August 18, 1996 was the day after my 45^th birthday. I slept little the night before and I remember being very frightened that night. I had set up the chaise lounge on the patio and took my two little dogs outside with me. It was as if I was guarding the house from some evil approaching. My two teenaged children slept quietly away, not knowing that their mother was sinking into a full psychotic state replete with delusions and hallucinations.

I was very religiously preoccupied during the months preceding this and thus, that night I was told to Apick up your pallet and walk.@ I took the plastic cushion off the chaise lounge and that was my pallet and I carried it into the house and placed it folded in half in my bedroom closet.

I went to the living room and lay on the couch and was told to remember how I laid in the womb and I remember vaguely doing that, and I lay on my stomach and sobbed a very long time. After that I went up to bed and after praying and speaking in tongues, fell asleep with Trinity Broadcast Network on my bedroom TV. By that point in time that was all I watched and my musical choice was only contemporary Christian music. (My obsession with religion was driving my 16 year-old daughter to distraction. My son, being 12 was a little more tolerant of Mom and her odd ways.)

The morning of the 18^th I was vividly hallucinating. My kids had to go to band camp later that day and the rational part of me knew I had to get them to the school on time, as well as run the few errands left. I stayed up in my bedroom and watched TBN and began writing things down on a piece of paper because messages were coming to me through the broadcast. I also sifted through my wallet and removed certain items and put them in the pallet I had stowed away the night before. I also placed a certain dress in there. I went out to the refrigerator and cleaned off certain magnets and threw them away. It was all based on a color code.

I was also fraught with a fear. A bone chilling dread that something terrible was going to happen to me that day and I made two phone calls. The first phone call was to some local common pleas court judge. He was very kind and it would be hard for me to detail what I had been involved in working on that summer. But, now that he is retired, I would like to sit down with him and see what he told me actually on the phone as compared to what I remember. The second call was to the pastor of my church. Again, I said, as I did to the judge, that I was terrified. I had this awful foreboding that something was going to happen to me that day that would affect my life horribly. Neither call was fruitful in getting help for me.

OK, you are wondering, why I didn=t call the local crisis intervention service. I used to work for the agency and had been on medical leave for physical problems. I was filing a complaint against the agency director for malfeasance, misfeasance and nonfeasance in her duties. It was not likely that I would trust that they would help when I knew she would be called.

My daughter stepped in sometime behind my back and called my separated husband. He came rushing into the house, furious with me. His approach only terrified me. I told him I had to go to the bank. I had a picture that I could stick my bank card into the ATM and I would have access to all the money I wanted or needed. He took me to the bank, and of course, I could get nothing.

We went back to my house with him yelling all the way with Awhat=s wrong with you, are you nuts?@ Please don=t ask a psychotic person that question. We still have tender feelings in-between the delusions and hallucinations. We got back to the house and my husband told me to stay, told our 12-year old son not to let me leave, then he took my 16-year old daughter to the mall for errands.

As soon as he was safely gone, I was in my car like a shot. I had been told to go to a dealership and there would be a Lexus waiting for me. My son was screaming and crying and he had the cordless phone trying to call the police. I told him to call the police but they wouldn=t stop me (which was true). I drove off.

Today, to even write that last paragraph tears me apart so incredibly. My poor son was so frightened and out of love was trying to stop me. My husband should have never told him to watch me. That is just one of the reasons he has been my ex-husband since October of 1997.

I had other Apictures@ go through my mind but those were the two primary ones as well as the awful feeling that something bad would happen. I think those pictures came to chase away the foreboding.

I got to the dealership and of course, after walking around there, realized there was no Lexus with keys waiting for me and I started to silently cry. This couple stopped and asked if they could help and I told them politely, Ano, I just need to be alone for a bit.@

I walked across the street to the pharmacy owned by an old family friend and sat down and just silently sobbed. The couple came over and the woman told me her husband was calling for help. I begged them to call my pastor. It was shortly after 11AM and church was in and he was unreachable.

From there I lost my memory, due to fear I would surmise. From my records I know that a policeman came and called the city ambulance and they transported me all the way across the street to the Hospital Emergency Room. I do remember signing the papers for permission for treatment, because I signed them Mrs., which was something I never did.

The next thing I know there stood my husband, angered, with my daughter standing by the examination room door. He told me he had to leave to get the kids to band camp. In September 1997 I finally got those hospital records and the doctor noted that he remained gone for several hours. I was totally appalled because of his failure to stay with me I was put into hell. As one might guess he plead total innocence when I finally confronted him with the information. He made excuses about the kids and I pointed out that any parent in band would have taken over so he could get back to me. If the situation had been reversed, I would have done that for him.

