He clearly had been doing this for hours. I walked by a guy on the street yesterday and he was taking bits of newspaper, ripping them into small pieces, and putting them in a sack. JENNIFER PARKER: D o you believe that, as a society, we ignore the mentally ill? McDermott spoke to me from his home in New York City. His title refers to his mother, Cindy, who called him a hairy gorilla and whom he nicknamed The Bird “because of her nervous habit of poking her head.” Yet it’s her deep concern for her son’s well-being that makes McDermott’s story so emotionally charged. McDermott writes about all this in an irreverent yet candid style. After two subsequent hospitalizations and a visit to his hometown of Wichita, Kansas, McDermott came to realize that practicing law was not conducive to healthy self-care. His book asks us to de-stigmatize mental illness by familiarizing us intimately with the issue.Īfter the incident on the subway platform, McDermott checked himself into Bellevue Hospital, where he was diagnosed as bipolar and heavily medicated. Yet for McDermott, success is measured by his own sense of personal balance. McDermott, now 34, has written a poignant memoir about his experience of mental illness, Gorilla and the Bird, the TV rights for which have been sold to Channing Tatum. AFTER YEARS working as a public defender, 26-year-old Zack McDermott found himself on a subway platform half-naked and crying, overtaken by the delusion that he was the star of his own reality TV show.
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