A LETTER FROM AMERICA

She was all there, all the time: exuberant in describing her mania, savage and tender when recalling her despair. And for decades, she gracefully wore the legacy of her legendary role as Princess Leia, worshipped by a generation of teenage girls as the lone female warrior amid the galactic male cast of the Star Wars trilogy.

In her long, openhearted life, actress and author Carrie Fisher brought the subject of bipolar disorder into the popular culture with such humour and hard-boiled detail that her death on Tuesday triggered a wave of affection on social media and elsewhere, from both fans and fellow bipolar travelers, whose emotional language she knew and enriched. She channeled the spirit of people like Patty Duke, who wrote about her own bipolar illness, and Kitty Dukakis, who wrote about depression and alcoholism, and turned it into performance art.

Fisher’s career coincided with the growing interest in bipolar disorder itself, a mood disorder characterised by alternating high and lows, paralysing depressions punctuated by flights of exuberant energy. Her success fed a long-standing debate on the relationship between mental turmoil and creativity. And her writing and speaking helped usher in a confessional era in which mental disorders have entered the pop culture with a life of their own: Bipolar is now a prominent trait of another famous Carrie, Claire Danes’ character Carrie Mathison inthe televisionserieshomeland.

“She was so important to the public because she was telling the truth about bipolar disorder, not putting on airs or pontificating, just sharing who she is in an honest-to-the-bone way,” said Judith Schlesinger, a psychologist and author of The Insanity Hoax: Exposing the Myth of the Mad Genius.

In a characteristic riff, answering a question about the disorder from the audience at a Comic Con last year in Indiana, Fisher said: “It is a kind of virus of the brain that makes you go very fast or very sad. Or both. Those are fun days. So judgment isn’t, like, one of my big good things. But I have a good voice. I can write well. I’m not a good bicycle rider. So, just like anybody else, only louder and faster and sleeps more.”

She then grabbed the mike and sang, in mock-ballad voice: “Oh manic depression ... oh how I love you.”

That last line is a reminder too, that in Fisher’s lifetime, even the name of the condition had evolved, to bipolar from what was once more commonly known as manic depression.

Fisher has said that she was first given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder at age 24 but did not accept it until five years later. In time, she spoke often about her lifelong struggles with both addiction and bipolar disorder and her desire to erase the stigma of mental illness. She wrote her 1987 novel, Postcards From the Edge, after a stint in rehab after a near-fatal drug overdose. It was during her autobiographical onewoman stage show, Wishful Drinking, that she first posited the idea for “Bipolar Pride Day.”

Like the disorder itself, the wave of attention that occurred during Fisher’s life had its excesses. Through the 1990s, research scientists – many of them supported by drugmakers – expanded the definition of the disorder, describing “subsyndromes” and permutations like bipolar II and “hypomania”. By the 2000s, doctors were diagnosing the