Patty Duke was a pioneer for those with bipolar disorder

By Kim Palchikoff

Monday, April 4, 2016 | 2 a.m.

When those of us in the mental health world hear about the sudden death of a celebrity with a documented mental illness, we almost always assume it was a suicide.

That wasn’t the case for Anna “Patty Duke” Pearce, an Oscar-winning actress known as much for her stunning roles on the big screen as for her national crusade for mental health awareness.

Duke died March 29 from complications due to sepsis, an infection-related condition. She was 69.

She was the youngest actress to receive an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, for her role as Helen Keller in the 1962 movie “The Miracle Worker.”

She also starred from 1963-66 in a TV series, “The Patty Duke Show.”

But she also was known for being the first — and only — celebrity to talk about her mental illness in the open.

And she didn’t just talk.

She made waves when she published her 1987 autobiography, “Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke,” at a time when many of her peers in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences saw a mental illness disclosure as career suicide. She didn’t care.

The book was made into a 1990 TV docudrama starring Patty as herself.

Her book was the first memoir I read of someone who, like me, had bipolar disorder. I hadn’t heard of her until I came across the book.

Even in the 1990s, much of the literature on mental illness was medical in nature. Certainly no one of her stature was writing and marketing a tell-all book about her severe ups and downs.

It was not a sugar-coated read with a happy ending. She penned hundreds of pages describing a roller coaster life, with several suicide attempts, four husbands and an abusive Hollywood childhood filled with agents forcing her to memorize lines and going to daily rehearsals instead of playing outside with other kids.

She talked about the mixed feelings on the night of her Oscar win. Neither of her parents went with her to the ceremonies. Her dad was in a bar.

But there were a lot of on-set Hollywood talent temper tantrums that had me laughing. One of my favorite scenes: her storming off the set for lunch after her managers told her to eat on-site for lack of time.

They ordered her chauffeur to stay put, so she caught a ride with a garbage truck that drove her onto an Army base.

Her personal driver, chasing after the truck in his car, didn’t have a pass to get in, so she negotiated a much longer lunch hour through a fence on the base.

After falling in love with her memoir, I fell in love with her acting ability. One of her most famous scenes was a meal scenario in the film about Helen Keller. She had an innate ability to convey Helen’s enormous anger, hate and frustration.

As an actress and mental health advocate, Duke traveled all over the nation. Ultimately she testified before Congress, advocating for funding mental health research. She shed light on how one actress used her fame to improve the climate for the mentally ill — her fans and her peers.

Following the 2014 suicide of actor Robin Williams, she talked passionately and almost angrily in a CNN interview about the need for actors with mental illness to live stigma-free.

Her passing sent shock waves through Hollywood. Actress Melissa Gilbert, who played with Duke in several movies, released this statement:

“She (Duke) got so many people to see mental illness as what it really is, and led the effort to de-stigmatize it. She truly understood mental illness at its core and worked her entire life to help those who suffer from it.”

In the days following her untimely death, many national media outlets commended her lifelong courage and tenacity, often mentioning her tireless dedication to mental health awareness.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences tweeted: “Thank you Patty Duke for all that you’ve given us. You’ll be missed.”

For me, the Academy and millions of Americans, she was a class act whose work on and off the screen will be remembered forever.

Kim Palchikoff is studying social work at UNR and writes about mental health. Her Twitter handle is @NVmindsmatter.