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Zak Sandler and I have a deeply personal and contemplative conversation about the struggles he has faced with his mental health and how he has managed to organize his life with a brain that functions in a different way. From his original diagnosis as bipolar while an undergraduate student at Yale University, to becoming a highly creative Broadway pianist for such shows as Wicked and The Color Purple, Zak has traveled the road from despair to acceptance and now to allowing his creativity to guide his response to his diagnosis. Zak will tell you that he does not have a mental illness or a disorder. For him that language implies there’s something about him that needs to be fixed. He chooses the phrase mental condition, because it indicates that his bipolar diagnosis is simply part of who he is. At core he is not broken. This distinction is how we move from shame to understanding and hopefully acceptance. That our differences, no matter how acute, are simply that - differences not deficiencies.

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