I haven’t checked out the new Netflix miniseries, Maniac yet, have any of you? The reviews are mixed so I’ll give it a few episodes. It stars Emma Stone, Jonah Hill, Justin Theroux and Sally Field and revolves around a drug trial. But it also deals with mental disorders. Even in the critiques that it’s mediocre, Emma is getting great reviews for her performance.
Emma has struggled with anxiety and panic attacks most of her life, having suffered her first attack at the age of seven. While at the Child Mind Institute in New York yesterday, Emma described how it affected her childhood and how acting became a way for her to deal with it.
Emma Stone is pulling back the curtain on her lifelong struggle with anxiety.
During an interview with Dr. Harold S. Koplewicz for the Child Mind Institute, Stone discussed having her first panic attack and how that “terrifying” moment repeated itself over the next few years. The La La Land actress described her first attack when she was just 7-years-old. “After first grade before I went into second grade, I had my first panic attack. It was really, really terrifying and overwhelming,” she told Dr. Koplewicz. “I was at a friend’s house, and all of a sudden I was convinced the house was on fire and it was burning down. I was just sitting in her bedroom and obviously the house wasn’t on fire, but there was nothing in me that didn’t think we were going to die.”These type of occurrences happened constantly over the next two years for Stone. It made going to school really difficult for her. She explained that she went to the nurse’s office every day in second grade and feigned sickness so she could call her mom and go home.
Stone also discussed how acting and improv helps her cope with anxiety. She said improv is “presence. It’s meditative.” Plus, the anxiety can sometimes assist Stone in her acting. She said, “I also believe there is a lot of empathy when you struggled a lot internally. There is a tendency to want to understand how people around you work or what’s going on internally with them which is great for characters.”
She added, “You don’t have to be actor to over anxiety, you don’t have to be a writer to overcome it. You just have to find that thing within you that you are drawn to.”
I don’t get panic attacks but I’m trying to grasp what friends go through, so I can be a better friend to them. Descriptions like Emma’s shed light on what they experience. It breaks my heart to think of a scared little seven-year-old sitting in a friend’s house thinking they were all going to die. Emma saw a therapist early on and it helped her immensely. It was in therapy that she created a staple-bound book called I Am Bigger Than My Anxiety that she still has today. Emma said she still struggles and that anxiety, “still wakes me up in the middle of the night [and] still haunts me to this day.” She is able to manage it by continuing her therapy and meditation.
As Emma mentioned, she also relies on acting to help her cope. That part really illuminated something for me. My son has ADHD and one side effect of his medication at higher doses was to amplify his OCD and anxiety. There were a few nights he’d be so panicked, he had to wake me up. To calm him down, we’d sit in the living room and discuss plots – books, movies, TV shows. I see now that hyper focusing on those storylines helped run off the demons in his mind. He’s since stopped taking any medication (shout out to my young warrior). Now he invents and draws card games. After reading Emma’s interview, I have a better understanding of how it helps him. I’m happy that Emma has come so far in dealing with her panic attacks. I am also very grateful that she puts her anxiety out there so we can learn from it.
Photo credit: WENN Photos
I’ve at least 2 that scared me. I know how that feels.
Her face is so lovely in these pics.
I only had had two, but struggled with horrible anxiety for years. I dealt with it by taking high doeses of magnesium (up to 1000 mg a day at first, split into several doses as it has a laxative effect if taken in excess) which was recommended to me by a neurologist. If anone’s reading this and struggling with anxiety, panic attacks, muscle tension, depression or insomnia, please read up on magnesium deficiency as these are all its symptoms and it’s very common. I take magnesium religiously, it changed my life. I did not realize I was living in a constant state of panic until it went away.
Maniac is terrible and she is profoundly annoying in it.
Yes. It saddens me to know she battles anxiety but I find her to be too hyped for her own good. She always chooses projects that seem amazing on paper but end up being superficial or problematic.
@Tw-
Your very brief review has me rolling!
