Illustration by Ana Mouriño
As the machine-gun-wielding Sarah Connor in the Terminator movies, Linda Hamilton is the ultimate badass action hero. She’s battled cyborgs in the dystopian world of the Terminator series — the latest installment of which, Terminator Genisys, recently came out. But off-screen, she’s battled bipolar disorder, speaking openly about it in an hour-long interview with Larry King on CNN in 2005.
“I think it’s important to stand as an advocate for the mentally ill,” Hamilton told King. “My journey has been so full of struggle and I just want to be able to offer some help and some general ideas to people that really need it the most.”
Linda Hamilton played the lead role in Children of the Corn, the 1984 horror film based on the Stephen King short story. But her breakout role was in The Terminator — the original movie that spawned four sequels. She won a Golden Globe for her performance on the late ‘80s TV drama Beauty and the Beast. She was a cast member on the comedy Chuck and took on bit parts on other TV shows including Frasier and Showtime’s Weeds.
Hamilton suffered from depression as early as five years old, when her father died in a car accident. This led to compulsive eating and, by her teenage years, she weighed 170 pounds.
For 20 years, Hamilton suffered from depression and mood swings and didn’t know what was wrong with her. Throughout her career, Hamilton was hindered by bouts with horrible depression. She was also a cocaine addict and says she “was” an alcoholic.
“[In 1995], when I really was crashing and burning, [I] had spent many years, you know, not only looking for the answers but sort of self-medicating with drugs and alcohol… it was at that point that [a therapist] wouldn’t let me out of his office,” she told King. “He said, ‘You are so seriously bipolar. You should not leave this office without me calling your primary physician and we need to get you on medicine.’”
Hamilton told journalist Luaine Lee in 1997 that she will be on antidepressants for the rest of her life and that being on meds changed her world.
Linda describes a feeling that is all-too familiar to those of us with bipolar disorder — the crash.
“My manic spells are manageable and are great,” she said. “But what happens is then, all of a sudden, you plunge because you’ve depleted yourself on such a level that one day you wake up with a gigantic lump in your throat. And there it is. So I would fall down and just not be able to get myself up. Just the smallest thing would set me off.”
Hamilton has mixed feelings about her mania. While she was able to thrive on only four hours of sleep per night, and woke up feeling bright-eyed and bushy tailed, there were negative consequences as well.
“A lot of the raging that I did I think was the manic part of my disorder,” she said. “The capacity for fighting, war, taking everything on, taking too much on, overachieving and then raging because my system was so depleted.”
Now 58, Hamilton reflects on her past with newfound perspective.
“I feel like I had 20 years of hell on Earth and now 10 years into my journey to mental well-being, it is wonderful,” Hamilton told the Toronto Star in 2008. “I embrace life as it changes and I love that I have a lot of time to make up for all the devastation in my past.”
