Reducing stigma around bipolar disorder on stage

“People tend to joke about mood swings, saying ‘my mood swings throughout the day, I’m already a bit bipolar,’ or joke with each other, saying ‘everything is bipolar.’ And it’s not quite like that, as bipolar disorder has a biological component.”

This is one of the statements featured in a short trailer on YouTube about bipolar disorder. The video is connected to the play Oxímoro, entre Solstícios e Equinócios (Oxymoron, Between Solstices and Equinoxes) by Marionet, a Portuguese theater company that brings scientific research topics to the stage.

The play was developed through an in-depth collaboration with doctors, researchers, and patients, with the goal of informing and raising public awareness about bipolar disorder, helping to reduce the stigma surrounding this and other mental health conditions.

The project also included an analysis of audience responses to the performance, with a specific focus on emotional engagement. The results of this experience are described in a practice insight published in the special issue of emotions and science communication in the Journal of Science Communication (JCOM).

According to the authors, the audience’s emotional response—empathy, emotional resonance, and personal identification—helped facilitate the assimilation of scientific information and contributed to reducing the stigma surrounding mental illness.

The Marionet theater company has extensive experience staging works inspired by scientific research, explains Mário Montenegro (Marionet and Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Coimbra). “We have been working with science for 25 years,” he says. “But we only started to work on health subjects a few years ago.”

The company collaborates with scientific partners such as the Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology at the Universidade de Coimbra, which also conducts research on mental health.

For this play, Montenegro and his colleagues collaborated with a group from the center with a project focused specifically on bipolar disorder, as well as health practitioners from the Integrated Psychiatry Responsibility Center of the Coimbra Hospital and University Center.

The scientific component entered the project from the very beginning, during the writing phase, and was complemented by direct testimonies from patients.

“We felt the need to change our creative process, because these were delicate subjects that touched people’s lives. We realized we needed to be even better informed,” explains Montenegro. “So we based our work on interviews with patients, doctors, nurses, and relatives—to hear, in their own words, their experiences with these conditions. From those interviews, we then began building our creative material.”

Based on these interviews, Montenegro and his colleagues wrote the script for the play, composed of several scenes featuring different characters and situations, rather than a single story with a defined set of protagonists. The play, performed by professional actors, ran for five days at the BlackBox of Convento São Francisco in Coimbra, Portugal, from March 20 to 24, 2024, with a total of six performances.

After each show, audience members were invited to complete a questionnaire about their experience. Of the approximately 300 attendees overall, 54 responded. “It was an emotionally very strong play,” says Montenegro. “And the emotional engagement from the audience was very strong as well.”

According to the authors’ analysis of the questionnaires, emotions proved to be a key factor in helping audiences understand and remember information about bipolar disorder. Engagement, empathy, and personal identification helped assimilate scientific content and contributed to reducing stigma and stereotypes, humanizing the illness.

Emotion, therefore, does not interfere with message accuracy, Montenegro believes: when intentionally and thoughtfully guided through staging and language, it strengthens it, motivating audiences to learn more and leaving a deeper, longer-lasting impact than purely informational communication.

As he puts it, “An important aspect of our play was not to offer the audience a pre-established interpretation of the illness or of the situations represented in each scene. We left the interpretation open so that spectators could form their own opinions. In this way, everyone could receive the content in their own way and react emotionally according to their own sensitivity—because we are all very different.”

The paper “Theatre and bipolar disorder: dealing with emotions” by Mário Montenegro, Silvia Carballo and Francisca Moreira is part of a JCOM special issue titled “Emotions and Science Communication.”

“Theater is indeed a very powerful way for engaging people in science and health issues; recently, very important initiatives have been developed worldwide, including this (very beautiful) one from Portugal,” says Luisa Massarani, researcher at the Brazilian Institute of Public Communication of Science and Technology and one of the guest editors of the special issue on emotions and science communication.

“Despite their significant role, emotions are under-theorized and under-researched in science communication—although there is a growing interest among researchers and practitioners in understanding their role in science communication.

“This led us—Neta Shaby (UK), Daniel Silva Luna and myself—to propose this special issue, inviting researchers and practitioners around the globe to submit their manuscripts. We hope this special issue inspires other people to think further about the different facets of emotions and science communication , as well as to carry out more studies on the subject.”