Creativity and Mental Health Disorders with Mary Guillermin Mental Health Advocate Pellin Institute An Empowered Patient Podcast Published April 25, 2021 Karen Jagoda: Welcome to the EmpoweredPatientPodcast.com show. I'm Karen Jagoda. And my guest today is Mary Guillermin. She's an advocate for de-stigmatizing mental health and she's an author of John Guillermin: The Man, The Myth, The Movies. She's also a marriage and family therapist, and director of communications, and Senior Pellin Practitioner at the Pellin Institute International. So I want to welcome you to the show today, Mary, and that's a long way of introducing you. So I think the best idea is to have you tell us a little bit about the Pellin Institute and what that means in your life. Mary Guillermin: Okay. So I first met Peter Fleming, founder and director of the Pellin Institute when I was in my twenties, which was over 40 years ago. And he developed a way of working called contribution training. It's deliberately not called therapy. They use Gestalt therapy for the deeper bit, so the more personal bit. Contribution training is a set of tools about mental health and wellness. And he could see, and I knew that I suffered from extreme mood swings, and in the very first piece of Gestalt work he did with me, he got me straight into my calm. Mary Guillermin: The calm, what we call the pendulum, the tool of the pendulum of emotions. And so I was rather fascinated by this because being calm wasn't an experience I had very often, I was either very up or very down. And so I became an avid student of his in the late seventies. And I used that message my whole life in terms of my own personal difficulties and challenges. Karen Jagoda: And the idea is that it gives you some kinds of personality or behavioral techniques that you can use in addition to a drug therapy? Mary Guillermin: You could use it in addition to drug therapy. Because I was someone who was really interested in radical change and the atmosphere that there was around in the seventies about the possibility of change, in my own case, I never used medication. I used personal exploration and the application of these tools, to modulate my extreme swings until they were right within the normal range. Mary Guillermin: So that's part of my drive to de-stigmatizing mental health, is feeling that you can achieve change through finding the right purpose, making the right contribution and learning how to change. In my particular case, learning how to change the trajectory of those debilitating things. Karen Jagoda: And do you work as the marriage and family therapist with children often, or with people who have gone undiagnosed with some of these mental disorders? Mary Guillermin: I worked with children when I was doing my internship. As a licensed therapist, I've actually chosen in recent years to work within the framework of the Pellin Institute. I really like the wellness model, I have my whole life, and so I choose to work as a Pellin practitioner, so that I can teach people the tools that have benefited me as well as working with the therapeutic methods based on themselves. Mary Guillermin Pellin Institute Page 1 of 5 EmpoweredPatientPodcast.com ©TBI LLC 2021 Creativity and Mental Health Disorders with Mary Guillermin Mental Health Advocate Pellin Institute An Empowered Patient Podcast Published April 25, 2021 Karen Jagoda: And so, you took on a really interesting personal challenge and that was marrying John Guillermin, the director, Towering Inferno, King Kong, Death on the Nile, The Blue Max. I mean, we're talking about somebody who had big ideas. It was clearly a love story. Was that really what happened there? Mary Guillermin: Oh yes, absolutely. Well, when we met at a dinner party in North London when John was over trying to get a script made, about 10 years after he made his last film. And he heard me across the room and he said, "Oh, I knew you were like me." And he meant someone who had big expansive swings and then had the tough times. And it was interesting. He was like a really passionate man, and we recognized this largess in each other. And we really enjoyed connecting, we really had a very strong connection. Mary Guillermin: Because we understood what it felt like when we had the swings down in those days, I'm talking 20 years ago, my swings, I didn't have any mania anymore, but my depressions were quite dark and so were his. And we supported and sustained each other through the period when we had down patches, and really had a very profound connection. Mary Guillermin: And that was what led me on. I felt he had produced so many amazing films, many of which were not known on this side of the Atlantic, and that I really wanted to produce a book about him, which I did, with nine other contributors. And have a look at him as a man and how he was more than someone who just yells, which is what he was known for. And it's really an interesting read, looking at the person behind the film and an in-depth look at some of his films, Karen Jagoda: The idea of creative people and bipolar disease seems to be an interesting story unto itself. And so would you say that your husband managed to channel his mania into his movie work and that's what made him so capable of creating such big stories? Mary Guillermin: I think so, yes. I mean, I saw him when he was writing scripts and he would get very full of the creative juices. And so I think he did absolutely do that. And when you think of what's involved in making a film, you get the script, you have the ideas, you have to conceive who you want, what sort of actors you want, how you're going to use the camera. He did lots of detailed drawings of the camera work on the script. And he really got involved in the vision of what he wanted to produce, which was particularly successful in his lost masterpiece called Rapture of 1965, which didn't get attention at the time, but got really good critical attention when it was released in 2011. And that was the film that showed the fullness of his creative mission, where he had, the producer gave him complete control over the whole film which really showed what he was worthy of. What he could produce. Mary Guillermin Pellin Institute Page 2 of 5 EmpoweredPatientPodcast.com ©TBI LLC 2021 Creativity and Mental Health Disorders with Mary Guillermin Mental Health Advocate Pellin Institute An Empowered Patient Podcast Published April 25, 2021 Karen Jagoda: And how did he take criticism of his work? You're saying in the book, you point out how a lot of his work was not seen as top Hollywood material, but it still had a really great popular appeal. So, how did he reconcile the popularity with the critical acclaim from his peers? Mary Guillermin: I think that he really cared about doing the story as well as he was able to. And he wasn't a snob, he wanted to reach the ordinary people in the cinema seats. So, he did each story to the best of his ability. Mary Guillermin: So, for example, with King Kong, he knew he had to have a really different story from the original 1933 film. And then he put all his artistic ability into creating as sensitive a story as he could, and a wide ranging story. I think that the film criticism world has its way of looking at art which is a bit snobby. John was someone who took the work that was given to him, he could turn his hand to anything from poetic films to blockbusters. He could use his vision, and his energy, and enthusiasm, to channel it into whatever work was given to him. And that's not the way it works in terms of getting recognition and acclaim. Mary Guillermin: So I think his wide ability and his eclectic ability to work in so many different genres inside film, he produced a number of significant war films like Blue Max and Bridge at Remagen, and he always had his own individual vision, his signature style. I think now in this recent criticism, he's getting recognized for having his own style, his own signature, and you can see things like the way he uses camera and to create intense emotional way back in his earlier films that were made in Britain before he moved over here. Karen Jagoda: So when I hear you describe the work that he's done and the conditions that he was dealing with internally, it seems to me, bipolar was an advantage to him in so many ways. Would you agree that there are a lot of positive things about being bipolar? Mary Guillermin: Yes, I think that certainly the positive side is that ability to conceive of an idea and really flesh it out. He was able to use his energy and bring it into this, work really hard on these films and bring it to fruition. So I think it is a matter for evaluating. You can hurt yourself and other people with the extremity of the swings, if you don't have some kind of outlet that's working for you and that channels all that energy.