Most people are diagnosed with bipolar disorder before they turn 24, but that is not that the case with Jane Pauley, 68, who said she was fine until 50.
The CBS Sunday Morning anchor said on CBS This Morning, “When I was 49 I was not bipolar. When I was 50 I was.”
Pauley also revealed that she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder after undergoing treatment with steroids for hives.
Speaking to hosts Gayle King, Tony Dokoupil and Anthony Mason for their “Stop the Stigma” mental health week, Pauley said, “It unmasked what doctors described as a genetic vulnerability to a mood disorder, and by that time I was in pretty deep trouble.”
She said she changed and her moods become erratic.
The “Skywriting: A Life Out of the Blue Jane Pauley” author said, “I got better and felt much better, and then I felt really great and started having plans, and other behaviors that my husband didn’t know who I was.
“When the doctor finally recognized, ‘Oh I know what’s going on here, this is bad,’ he called my husband and said, ‘Your wife is very sick.’ And Gary [Trudeau] was almost relieved, because he knew, ‘Oh maybe someone can help get my wife back now,’” added Pauley.
In 2001, Pauley finally decided to stay away from the limelight and spent three weeks in a psychiatric ward.
She said, “The only time in my life, and we’re closing in on 20 years, that I experienced stigma was that day, day one, when I realized that my doctor was giving me a cover story to tell employers that I was being treated for a thyroid disorder. Which was true, but it wasn’t the whole truth.”
Although Pauley agrees with the point that mental illness still has the stigma, she does not want to “fight” it. Instead, she has taken the issue with CBS This Morning’s “Stop the Stigma” theme. Pauley said, “As a communicator, I know something, words have power. And the word stigma is its own stigma. So every time you say stigma, it is a reminder for people like me that I’m fighting two wars. It’s not enough that I have a disorder that’s pretty serious, but I’m also fighting this front. So my goal is that we fight stigma, which is real, but we fight it with sophistication.”
