Stephen Holden in NYT on Paul Dalio’s movie “Touched With Fire”:

“The manic phase of a bipolar cycle often produces a sense of omnipotence and infinite possibility that can feel so wonderfully exciting that patients often stop taking their medication. “Touched With Fire” only tangentially deals with the depressive phase, when a patient can become catatonic and suicidal.”

(…)

‘The movie is inspired by Kay Redfield Jamison’s 1993 book, “Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament.” Marco and Carla visit Ms. Jamison in the movie, and she reassures them that taking lithium hasn’t diminished her creativity. Although awkward, this scene, shoehorned into the film to be reassuring, crucially tilts a movie that might otherwise be misinterpreted as an invitation to embrace madness in the direction of medical common sense.’

Read the review here.

“Touched With Fire” is very much worth seeing, the movie is on the verge of romanticizing mental illness but it remains blissfully ambiguous.

You don’t need a mental illness in order to be an artist, but what we call inspiration or “the flow” often comes close to a mental illness or may be aided by this illness.