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Insanity: A Love Story
An intimate journey into the bipolar mind of one woman struggling to cope with the symptoms of madness and the elation of mania. It chronicles the resulting hospitalization that led to a diagnosis that challenged the distinction between sanity and insanity.
In 1998, Melissa Miles McCarter struggled with symptoms of depression after graduating from college and trying to recover from a series of failed relationships. After being prescribed an antidepressant, she was launched into her first mania-induced psychotic break. This mental state led her to a hospitalization, which revealed an underlying mood disorder she had unknowingly struggled with her whole life.
This memoir chronicles the events that led up to her psychotic break and the experiences she had during her hospitalization. Struggling with the diagnosis with bipolar disorder, Melissa explores the fine line between insanity and sanity, and the courage it takes to build one's life after delving into the world of madness.
Melissa Miles McCarter is a writer, editor and doctoral student living in Southeast Missouri with her husband, step-son, two English bulldogs and three cats. She is currently editing an anthology, "Joy, An Anthology on Motherhood and Loss" for Fat Daddy's Farm. Melissa is also working on her dissertation on postfeminist composition studies. She continues to manage her bipolar condition with medication and the help with her family and friends.
A Love Story
A Memoir of Madness and Mania
In 1998, Melissa Miles McCarter struggled with symptoms of depression after graduating from college and trying to recover from a series of failed relationships. After being prescribed an antidepressant, she was launched into her first mania-induced psychotic break. This mental state led her to a hospitalization, which revealed an underlying mood disorder she had unknowingly struggled with her whole life.
This memoir chronicles the events that led up to her psychotic break and the experiences she had during her hospitalization. Struggling with the diagnosis with bipolar disorder, Melissa explores the fine line between insanity and sanity, and the courage it takes to build one's life after delving into the world of madness.
Melissa Miles McCarter is a writer, editor and doctoral student living in Southeast Missouri with her husband, step-son, two English bulldogs and three cats. She is currently editing an anthology, "Joy, An Anthology on Motherhood and Loss" for Fat Daddy's Farm. Melissa is also working on her dissertation on postfeminist composition studies. She continues to manage her bipolar condition with medication and the help with her family and friends.
A Love Story
A Memoir of Madness and Mania
- GenresMental HealthMedical
132 pages, ebook
First published September 1, 2009
2 people are currently reading
283 people want to read
About the author
Melissa Miles McCarter
6 books13 followersMelissa Miles McCarter is an editor, memoirist and novelist. McCarter has written numerous articles and columns about mental illness and popular culture, infertility, and postfeminism.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 8, 2012
Have you ever wondered if you were losing your mind? Many of us use that phrase almost jokingly, never paying much attention to what it really feels like to lose touch with reality, to spend time in a mental hospital. Melissa Miles McCarter shares her journey in raw, gut-wrenching honesty. She describes a childhood of shyness and extreme sensitivity, high school and college years of abrupt mood swings, delusions, and seeking validation and self-worth through romantic relationships. She details her psychotic break at the age of 22, and the resulting stay in a mental hospital, with language that shimmers. Her descriptions and imagery are lush. She uses present tense when describing events leading up to, and including, her hospitalization, which makes her story immediate.
McCarter does not bash the mental health system, although she does wonder why the many psychiatrists she saw before her first hospitalization relied on writing prescriptions rather than using therapeutic techniques to uncover her mental illness. She shows great insight and self-knowledge as she tells us that being stabilized on the appropriate medications was like “learning to walk again after years in a body cast.” She had to learn a new way of living, a way that isn’t controlled by her moods. She acknowledges that her creativity was perhaps spurred by her mania, and she has to come to terms with maintaining a creative life while maintaining predictability.
She calls herself “a work in progress.” She also openly claims “the creativity, the uniqueness, the certain way of processing the world made possible” by being bipolar.
She shows that it is possible to live and thrive with this diagnosis, despite a major setback in 2003 when her infant daughter died of SIDS.
McCarter offers a rare gift by opening her life, her world, her reality. This act took a great deal of courage, especially in light of her many statements about the shame and stigma of mental illness. Thank, you, Melissa, for using your talent as a writer, and offering the gift of you to us.
McCarter does not bash the mental health system, although she does wonder why the many psychiatrists she saw before her first hospitalization relied on writing prescriptions rather than using therapeutic techniques to uncover her mental illness. She shows great insight and self-knowledge as she tells us that being stabilized on the appropriate medications was like “learning to walk again after years in a body cast.” She had to learn a new way of living, a way that isn’t controlled by her moods. She acknowledges that her creativity was perhaps spurred by her mania, and she has to come to terms with maintaining a creative life while maintaining predictability.
She calls herself “a work in progress.” She also openly claims “the creativity, the uniqueness, the certain way of processing the world made possible” by being bipolar.
She shows that it is possible to live and thrive with this diagnosis, despite a major setback in 2003 when her infant daughter died of SIDS.
McCarter offers a rare gift by opening her life, her world, her reality. This act took a great deal of courage, especially in light of her many statements about the shame and stigma of mental illness. Thank, you, Melissa, for using your talent as a writer, and offering the gift of you to us.
December 1, 2012
It seems I have a lot of life experiences in common with the author, so I hoped this book would be a true reflection of those experiences; it did not disappoint.
Living with bipolar disorder, the author takes us on a journey through a turbulent life which has led to a stay in a psychiatric hospital. The book begins with a brief explanation of her life before her time in the hospital. A life characterized by changing moments of clarity and confusion. A life riddled with a number of delusions, including one that takes her to the psychiatric hospital, as she follows her parents there on the belief that she is being taken to an actual hospital to cure her of an impending “fatal heart attack”.
I really enjoyed the descriptions of the fellow patients in the hospital. The angry, the sedated and the downright dark individuals who inhabit the building, rounded off with the story of one man who believes he is a CIA assassin and sporadically leaves the hospital to commit his headhunting crimes.
Life has not been kind to Melissa and has thrown a number of setbacks her way, but she shines through and lays it out in beautiful prose for everyone to see. It’s not an easy thing to do and yet I’m glad she did. This is a really good book and a great insight into dealing with mental illness.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews