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

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 decelerated. I vividly pictured my brain curling upinto a fetal position..."Susan recounts how telling staff at the first mental hospital that her husband was theone who was "crazy," landed her in a locked unit, the end of the line for the mentally ill.Terror greeted her at the door in the form of a young woman wearing a football helmet whohit and kicked Susan as she walked in, and the nurse behind a tall, plastic enclosure whoignored what was going on. The author describes her unwillingness or inability to talk aboutwhat was troubling her and her resultant discharge with the wrong diagnosis and red-hotbipolar disorder boiling under the surface, ready to erupt again.This is a story of soaring accomplishment alternating with black periods of tenseness,brain freeze, and despair. A little girl who ran home from kindergarten daily during recessbecause she feared her mother was going to die, is transformed into valedictorian of her high schoolgraduating class, then into a college student who was seriously mentally ill. The nextcharacter is a happy bride and new mother who subsequently falls apart under the weight ofher husband's alcoholism and her younger son's asthma.For most of her life, Susan explains, she carefully hid her bipolar disorder fromanyone she could, fearing the stigma that could deliver a second punch to someone alreadyreeling from illness itself.In the pages of this memoir the author summons the strength to share her experiences,confident that other bipolar individuals can find hope and healing in her tale and that theirfamilies, as well as mental health professionals, can gain knowledge and understanding.She says she dreams of the day when bipolar sufferers will no longer think they mustcarry the heavy "bipolar backpacks" in which they hide their disease.The author grew up in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, graduated from NorthernMichigan University, and worked as a reporter for newspapers in Minnesota and Arizonaincluding The Duluth Herald and The Phoenix Gazette. She was married for 38 years to herlate husband, Roger, and has two grown sons and nine grandchildren. She presently resides inthe Portland, OR, area.