Diary of a Mental Patient

I was 26 years old when I was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder. For the next seventeen years, I refused to accept the truth. I continued to drink excessive amounts of alcohol and use drugs of both the legal and illegal variety. I suffered from suicidal ideation and made several determined attempts to take my own life. As a result, I was often committed-usually involuntarily to psychiatric hospitals. In March of 2007, a small hospital in Brunswick, Maine, offered me hope that I...
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I was 26 years old when I was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder. For the next seventeen years, I refused to accept the truth. I continued to drink excessive amounts of alcohol and use drugs of both the legal and illegal variety. I suffered from suicidal ideation and made several determined attempts to take my own life. As a result, I was often committed-usually involuntarily to psychiatric hospitals. In March of 2007, a small hospital in Brunswick, Maine, offered me hope that I could live ¿ actually live ¿ with bipolar disorder IF I would accept the fact that I have it versus denying it. Diary of a Mental Patient: A Journey Toward Acceptance is just what its title implies. Presented in diary format, it chronicles one full year of my personal life as I struggle toward accepting the fact that I have a lifelong mental illness. It is one thing to say: "Yes, I have a mental disorder, but I have accepted it, and I can live with it." I quickly learned, however, that it is quite another to actually do it. Diary of a Mental Patient: A Journey Toward Acceptance offers an up-close and personal look inside the mind of a person with mental illness, the day-to-day struggle and search for reasons to live a life that is affected, usually negatively, by an incurable (but treatable) mental illness.