:))
I kept trying to watch it! I don’t know why, but I made it to episode 4. It was almost like the hype made me think that I just needed to give it more time. Lol
I tried watching Maniac but the first minutes felt so contrived and hipstery that I lost interest and started watching other stuff.
A big fist-bump to your son Hecate!!!! And a hug to you.
If you don’t like Emma Stone, you probably won’t like the show. Both my husband and I binged watched it within 24 hours. I was ahead of him, but couldn’t wait for my husband to catch up because I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on!
It’s an incredibly unique show. Almost every episode is vastly different from the others. And my dear husband helped point out all the ways the final scenes trace back to other episodes. I love when shows do that well.
I’m not a Jonah Hill fan, but I have to admit he was excellent. Emma Stone, Sally Field and Justin Theroux, too. Such a unique, strange, ultimately uplifting show. I thought it was worth watching. For what it’s worth, it’s based on a Norwegian TV show.
Tangent: My son also deals with ADHD. He’s on a low dose of Vyvanse, but said to me the other day, “I feel more hyper at school lately. Maybe we should increase my dose.” He’s an insightful ten year old. Best wishes to all the wise and wonderful kids working hard to overcome obstacles.
I like her. But I still don’t understand how she won an oscar for La la land… oh, and her friendship with Taylor Swift
I am sorry for her struggles but glad to hear her speaking out about it. My SIL deals with anxiety and OCD and at one point a few years ago it basically crippled her. there were months where someone always had to be with her and the kids. It was really rough for her and I know it was hard for her to explain to people because someone without those problems would try to be reasonable about it but her mind wasn’t working that. She finally found the right blend of meds and therapy and it helped tremendously but its not like she is “cured,” she still has to work through it daily and I know it takes a toll.
So I’m glad when I heard celebrities talk about it because often people say “why are you anxious? don’t be anxious. Things are fine.” And that’s not quite what is going on.
For me (and a lot of others), the “Don’t be anxious. You’re fine!” refrain is, during a panic attack, a constant internally. And it actually makes it worse, because you *know* you’re being completely irrational, but it sure as sh*t doesn’t feel like way and you don’t know how to stop it.
I had a lot of illness/medication induced anxiety this summer. It’s terrifying to feel like you have no control, and frustrating when people tell you to just calm down or relax.
Emma’s story about her childhood panic attack seems all too familiar to me. Going through all this recently, I realized how much anxiety I had as a kid, and how much I hid it from everyone.
Emma is a good actress but she’s not as great as film twitter makes out. There was critics out there saying none of her male costars come close to her. Everything she does is “her best performance yet”. Not many people call her out on her awful hair and make up either. This is one of the only sites I go on regularly that doesn’t seem to have a soft spot for her. It’s refreshing. That green eyemake up the other day was horrific
This shows how low the standards are for her. They don’t expect great things from her so every time she’s good or decent is “her best performance yet” LOL
And what exactly can we learn from her magical anxiety?
A health issue like that, that conveniently never manifests itself in public, panic attacks that never happen in front of witnesses during work hours – not during interviews or appearances or the red carpet, nobody has ever seen you shut down, nobody has ever mistaken your panic attack for a drug withdrawal, no bad reputation, no people around you calling you crazy behind your back, you suffer no job consequences, you require no special provisions in order to do your job, you have never fallen behind your peers and you require no medication nor ongoing therapy bc you can get by just by doing acting.
Her anxiety is very magical indeed. I wish mine was like that.
Not only are we constantly being compared to fully abled extroverted people all the time but now we are being held up to the functioning standard of fully abled celebrities who pretend to have mental issues too. This pisses me off so much.
I’m glad you say that because this flood of celebrities with lots of issues has always been a head scratcher for me but I did not see it as my place to say as I don’t have any of these conditions. These mental conditions, as you know better than me are usually visible from what I see around me. Even my husband who had one panic attack one day corrected me when I described him as having them, plural. In hindsight, I cannot say he has anxiety because it was an episode a few years back that never repeated itself and is not debilitating. Therefore, he does not allow himself to say it.