I had an insurance at the time which should have put me into a hospital about 25 miles away which had a psychiatric ward. The insurance would have covered 100% of the stay there because that hospital was the primary provider for the insurance. The hospital in my town was a secondary. The hospital in my town closed the psychiatric unit about four years previously because politically it was bad to have psychiatric patients there.

I vaguely remember seeing a co-worker standing outside the examination room and looking at me through the window. I do know, at no time did she come in and do a mental status exam on me, however agency records reflect differently. I know in my gut she didn=t do it.

I was terribly frightened and terribly delusional. I hated that hospital ER anyway, because they always screwed up. The saying was and still is AIf you want to die, go to Union Hospital Emergency Room.@ I knew of some bad cover ups that had gone on and suddenly I became an avenging angel. I thought there was a camcorder in the ceiling and I was shouting at it about the people they had killed. They had an orderly standing with me and I remember ranting at him about xanax and inderal and telling him they were demon drugs. I had gone off paxil, xanax, and inderal cold turkey about five days before that. Without a doubt that sudden withdrawal exacerbated my psychotic state.

I kept wetting my pants. I don=t know why. I just had these weird hallucinations and delusions which are even too bizarre for me to write. It was something about being tested for drugs and my urine would be pure, cleansed from the Ablood of the lamb.@

Hours later my husband returned and with him there I agreed with the doctor that I needed to go to a safe place. I was thinking the psychiatric ward at the hospital in Canton. Wrong. I was pink-slipped to a state psychiatric hospital. When I heard that something inside me snapped big time. There were people there that I had worked with. One man had threatened to kill any agency staff that he saw and they were sending me there?

I was in a hospital gown and transported the 25 miles by ambulance with my husband following us. I pretty much lost memory from that point on. I enjoyed the ride up because of the colors on the signs and what I was Atold.@ One=s mind tries very hard to conjure up some goodness in all the bad. I was really trying.

The intake was long and drawn out but finally I was sent to a floor. I vaguely remember a couple of the patients. They were kind and watched over me. The woman who took me there was also very kind and tried to calm me and support me.

That was a Sunday. Late that night I was moved downstairs to another floor. The staff was very nasty and they frightened me. Later on, when I became alert one of the patients told me how they wouldn=t talk to me and I got upset. This staff believed in using chemical restraint. Upon admission I had agreed to ativan, but that was all. I found four people approaching me with a needle and I fought like hell. Finally it took a fifth person, a guard who weighed at least 300 pounds who laid across my back while they injected me in the hip.

I had huge bruises on my arms from this. I have no real memory from then until Wednesday Morning, August 21st. I could also tell from side effects that I had been given something other than ativan. I had trouble working my mouth, and my husband noted other things. My records reflected that I was given several haldol injections, along with ativan. My rights were violated, it seemed, at every conceivable turn.

While I was drugged up, I ran to my husband like a little puppy dog. Once I started to become lucid and rational, then I became more confrontive about why I was in the state hospital and what was he doing to help get me out of there. At every turn when I tried to do something positive he would screw up like saying I was involuntary when I had signed voluntary as soon as possible.

Being in the state hospital was a totally dehumanizing experience. There were very few of the staff members that had the real ability for the work. The ones who did were very nice and I got along well with them. They continually gave me pointers to get me up and out. I think they got frustrated that I was kept in when other people went home. I know that one told my current boyfriend that I didn=t belong in there at all.

I had my fun with the staff I disliked. I would watch them like a hawk and since I knew the rules that governed them I would point out Agee, aren=t you supposed to do so and so.@ They had stripped me of my dignity and I was very angry about that. Also, they had this penchant for talking about you like you were not there which just infuriated me. Hello! I am very much here and I can hear everything you say and even comprehend it.

Essentially the high functioning patients watched out for the new patients coming in. I guess they had their pecking order and decided who would be salvageable. I am very grateful to the patients who helped me. They were my angels.

My first time that I was allowed off the floor and outside, I had a man and woman showing me around. The grounds of the hospital were absolutely breathtakingly beautiful and my first time out I wept. One doesn=t appreciate true freedom until they lose it all. But the woman was so special. Her name was Sherry and she walked me around and showed me squirrels, flowers and tame raccoons. She was just a country woman whose family didn=t want her . . . any more than that.

Finally on Monday, the 9^th day, I was allowed a pass to go home overnight. Oh, how I wept as I walked to the car and gripped my husband=s hand and felt like such a weak baby. That night he threatened me two times that he would keep me in the hospital permanently. Then he left and I fixed steak and sauteed mushrooms for my son and me. My daughter was away for the night.

When I got home the first thing I did was to go outside and sit on my lawn with my two dogs in my lap. Perhaps a benefit of being in a place like that was learning what was important. I had been so irritable before that and yelled so much at my kids, without knowing why, and I just wanted nothing but peace.

The next day I was discharged because I knew the director of the mental health center here, had spoken to him from the hospital and he had arranged for psychiatric care, so the doctor had to let me go. My doctor in the hospital was nothing more than a pompous little man who was using me apparently for a test case. My diagnosis was borderline personality disorder. When he told me that I nearly fell over and disputed that with him but he was insistent. Later on obtaining papers from the hospital I learned I was in because I was homicidal, standing in the middle of the street screaming . . . on and on. Now the agency who pink-slipped me does not have a mention of that in their paperwork. The local hospital sent me due to suicidal ideation. I will find out someday when I feel ready how the homicidal piece fell in and where it is in writing sent to the state hospital.

Three days later I told my husband that we had to get a divorce. I was just simply tired of the way he treated me. He became incensed and the next day he came to the house, I called the police and the next thing I knew he was taking the kids and leaving. I told the officer he couldn=t take my daughter as he was not her father.

I had grabbed my daughter on the arm the night I was discharged from the hospital to get her to sit down. Apparently I bruised her arm and she had a yellow mark left on her arm, thus domestic violence charges were filed against me and I was arrested. I had been the director of the domestic violence program and had been asking that summer why the police were not arresting.

I spent three days in jail due to it being labor day weekend, was arraigned by tv and told I could not return to my home nor could I contact my children. Now I know I was still manic then and maybe that is what kept me half safe mentally. After I was told that I had to stay away from my kids I know I dissociated for about a month. I was homeless, penniless, and apparently friendless, since my husband got to my friends and told them to stay away from me. The real topper was that my husband was stalking me despite restraining orders and he tried along with my former boss to have me put in the hospital two more times. Thank God, but I wasn=t that sick. I think I would have gone away forever if put in the state hospital again.

Well, I had a man to lean on whom I met around the time of my hospital stay. He is my current boyfriend. He was having tough times too and we just leaned on one another. We had my car and my first social security check and that was it. I was able to get a man I met in the hospital to let us stay with him. There were five of us in a one bedroom apartment. Again, all I can say is mania helps in a case like that.

In mid October we were able to get a house and the other man moved in with us. He was Bipolar too, (but I didn=t know I was) and he was not compliant to taking medications. That was an interesting venture.

As soon as we got into the house, I crashed big time. My mind was trying to grasp the loss of my kids. I had been picked up from my life and plunked down onto some strange planet. I sank into depression which grew deeper by the week. I got myself into counseling as soon as possible with a wonderful woman. Morven was my angel and the person who saved my life. Many times when I was close to death would grab onto the words she gave to me and trudge on.

I was confronted with numerous court hearings, between the domestic violence, the divorce, and the fact that I was trying to get my daughter away from my husband. I would make it through that day then spend days on end in bed just willing myself to be able to sleep.

I was void of emotion. The only tangible feeling was overwhelming sadness and the sharpest type of emotional pain which cuts through the human psyche. I would go out only rarely, watch other people, as if in a dream and wonder if I would ever be able to feel just a bit of what they felt.

In January I got into the psychiatrist and I was put on Trazadone. The medication helped a very little bit. I could get some sleep and that was about it. At a later date he mentioned depakote and I nearly spazzed out. I was terrified of manic-depression and had run from it all of my adult life, I think. Our families can be in denial and pass on those stigmas.

In March 1997 I keeled in and returned to the house to be with my kids. Oh my God, though, the monster was there and I hadn=t lived with him since January 1995. That was my complete undoing. He pummeled me all the time with his tongue, lashing out at me, never giving it a rest.

I felt such shame inside of me anyway, not having a logical answer for what happened to me the year before and I would beat myself up about AWhy the hell did you do that?@ We are our own worst critics.

I couldn=t interact very much with my kids at all. My daughter was nothing but angry with me. It was just so bad and my depression dipped to melancholy. This was true hell on earth. I could not function at all. My current boyfriend kept in touch with me because he suspected my husband would abuse me. His phone calls and a counselor kept me alive.

I made plans with Dennis for him to come and get me on May 5, 1997 and the weeks until then were just terrible. I pictured all kinds of disasters ending in my not being able to leave there and I was so very fearful.

Then there was the part of knowing I had to leave to live, for my own safety, but I couldn=t tell my kids. I couldn=t imagine leaving while they were at school and not hugging them and reassuring them I would always love them and all would be ok, but that=s what I had to do. I nearly killed myself over that. The only reason I did not kill myself was because I could not leave that legacy to my children.

