Besides eating cheese burgers, the 'Stanger Things' star smokes cigarettes and hangs out whenever he has bipolar episodes.
- Jun 7, 2018
AceShowbiz - Stranger Things star David Harbour has opened up about his battle with bipolar disorder, revealing he was once committed to an asylum.
The actor recently revealed his battle with mental illness on Marc Maron's WTF podcast, explaining he was diagnosed bipolar when he was 25.
"Here's the interesting thing, which I've actually never truly spoken about publicly," he said. "I actually was in this Catholicism thing... and I was sober for, like, a year and a half... and I actually did have a manic episode and I was diagnosed as bipolar."
"I really had, like, a bit of a break where I thought I was in connection to some sort of God that I wasn't really in connection to," he continued. "It was like I had all the answers suddenly."
His parents subsequently committed him and he revealed the experience was not what he thought it was going to be.
"I have one thing to say about the mental asylum," he added. "I've romanticised two things in my life and both have fallen short. One is being in a mental asylum. Really, really not as fun as you think it is. You do have a romantic idea of it... and it just ends up being sad and smells like s**t."
"Have you ever been to a mental asylum?" he continued. "The only thing that defines a crazy person and a normal person - because you can seem very normal as a crazy person - is they're convinced they're sane. Crazy people are convinced they're sane. It's incredible."
Harbour is now medicated and claims he has figured out what triggers his bipolar episodes - and knows what he needs to do to cope with them.
"The funny thing about my particular brain or mental illness is every time that I've had an episode like that, it's always coupled with spirituality," he said. "Generally, people are like, 'I need to meditate more or I need to get into yoga'. And I need to, like, eat a cheeseburger and just, like, smoke cigarettes and hang out.
"Because the minute I get close to that - what I consider a flame - of, like, the answers and the mysticism... it's like I'm out of my mind, so if I write the self-help book it's going to be like: 'Sit on the couch and play some video games'."