Similarly, what she describes made me think of what a lot of kids go through at that age when they “discover” death: most of them manifest it through nightmares and waking up during te night when they are 6 to 8 years old. Lots of kids get really anxious when they are in other people’s houses. Some wet the bed, others have to have their plushies etc. Some can’t go. She seems to have mild anxiety – which a lot of people have and was clever enough to do therapy about it.
Edit: my cynical self is also thinking that it is always when they are promoting something related with a certain mental condition that these infos come out. It could be a propos to say it now, but also could be them forcing an issue and exaggerating it for the sake of promotion.
I’ve had anxiety since I was young and have never had a panic attack at work or in front of friends. That’s because most of the time I was fortunate enough to find a private space, so I’m sure most people wouldn’t know. There are multiple kinds of anxieties, and people struggle with various degrees of mental health issues.
Same, catgirl. I have this terrible state where I know that as soon as I’m alone it’s going full-blown, and until then I will be in a horrible state of disassociation where I literally can’t feel my hands and tongue. I’ve gone through days of work and school like that, with my body in a kind of “pause mode”, and the panic attack just waiting to happen. It’s hard to describe. But I’ve had to tell friends of many years that I have anxiety and panic attacks and some of them had no idea. For some it’s a private kind of demon.
I agree with everyone here. I understand that there are different kinds of anxiety out there and some people like Emma seem to be able to function really well – great for her.
BUT, you’re totally correct Hikaru (and I’m going to quote you because it sums it up so well) ‘Not only are we constantly being compared to fully abled extroverted people all the time but now we are being held up to the functioning standard of fully abled celebrities who pretend to have mental issues too’. When you have a mental illness, it’s so easy for people to brush it off without a second thought or tell you to get over it and move on. Emma Stone is an Oscar winner, she’s independently wealthy and talented – she’s not the face of my anxiety.
My anxiety looks more like me being up fully dressed, packed and ready to take a 1 hour bus journey – and still sitting here 4 hours later because I can’t bring myself to leave the house. My anxiety looks like ignoring phone calls for fear of what’s on the other end. My anxiety looks like me going to the doctor once every two months and having to convince him that yes, I still need my medication to function like a ‘normal’ human being. Of course, not every day is bad but even my best days aren’t as impressive as Emma Stone’s most average ones.
THANK YOU. I am beyond over these celebs jumping on the anxiety bandwagon. Yeah, I said it. I don’t believe any of them, especially not that fake ass Gisele. Suddenly they all have anxiety or they all almost took their lives at one point. Nah, not mathematically possible.
And before anyone says I don’t know or don’t understand: I have anxiety, have moved in and out of clinical depression, and I have chronic PTSD from surviving an abusive relationship. I know exactly what anxiety is. These people don’t have it.
I admit I did wonder how she has been able to master such a fast trajectory to success without any obstacles getting in the way of that trajectory. It’s not so much the high-functioning that puzzles me as the fact that she doesn’t seem to have had impediments whatsoever to getting to where she is now (at a young age). Even if you’re high-functioning, usually there’s some kind of delay or obstacle that occurs because something breaks down somewhere for a moment and it takes time to get back on track.
Then again, she didn’t go past high school and these kinds of impediments hurt one’s grades, etc. so maybe leaving school helped? I did wonder if she was taking some kind of medication, but she didn’t seem to mention that either (unless I missed it). I was more puzzled by her story than the story of other celebrities (even Gisele’s made sense to me since she made it sound like more of a blip than a life-long problem, but Emma Stone’s story seemed to have too easy of a resolution?).
She is in continued therapy, according to the article.
I get your frustration, but it sounds like hers was worse when she was a kid, and she’s found tools that help her now as an adult. I understand how it’s annoying to be compared to someone with what sounds like a milder form of it, but at the same time, I do think it’s good for it to be discussed openly and reduce the stigma.
