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Creating a New “State of Mind”

When Lifetime’s State of Mind premieres on July 15, viewers will be treated to an unconventional television portrayal of psychotherapists. Bisexual author Amy Bloom (Normal, Love Invents Us) – writer, creator and co-executive producer for the one-hour drama starring Lili Taylor – characterizes it as “backstage with therapists.”

She should know. Besides being a critically acclaimed author (she has won a National Magazine Award and has been nominated for National Book Critics Circle and National Book awards), Bloom is also a licensed clinical social worker. She spent 10 years as a psychotherapist before launching her career as a writer.

But with six books to her name – one nonfiction, two short-story collections and three novels – and the requisite book tours, at this point she maintains only a very limited practice. “I did it as long as I could, until I began to feel that my absences really compromised the quality of people’s therapy,” she said.

Before State of Mind, Bloom had no background in television other than having written a couple of teleplays and occasionally teaching a television writing course at Yale, where she leads a fiction workshop and other undergraduate writing seminars each spring.

She happens to have a background in performance, however; she studied theater (along with political science) in college and worked for a time as an actor. But she regards leaving that field to become a therapist as a wise decision: “I realized that my talent as an actor was very small and basically confined to those parts which were identical to my own personality. And I think we don’t call that acting.”

She noted that she’s brilliant at charades, though, “perhaps the last vestige of my theater training.”

Four years ago, producers Michael Robin and Greer Shephard (Nip/Tuck, The Closer) – fans of Bloom’s fiction – approached her about developing a television series. When they asked if she had any ideas, her first thought was to create a show that portrayed therapists from a therapist’s perspective.

“The one thing that’s always struck me is that whenever you see a therapist on television, it is so obvious that the character has been written from the point of view of a patient,” Bloom said, noting that many writers go into therapy. “And you can always tell that either they’re idealized or they’re demonized, or they’re exceptionally peculiar or Zen-like in their comprehension – whatever they are, they’re not people.”

Bloom had something else in mind for State of Mind when she came up with the concept; she also wrote the screenplays for several of the series’ eight episodes. She describes the therapists on the show as “people who are interested in people’s lives, who have their own issues, who find human beings complex and intriguing, and who have a wish to help but who also are not necessarily reverent about the process in which they’re involved, taking it seriously but not solemnly.”

Referring to the first episode’s closing scene, Bloom said, “If you are someone who might be entertained, and even moved, by the sight of a hamster puppet quoting Henry James, this show is for you.”

The ensemble cast for State of Mind is led by Taylor (Six Feet Under, Julie Johnson) as Dr. Ann Bellowes, a therapist in New Haven, Conn., who walks in on her husband having sex with their couples counselor.

She shares a practice in a Victorian house that’s been converted into office space with a group of colleagues: James (British actor Derek Riddell), the puppet-wielding child psychologist; Cordelia (Theresa Randle of Bad Boys), the tough-but-kind therapist who is having a secret office romance with married psychiatrist Taj (Mido Hamada of The Path to 9/11); Barry (Devon Gummersall, who played Lisa on The L Word), the young attorney who takes over Ann’s husband’s office space; and Fred (Kevin Chamberlin, a two-time Tony-nominated Broadway actor), the sardonic and somewhat nosy receptionist.

Although Bloom’s own psychotherapy practice is in New Haven, she said no single character in State of Mind is based on her own life. “Although all of them emerge from me, none of them are autobiographical,” she explained. As with most of the other fictional characters she writes, there are bits and pieces of her in each one.

She did acknowledge sometimes having her State of Mind characters voice things she could only fantasize about saying to a patient. In the first episode, Ann tells a querulous couple she’s counseling that she’d cut her throat if she had to live with either one of them, then launches into a rapid-fire exposition of why. But she goes on to deliver a tough-love speech – which could describe her own relationship just as much as her clients’ – so spot-on and poignant that it moves the adversarial couple to a tearful embrace.

While State of Mind‘s main characters are the therapists, there are no insignificant characters on the show, according to Bloom. “As far as I’m concerned, even someone who crosses our screen once has a whole life story,” she said. “It’s just that we’re only getting to see a little piece of it. But that little piece should be as full and real as possible.”

Upcoming story lines will include a family in crisis over whether their transgender daughter will be a bridesmaid or best man at their other daughter’s upcoming wedding, and a kid who gets caught in the middle of a lesbian custody battle. Regarding the latter, Bloom said: “It’s an exploration of family and the different things the two women bring to the family, which is not always apparent. To me what’s always interesting is: This is how it looks, and if you want to pay a little more attention, this is how it is.”

One of the lines in the theme song for State of Mind, which was written by Ani DiFranco, is that human beings are a mystery — something Bloom says she’s always saying. That’s what motivated her to show that even therapists are sometimes baffled by other people.

“You have to be willing not to know,” she said. “You have to be able to stand that things are not always resolved. And I think that’s one of the ways that the show is not that conventional. It’s not a medical show. It’s not like you get the kidney and then you’re fine. Some things go well, some things not so well.”

Rather than having her characters “sitting in the office endlessly, having epiphanies,” Bloom employs apparitions to voice what the characters can’t say or can barely allow themselves to think. For instance, as Ann suffers through a session with a particularly cantankerous patient while in the midst of her own personal crisis, she envisions herself taking a wire to the patient’s throat — but comes to before any actual violence is shown.

Bloom said other characters will also be visited by apparitions of themselves as well as of others, such as family members and even Sigmund Freud. “Sometimes the apparitions have a lot of insight, and sometimes they’re just being contrary and difficult and saying things one would rather not hear,” Bloom explained.

Another device Bloom employs in the series is opening each episode with a dream sequence from the point of view of one particular character. “Each dream is very much in the interior language of whichever character is having the dream,” she said.

Comparing writing for the screen as opposed to the printed page, she said, “One really has to learn the use of the camera’s narrative, the way in which the camera creates a connective tissue that in prose are some of the hardest and most interesting sentences to write.” Working in television entails a much more collaborative creative process than Bloom said she is used to, which isn’t always a good thing. She bemoaned “the constant conversation with other people” and noted that “it’s a world in which there are a lot of meetings.”

But she really enjoyed seeing what someone else could add to her vision of a story, and was especially enthusiastic about having the chance to work with director Arvin Brown (The Closer, Everwood), who is also artistic director of New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre.

“Unlike with a movie, where you write your screenplay and then people go off and direct it and you’re either welcome on the set or not,” Bloom said, “this tends to be more collaborative. Some things are up to me and some are not, but I certainly felt I was getting to work with people and not in isolation, which is a nice change of pace from writing a book.”

After spending the summer in Los Angeles working on the show, Bloom will return to Connecticut before taking off on a book tour for her latest novel, Away, which will be published in August. Television may beckon again in the future, though. “I don’t ever see myself not writing fiction, and if I continue to have the opportunity to write nonfiction and television, that would be great too.”

State of Mind premieres Sunday, July 15 at 9 p.m. ET /PT. Visit the show’s official website for more information and to watch the entire first episode online.

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