On May 12, 1997, I put myself into the psychiatric ward in a Youngstown hospital for 10 days (length of insurance approval . . . the pattern). That was a very scary move for me to reach out and trust but I knew my alternative was death. I had severe anxiety. I had constant fear with no readily identifiable factor. This had to stop.

That was the best thing I could have done for me. Dennis was scared and so was I. The staff was super for the most part. I was a person and given respect and encouraged to like myself again.

The day that I was discharged I just wept and wept for about two hours. I was so scared. I was so afraid that I would never get better and I didn=t want to feel bad all the time. Dennis held my hand and I wept and wept. He took me to gardens in Youngstown and I looked at the flowers and wept and wept. Then we went up to Lake Erie and walked by the water and I think I finally stopped weeping then.

I didn=t have the Bipolar diagnosis yet, but was on a slew of medications. Slowly I got better. I was still saddled because in June was a custody hearing for my daughter and I was placing her with a family. That came and went and Dennis decided I needed a trip to Illinois to see a friend.

Once we got to Illinois they talked to us about moving there and I realized I needed to be out of Ohio to recover from the traumas of the severe post traumatic stress disorder. So, at the beginning of July we made our move since our worldly goods fit in the car.

I then dissociated again, but this time for only about two weeks. I had made an appointment to see a psychiatrist but ran out of medications. Being off the medications appeared to clear me up, so I just went to Effexor. From that point on I began to get better. I was still troubled by what had happened to me, but my counselor was able to explain the disassociative periods to me. I was still too traumatized to have much in depth counseling.

We returned to Ohio in September 1997 for my divorce and so I could be near my kids. I needed to be close by them so they would know Mom would be there. I felt ready to come back and face the nibby people in the town.

In October 1997 I got into my current psychiatrist. I was a little apprehensive because according to my former boss she was Ano good.@ I am happy to report nothing could be further from the truth. She is a marvelous, savvy, empathetic woman. She asked me some few simple questions and then asked me if I would take lithium. She didn=t tell me the diagnosis as she knew I knew what she meant. I was momentarily taken aback (denial?) but told her yes.

I got out to my car and my head was whirling with temptation to not get the prescription filled, thinking about weight gains, etc. I decided to get the prescription filled then go directly to the library. I checked out A Brilliant Madness to read again, and also found A Mood Apart.

I do speed reading so by the time Dennis came into the motel room that night I had gone through both books. I was excited and he was upset. AAnother pill? Are you sure you need it?@

OK, so I started taking the lithium and finished getting all of my records together, went through my divorce and we finally got a place to live. I was a bit naive back then. My thoughts were take your lithium and don=t miss any doses and everything will be fine.

It has been a long road since then. Dennis denied for a very long time that I had Bipolar Disorder or that he needed to learn about it because it would certainly affect him. I have mixed variety which are features of both at once and trust me when I have an episode, it is not pleasant. My children still don=t read about bipolar and that saddens me because they will need to. It is not a fluke thing. I can see the undiagnosed bipolar going way back maternally. It could hit the males too but alcohol has gotten in the way.

It has taken a long time to get my medications right but I am feeling we are on the right track now. I feel good. I am not depressed and I am not hypomanic or hypermanic. I feel like I am walking on toddler legs. Dennis is learning about Bipolar Disorder and is in counseling now for him which I think is just super. There are not a lot of men who would put up with what he has had to.

I have had to look back on my life and reflect the impact. In my 20's I got depressed and then went on Lithium but stopped it when I was pregnant with my daughter. Back then my family gave me no support and told me I was crazy for being so doped up, blah. I was made to feel ashamed. Later I was told several times I was mis diagnosed.

But I look back to alcohol binges, sexual promiscuity before marriages, and the inexplicable verbal rages that were aimed at my kids mostly. I weep a bit inside because that explosiveness is the Bipolar Disorder and now I take medication for that. I never wanted to be like my mother and a part of me was and it hurts me.

I know I was most likely cyclothymic for my 30's. My job track records tell me that. I hold no degrees yet I was employed by two agencies in jobs requiring at least a Bachelors degree.

In February of 1997 I received cortisone injections and then had more steroids applied through electric stem to my ribs. Undoubtedly that was the straw that broke the camel=s back for me. I can see the progression from hyper to hypo to manic.

I can=t go back and do anything differently. I had to play the hands I was dealt. I do know that I don=t ever want to be manic again. Looking at the world from the inside of insanity is a very frightening experience. I am so glad I know logically what it was.

The best part is that I was afraid I would lose a lot of the facets of my personality which was intrinsically I. I still have them. I am learning to live with the other aspects and getting used to determining what I can change and what must be accepted. It=s very wonderful to be able to see colors, hear the birds, feel the breeze on my face, and smell the flowers, or taste a fresh herb. That is what being alive is to me.