My 16 teen daughter has anxiety with crippling panic attacks from age 12-14. She refused to go to school because she would scream & curl in a ball when the panic hit, but did hold it together in front of people. But she said it was so very hard to hold it together, and she feared she wouldn’t be able to and would lose control and then have that huge embarrassment to deal with too. For anyone suffering from it: my daughter went on Zoloft, got therapy once a week to fill her tool box with tools to cope, & things got much better. Then recently we started eating almost all whole food and she went mostly gluten free. And she’s never felt better anxiety wise. It makes me wonder if what were eating contributes to anxiety for some people.
I have had crippling anxiety since childhood as well, along with ADD. I recently had to go off my ADD medication after over ten years because the prescribed dosage (that I sometimes even used less of, or skipped days of) had slowly built up and was unknowingly amplifying severe anxiety and OCD, and turned out the be the cause of a complete stimulant induced psychotic break. I didn’t realize it was my medication until after the fact, but got off it completely immediately. I started a following a whole food, vegetable heavy keto diet, a running/walking regimen and busted my ARSE learning mindfulness techniques, meditation, and practicing ways I can find that “autopilot work flow” all on my own, despite ADD and without medication.
Ive had the most productive, happy and anxiety free period of my life, my house is cleaner, I plan ahead, I take deep breaths, I don’t yell anymore, and I’m convinced food is a HUGE part of the battle along with the other work. A cheat night with gluten and sugar makes for an excessively anxious next day. That gut biome is more than we give credit for….
(I’d be lying Hecate, if I said that I can’t help projecting my own fears with your son’s meds amplifying his anxiety and OCD. That was the scariest time of my entire life, and prescribed long term stimulants I felt I couldn’t function without literally made me lose it. My my heart goes out to him and his struggles. I totally understand.)
I mean I get what you’re saying, but that’s not always true (as other have pointed out you can have panic attacks and hide it well). I do. I’ve been in the professional arena a while and have never had an attack at work (at least that anyone could tell). My attacks are usually first thing in the morning, my guts feeling like they are being ripped out while my world is being torn apart. And I get up, shower, have coffee, and calm myself before I go into work. It’s different for all of us. So while it might not ring true to you, there’s other people who might feel the same. I see no need in discrediting celebrities discussing mental health as it is so taboo in our culture. To me, it only helps to “normalize” things and move the discussion forward. As someone who struggles with their mental health I applaud this, and I honestly couldn’t care less if it comes out of a celebritie’s mouth as a way to get a attention or not. I need people to know I’m normal, I’m just different, I’m not crazy. And this helps.
I’m 35 and I’ve been having panic attacks for over 25 years, and I STILL feel convinced I am going to die. Every single time. It’s unbelievable.
I’ve worked very very hard and gone from almost daily panic attacks (in my early 20s), to having only a few a year. Thank god. But every time it happens is just as bad as the first time, and I then get several days of a “hangover” in which my body, mind and spirit are exhausted and scared and need to recover.
Sending hugs to all those who also suffer with anxiety and panic disorders. I hope you all find partners and loved ones who are supportive and not judgemental, it makes a huge difference. And good therapists and the right medications! I feel like in the past eight years I’ve found all these things and while my disorder is always present it thankfully doesn’t run the show anymore.
Maniac was excellent! I’m very picky about what unwatchable and more do about what I actually like, and this show was hands down wonderful. Poignant, heartwarming, exciting, and very well done. It starts slow, but I promise you, it is well worth it in the end. Justin Theroux is actually superb in this.
It was also pretty hilarious.
Yes, it was hilarious too. I’ve watched it twice already. Makes more sense and you catch things you missed the first time.
I am watching again as well! It is GREAT! Also, very easy to relate to when you have people in your life with schyzophrenia. I just wish she was a rich, white guy that would ADMIT to the voices, etc. BUT, it is fiction after all.
I’m on episode 4 now and I am blown away. It is so interesting and unique. It’s really holding my interest, I can’t wait to see where it goes. So unpredictable.
