Wrong. Scarcely two sentences had tumbled from my mouth before he barked, “You’re wasting my time!”
“Look at you,” he commanded, pointing his index finger accusingly as his Hungarian accent grew heavier. “You’re talented, wealthy, and doing exactly what you want for a living. What do you have to complain about? I had a patient in here half an hour ago who threatened to murder everyone in the waiting room. There are people out there who are really suffering and need my help. Get out!”
Dr. Kundara’s bedside manner notwithstanding, he may well have had a point: my suffering was not curable, per se. It was part of being human. Furthermore, overachieving was an ingrained Hill family trait, but surely no life-threatening disease. Granted, no matter how many hit songs I rack up, a sensation of utter worthlessness forever nips at my heels. But this sense of dissatisfaction also drives me to achieve. I’m hardly alone here. Most of my songwriting collaborators barely give their multi-million-dollar publishing catalogues a passing thought. They’re too obsessed with the song they’re writing or are about to write. “I feel like a failure ’cause I didn’t write Desperado,” one L.A.-based songwriter told me. This from a lyricist who’s bagged a half-dozen Grammys.
Dr. Kundara’s “get your swollen head out of your ass” speech haunts me to this day.
“You are definitely manic,” my current psychiatrist concluded in the spring of ’09.
“But I don’t experience the lows, so there’s no way I’m bipolar.”
“What I’m saying, Dan, is that you exhibit symptoms of someone on cocaine: overly excited, febrile, with rapid speech, a slight tremor in your right hand.”
I looked down at my right hand. It was shaking. I sat on it.
“Are you engaging in substance abuse?”
“Doctor, I’m from the planet Boring. No drugs, and I stopped drinking a long time ago.” There was a stretch of silence as my psychiatrist jotted something down.
“You walk an emotional tight-wire, and you’re addicted to drama.”
“But drama is my job. I’ve made my living from it.”
“Why do you feel such a need to prove yourself? You come in here, talking of all your accomplishments, all the famous people you’ve worked with—why do you need to impress me so desperately?”
I was starting to hate this guy. He was by far the best shrink I’d seen. And I’d gone through truckloads.
“You have a choice,” my shrink said, manoeuvring his six-foot-four linebacker frame beside me on the couch, a device he used to reinforce a point. Call it instruction through physical intimidation; it reminded me of my father.
I stood up to shift the power dynamic.“What is my choice, doctor?”
“I can give you a pill that will knock out your hyper-intensity, make you appear and feel more normal. But it will reduce your creative output by 50 per cent. And your work won’t carry the same force. The upside is you’ll be a lot calmer, easier to live with.”
Why not just blow out my brains with a shotgun? That should calm me down a bit.
What did happen next is this: certain stressors—knowing that I’d upset a lot people I loved by writing a memoir, I Am My Father’s Son; the pressure of being catapulted back into the media spotlight after 15 years of quasi-obscurity—faded. My manic period eased as the months ticked by, as I got back to writing and recording a new CD in Nashville and stepped away from playing “celebrity.”
Given my family history (we Hills have files as thick as a Bible in certain Toronto hospitals), I’ve discovered time and time again that if you’re seriously ill—bipolar, psychotic, schizophrenic, or depressed to the point where you’re edging toward self-annihilation—you need drugs and professional help, or chances are you’ll self-destruct, possibly taking a few people with you.
But for me, it turns out there’s no form of self-medication that works better than massive creative output, topped off by two hours of exercise a day. Oh, and human connection, of course—writer to writer, brother to brother, husband to wife, parent to child. My experience has been that the best therapy comes from interacting with people I care about. And who care about me.
Last July, I was ferrying from Vancouver Island to Vancouver with my childhood friend John Hadfield, who had just road-managed me through a gruelling yet inspiring CD- and book-promotion tour of Western Canada. I was on deadline to write an article about the 50th anniversary of Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, and I was panicked because I hadn’t had time to revisit the book that had galvanized me in junior high school. I had a red-eye flight to Toronto that night and only 24 hours left to nail the article. Reading on the ferry was a bust, due to motion sickness.
“I’ll read to you,” offered John. Before I could say anything—it had been a half-century since anyone had read aloud to me—John snatched the paperback from my grasp. Something about his spontaneous kindness, the southern Ontario twang to his voice, the taste of the sea air as mountains glinted in the distance, and Harper Lee’s mastery of words left me feeling safe, complete, and happy. I was a little boy once more, playing guitar in the kitchen with Mom weaving her lovely singsong melodies through my chord progressions.
One thing was for sure: no drug, no therapy session, no self-help book or TV showcould ever make me feel this happy.
Earlier this year, I Am My Father’s Son came out in paperback, and Intimate, Dan Hill’s first CD in 15 years, was released.
