could be in a toxic relationship and not have it tear them apart, maybe some people don’t need that much sleep and they can feel great during the day, [or] some people don’t have to exercise…but, for me, I need to do all these steps and sometimes it sounds self indulgent, to be honest, a little bit, but, I need to do these things to make myself feel better and stay in a good place mentally, emotionally.” She calls her hospitalization “empowering” and “where the healing started for me,” but obviously not a place she wants to go back to at all.

On Behavior Not Being Mental Illness

One of the biggest issues for someone with mental illness is equating behaviors that someone does not like to a disease state. This happens whether or not a person has mental illness (e.g. mass shootings), but if a person does have a known diagnosis, it only further stigmatizes the disease. For example, with Kanye West, anything he says can be attributed to his bipolar disorder, but maybe not all of it is related. 

Leah says that something similar happened to her when Ramona found out she had bipolar disorder as well, and all of her behaviors were attributed to it. She explains, “What was upsetting is that this woman thought I was acting as if I had bipolar disorder. Meanwhile, I have been in remission from bipolar for years. Like actually, that’s just me being drunk….and having fun.” She adds that if she was really struggling or needed help and the conversation was out of concern, not gossip, it could have felt very different. She says, “Listen, if I was having serious mental health problems while this was going on and she brought it up in a caring way, that’d be a different story. That’s not what it is.”  

In the way it was presented, however, the storyline might create stigma around the diagnosis or make people not want to talk about it with others. Leah says, “The terrible part is that other people will be scared to say I have this issue or I am struggling.” 

On Creativity and Bipolar

There is a link between creativity and bipolar disorder that is often talked about, and was written about in the book Touched with Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison. Studies have shown that bipolar disorder and having a family history of bipolar disorder is related to high levels of creative achievement and people with bipolar might be more likely to choose creative occupations. Leah said this is something she has thought about often, in part, because she has been so successful as an entrepreneur (she founded Married to the Mob in 2004) and some of the traits needed to be successful in business (impulsivity and risk taking, for example) overlap with symptoms of bipolar. She says, “If I didn’t have bipolar II…would I have been as successful or would I be more successful if I didn’t have it….Have I been my own worst enemy or my greatest advocate?” She also adds that sometimes medications can affect creativity. But, contrary to the myth that medications blunt creative expression, she notes that if they do work they can help stabilize you. This can help you be more creative as “it’s very hard to be creative if you’re depressed and it’s very hard to be creative, if you’re having a manic episode, not that I’ve ever had one.”

On Covid-19 and Mental Health

Overall, Leah’s first season has been interesting coinciding with a pandemic in parallel. She feels “the whole country is having a mental health crisis right now, along with the health crisis,” though mental health is being less addressed by the media. She attributes the mental health decline to, among other things, being anxious and depressed about getting coronavirus, the economy, life changes, children being stuck inside and not being socialized with friends and “having their worlds turned upside down”, parents who are stressed at home “not knowing what is going to happen to their kids,” college students who graduate and can’t get a job, and small business owners who have “their lives destroyed.”

Like everyone else, Leah’s mental health has also been affected. She says, “Even me…I have it great, obviously, I am very lucky, and it was hard to get out of bed for like a couple of months so I had to double my lexapro.” She has also been sober for about 4 months now and though nothing in particular prompted it, she felt alcohol was a depressant and being hungover was also “the most depressing feeling ever.” So, she “just made a logical decision” to stop drinking. Unlike her first time being sober, which she says was out of “complete desperation,” this time was just a positive life decision for her. She says it is, like most people, a “day to day thing” where some days are better than others, but that is to be expected. She is focusing now on what is meaningful to her like her brand and her daughter, Kier (Kiki). 

One thing that Leah has noticed throughout her experience with mental health treatment is that she feels particularly lucky she can also just call her doctor up and get help, noting that mental health access is a privilege. She says, “being able to care for your mental health is something that only upper middle class people can do in a lot of ways because medication is so freaking expensive and a lot of psychiatrists don’t take insurance, especially in New York City, and, you know, if you get bad, that’s really bad. So, there’s a lot of things…happening that we’re not even going to see really critical for another year from now or a few months from now and it all has to do with mental health issues, for sure.” Judging from the early studies out of the UK, she is not wrong.

On Reality TV and Normalizing Mental Health

Though her bipolar disorder might not have been brought up in the way Leah wanted it to be, she is taking advice like she usually does from her trainer Martin (“her guru” who she has trained with for 10 years since she first got sober), and she is going to “use this as an opportunity to help people.” 

Some people might not think reality television is the right platform for these conversations on mental health or addiction, but Leah disagrees. She says, “It’s definitely the right place. If it is a reality show, you need to be talking about reality. And, I know that it seems like it’s actually not real or whatever, but it is…maybe other people shouldn’t be talking about it for you.” 

She hopes by discussing her own mental health history she can inspire other people to do the same as the first step is really just being open to talking about it and without shame. Otherwise, people can die by suicide or overdose without asking for help, like many of her friends have over the last four months. She explains that we all need to “try to take the stigma away from having depression [and] anxiety because people somehow think it makes you a weak person…and that’s not the case.” 

She also advocates for the role of treatment and suggests friends and family can help people with finding professional help. She highlights one myth that she knows from experience is not true. She says, “[Mental illness] doesn’t go away on its own. It just doesn’t. It’s not like a game of strength, you know? Or willpower. It’s just not.”

If all else fails, it might also help to learn to just own your own narrative. When Ramona calls Leah’s behavior crazy, knowing she has bipolar disorder this may have made some people cringe. But Leah says she was not offended. She says Martin taught her to “embrace my crazy” and realize that the world is itself not normal, so you can’t survive it being normal either. She feels a bit like reclaiming that narrative like she has the word bitch for her brand. 

She adds, “Call me crazy. I don’t care. I want to be crazy.” 

That is, of course, unless you are her boyfriend, then definitely, definitely, do NOT call her crazy.