My Bipolar Backpack: To The Bottom Of Mental Illness And Back -- A Memoir

In this powerful memoir, My Bipolar Backpack, Susan Ralphe employs sharp storytelling skills honed over a long, newspaper-reporting career to tell her own story of long-term, heart-wrenching bipolar madness and recovery from it. In this powerful memoir Susan Ralphe employs sharp storytelling skills honed over a long newspaper-reporting career to tell her own story of long-term, heart-wrenching bipolar madness. She recounts soaring accomplishments alternating with black periods of tenseness, brain freeze, and despair. For most of her life Susan carefully hid her bipolar disorder from anyone she could. She feared the stigma that could deliver a second punch to someone already reeling from illness itself. In My Bipolar Backpack the author summons the strength to share her experiences, confident that other bipolar individuals can find hope and healing in her tale and that their families, as well as mental health professionals, can gain knowlege and understanding. Susan Ralphe's long career as a newspaper reporter ended abruptly when she descended, non-functioning, to the bottom of bipolar disorder. Years later, the product of two agonizing hospitalizations, endless psychotherapy, and medication changes, she reinvented herself as first an Arizona, then a Nevada, politician. She also faced head-on, intent on fending off returning bipolar symptoms, her husband Roger's alcoholism, as well as his death after 38 years of marriage.--Cover, page 4 In this powerful memoir Susan Ralphe employs sharp storytelling skills honed over along, newspaper-reporting career to tell her own story of long-term, heart-wrenching bipolarmadness.My Bipolar Backpack begins shortly before the first of two stays in mental hospitals andends as she serves in elective office. Sandwiched in between are incidents from a troubledchildhood, a brain that regularly froze during her college years, employment nightmares,misdiagnosis, suicide attempts, a marriage rocked by mental illness in Susan and alcoholismin her husband, and mothering failures.The first chapter gives readers a snapshot view of how it feels to be under the grip of amanic attack."Without warning invisible bands inside my head often tightened until the pressurebecame unbearable. It sometimes worsened almost to the point that I thought my head wasgoing to explode."Simultaneously my thoughts raced as though my brain were continually in fast-forwardmode, while my ability to think... Mental Health