David Harbour and Kanye West have one thing in common, they both look at their mental health disorders as a genius/superhero quality. The Stranger Things actor recently opened up about his bipolar disorder saying that when he was a youth his parents checked him into a mental asylum before knowing his mental condition.
“I have one thing to say about the mental asylum: I’ve romanticized two things in my life and both have fallen short," he explained on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast. "One is being in a mental asylum. Really not as fun as you think it is. You do have a romantic idea of it – [like] ‘you’re a genius’ — and it just ends up being sad and smells like s—t. And the other thing was boating. I just recently went out on a ship in open water and I’d read ‘Moby Dick’ a million times and it really is not as sexy. It’s very similar to the mental asylum experience.”
The 43-year-old explained how his manic episodes used to be mistaken for religious experiences and profound connections with God. “The funny thing about my brain is every time I’ve had an episode like that it’s coupled with spirituality. Generally, people are like ‘I need to meditate more’ or ‘I need to get into yoga,'” he said.“And I need to like, eat a cheeseburger and just like smoke cigarettes and hang out.' Because like the minute I get close to that – what I consider a flame – of like ‘the answers’ and the mysticism, and I’m like ‘completely present,’ 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.'”