Maniac was excellent! I’m very picky about what I watch and more so about what I actually like, and this show was hands down wonderful. Poignant, heartwarming, exciting, and very well done. It starts slow, but I promise you, it is well worth it in the end. Justin Theroux is actually superb in this.
I tried watching Maniac and didn’t get very far. As someone said above, it felt contrived and I was highly distracted by Jonah Hill’s performance and appearance — he looks so much like Ben Stiller to me now and it’s odd.
The story of your son is heartwarming, I love the thought of him inventing card games. It makes me a little teary just typing that, I guess because it reminds me of my own son who is growing up way too fast.
Hugs to all who struggle with panic attacks and anxiety. I’ve never had a panic attack but my anxiety manifested itself into the worst hypochondria you could imagine when I was a kid. My parents thought it was “cute” that I carried around a medical dictionary and thought I was going to die soon from any number of diseases but my sister remembers it as harrowing as it was. The hypochondria is gone for me now but my anxiety is a lifelong battle.
I also almost didn’t get through it. It gets better in the second half. Every single thing has meaning.
Maniac is great, but it’s a little slow at first…you just have to push through. It’s really trippy but you have to remember it’s set in the future and it’s from the point of view of people with serious mental health issues.
I used to wake up in the middle of a panic attack nearly every single day my last year of high school. Luckily, my best friend who lived on the east coast (i was on the west) was my life line. I would call her, and she would sit on the phone with me while i was crying, shaking, barely able to breath or vomiting and just talk. About anything, everything. Just her voice, it would give me something to focus on and slowly bring me back around.
It got better once in college, and beyond, but i carry medication at all times to help combat my attacks, I’m trying to get my dog ESA certified for traveling, because drugging myself on a plane by myself is horrible.
When I wake up with one now, i grab a book and go hide in the bathroom with a pillow and a blanket. My husband has woken up to find me passed out against the toilet in my own little saferoom.
I do not wish this on anyone, and for those of you trying to empathize with your loved ones with anxiety. I beg you to never just tell us, “it’s fine.” “it’ll be ok.” “there is nothing to worry about.” We get that, trust me. we do, but my brain will not stop obsessing, once i had a panic attack because i thought i made the wrong color frosting for a cake for a friends’ birthday. i know it wasn’t the end of the world, but i couldn’t stop.
I began having panic attacks in college but it took me years later to figure out that’s what they were. It’s strange to me that so many people talk about their thoughts during panic attacks, because mine were purely physical. They were never triggered by a thought or worry.
Instead it was always an intense crushing feeling in my chest and would often lead to fainting. Think Tony Soprano. In fact watching that show years later is what made me realize that I had been having panic attacks. And it certainly never happened only in private! On the bus to college, on a chairlift, etc. I would macerate the inside of my cheeks, biting them until they bled, so hopefully the pain would keep me conscious until I could get somewhere private.
I have low level anxiety with a rare panic attack. It builds up and I can usually get somewhere private before it’s a full blown panic attack, but there have been days when I’m somewhere random like Costco and I look at my husband and tell him I need to leave. Or he’ll look at me and say he’s got it covered and that I can wait outside. I don’t think most people in my life know, but there’s a chance they all do and are just being polite. I don’t talk about it.
I binged Maniac on a rainy weekend with everything cancelled for Florence. It was good enough to watch, but was too strange to recommend. It’s in no way like The Shape of Water, but they both left me feeling glad I saw them, but not sure I actually liked them.
I am watching again as well! It is GREAT! Also, very easy to relate to when you have people in your life with schyzophrenia. I just wish she was a rich, white guy that would ADMIT to the voices, etc. BUT, it is fiction after all.
7? My god that poor kid. I developed panic syndrome at 29 and at one point wanted to die it was so bad. It runs in my family so I was able to turn to them when it was really bad (multiple attacks all day every day for months, couldn’t sleep, sense of losing my identity). Thank GOD for therapy and learning how to manage them. I get about one a year now. Still struggling that I’ll never really feel the same as I did before it started.