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In 1992, a psychiatrist gave me a prescription for Lithium and told me I would have to start taking the pills immediately and keep taking them for the rest of my life "Or else I would get locked up." That was the first time anyone ever told me I had a mental illness. My nightmare started innocently enough in 1991, with a pleasant desire to sleep a lot. I had always hated sleeping, preferring to spend my time reading all night or programming my computer. When I started to miss school because I couldn't get out of bed, my father was alarmed. At his insistence, I went to a psychiatrist and told her that I thought I had Major Depression. The psychiatrist seconded my self-diagnosis, and within 15 minutes I left her office with a prescription for Zoloft.

I took the Zoloft for three weeks, then the psychiatrist went on vacation and I went nuts. Technically speaking, I had a manic episode induced by the antidepressant: I had terrible mood swings, I became obsessed with someone and convinced that he would commit suicide, and that only I could save him, and after that he would leave his wife for me. I also thought I was going to get thousands of dollars in research grants to prove great theorems -- and I spent the money in advance. It was a nightmare time because I was having panic attacks and periods of sanity in which I saw myself for how crazy I really was.

I moved from New York to Providence, supposedly to attend graduate school in mathematics, but I spent a lot of time living in bed, subsisting on corn flakes (eaten dry in bed) bought at night from a store where I was afraid of the cashier. After my first episode, I was tried on 20-30 medications to try to control my manic and depressive episodes, which only got worse. I experienced suicidal thoughts, paranoia, occasional hallucinations and delusions, bizarre thoughts and sensations, and became disorganized and unkempt. As I began to realize that I was ill, I volunteered with NAMI. By 1996 I was answering crisis calls several days a week. I got a part-time job there (for minimum wage like all the consumers) in 1997.

I quit NAMI in fall 1998 and enrolled in a masters program in Creative Writing at Emerson College in Boston, where I was a full-time student and also worked part-time as a receptionist. The first semester, I did well, starting work on a memoir about my illness. I began the second semester with high hopes but after a few weeks things in my head started telling me to swallow a whole bottle of Seroquel and I did and spent a night unconscious in the hospital and then a week in the psych ward. I lost that semester of schoolwork but went back a semester later and now I have half my degree completed.

This summer, for the first time since I got sick, I became well enough to work, so I took time off from school to do so. I am better than I ever was, but I am still not well and I never expect to be. I still get manicky every other day, it seems, and have to take extra Risperdal, or else I'm dragging around with mild depression. But for the first time I can actually promise to be somewhere to work and know I can keep my promise! I'm working in a mental health agency as a residential counselor, giving out meds and advice to other consumers, much like myself. It feels good to be able to help people and I hope I can be less condescending because I know what it feels like to be in their place.