BIPOLAR BOOK: "OVER THE RAINBOW"

A TRUE DEPICTION

Meet me a bit more in depth and learn a little more about who

"Over the Rainbow:

A Story of Life, Love and Family with Bipolar Disorder"

speaks to and why it was put out there.

I am a 45 year old freelance writer and stay-at-home-mom of an AWESOME 15-year-old son, Matt. I am a board certified school psychologist, but currently spending my time writing in the field instead of working in it any longer. I recently had a book published titled, “Over the Rainbow: A Story of Life, Love and Family with Bipolar Disorder.” This is my true labor of love, (aside from Matt), as it provides a unique angular perspective in facing the issue of bipolar disorder at hand. Working in the mental health work force while secretly fighting the demons of my own mental disease was silently grueling. As a trained psychologist trying to tend to the needs of my clients while identifying with them at the same time gives this book an exceptionally astonishing and enticing point of view.

WHAT BIPOLAR CAN DO AND WHY WE MUSTN'T HIDE FROM IT!!!

A True Depiction:

I felt as if I were mentally shackled to my bedposts. I felt that not a person in the world could comprehend the devastating pain I was enduring. There were times it felt as though my feet were caught in the reeds beneath the water in a deep lake. There was the light above me and yet I could not swim to the top. All I felt was the tightening around my ankles and no escape. The answer seems so simple to some…just reach down and untangle your feet. Yet, it didn't quite work that way.

As you watch yourself, from the inside out, drowning in your own hopeless demise, gloom perpetuates and you can feel your tunnel of hope narrowing. The sadness is profuse as darkness closes in. Again and again you hear and see the words “THE END” in big black letters in your troubled head. Countless times this image haunts you as this beastly illness rips your soul out of your very being. It is a brutal and sinister existence, or nonexistence, and as your world grows darker and darker, it tears you and your family members apart. For the average person, the suffering is incomprehensible.

IT'S TIME!!!

The time has come for the public to be more educated about bipolar illness. The time has come for victims of bipolar illness to stop running from it and hiding it because the public does not know enough about it. The time has come for us not to be ashamed and for the stigmas and the guilt to stop. It is time for people to understand that this illness is mostly a genetic one much like heart disease or diabetes. Although it is classified as a mental illness, I believe that is a huge fallacy as bipolar disorder is more physical and chemical in nature than cancer is. In it's most beastly and negative light, I call it just that; "cancer of the brain."

I am not professing that we become scholarly read experts on the subject, but merely opening our eyes to the tumultuous suffering that bipolar illness bears on those who battle it every day may be a first step. How do victims stop running and burying when the world is casting judgement and throwing stones? Understanding that the stigma that goes along with bipolar only intensifies and worsens the disease for each and very one of its victims just may give someone a glimmer of hope ...and with that hope comes a glimmer of light, and then maybe some colorful thoughts and less darkness. Before we know it we will be finding our rainbows and then life begins. Can we do that? Are we capable of it? How far have we really come from "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden"??? This is 2009!!!

May you all be "Graced with the Colors of Life"


Also visit me @

http://www.michellewrites.net/

UPCOMING TOPICS FOR Michellewrites about bipolar:

• MENTAL HEALTH INSURANCE



• GREAT BOOKS FROM THE PAST (Martha Manning's "Undercurrents" & Kay Redfield Jamison's "An Unquiet Mind")

Michellewrites