Life Interrupted: A Bipolar memoir

Life Interrupted is both a brilliantly lucid and brutal memoir, capturing the author’s devastating three-decade journey with Bipolar 1. Unable to accept her diagnosis without understanding its origin, years are spent bargaining with her illness. She catastrophically yo-yos between psychiatric experts, medication, natural remedies, clinics, lock ups and eventually a litany of electroconvulsive therapies. Despite her best intentions and a string of light-bulb moments, Samantha’s mind, spurred on by intractable denial, repeatedly manifests the illness. Hers is a valiant fight for perceived justice. Her enemies are Western psychiatrists, psychologists and boxes of Schedule 7 medications. While loved ones around her watch terrified as she plummets between dark depression and mania, she is unable to see the recurrence of her harrowing illness cycles. A maze of suffering and memory-effacing medical interventions, ethereal delusions of compelling and yet concurrently repelling hallucinatory hell seem not to exist when life is in recovery from an episode. There is no apparent threat to her life when she is taking her baby steps into the normative world again. And so it is that, time and time again, denial bolsters itself and she lets go of recovery to hurtle into life-threatening, horrifying delusions of mania, frightening psychosis and fathomless, dark depression. A mental health illness trajectory is her life. As she ages, worn down by the years of denial and traumatic struggle, she yearns for a balanced and meaningful life. In 2016 she finally accepts that her medication is not her enemy. Decades after diagnosis she moves with insight and accumulated wisdom garnered through the journey of her mind. She chooses a life of joy and adventure. She finally finds a place of rest, and denial is rubbed out. Acceptance finds its breath, and so does she. Today Samantha strives to accept her Bipolar, manage its potency and stay in remission – remission being the greatest achievement for an illness that cannot be cured. A life interrupted becomes a life reclaimed.