On Oct. 18, Netflix released the trailer for season 2 of Maria Bamford’s Lady Dynamite. Much like the critically acclaimed first season and the comedy stylings that demarcate Bamford from many of her contemporaries, season 2 aims to “destigmatize” mental illness by highlighting how regrettably pervasive it is. I am not unique in my deep-seated enmity toward the subject, not just on behalf of myself, but on behalf of the many singular minds that had to live abbreviated lives because of a simple accident of birth; revolutionaries like Van Gogh, Nietzsche and Virginia Woolf that were made to pay the ultimate price for being born during a time when we had yet to clear through the brush and the barbs of truly comprehending psychological trauma.
I can not stress enough the importance of the kind of awareness Bamford brings to mental health, a kind of awareness I myself am utterly incapable of emulating. I find a kindred spirit in Bamford, sans one important ingredient. Indeed we’re both self-loathing, neurotic self-destructive sad sacks, but Bamford possesses the ability to make these hitherto contemptible qualities simultaneously endearing and relatable. According to Nietzsche, that is the ultimate goal of art, to be therapeutic and practical. The show is exceptional, irrespective of its message, but its creative honesty is seminal in dismantling our long-standing ignorance on the topic. An ignorance that is, quite frankly, responsible for the deaths of more people than we like to acknowledge.
Whether or not Bamford perceives it this way, whether or not she even should, she has achieved something I often struggle with. In a hopeless world where, as the late-great Christopher Hitchens so succinctly put it, “ You’re expelled from your mother’s uterus as if shot from a cannon, towards a barn door studded with old nail files and rusty hooks,” the only hope one truly has at living is to do all that is in their power to contribute to society in some meaningful way. For some, like the remarkable Franz Kafka and Maria Bamford, that means spreading awareness about one of the most persistent killers this world has ever known.
Alas, I don’t possess the wit or perspective to alleviate the burden mental illness has inflicted on so many. All I have is the recommendation that you make an effort to seek out works that dare to make sense of it. Lady Dynamite is a good place has any to start. It arrives Nov. 10 on Netflix.
