TED THAI FOR TIME The author Lizzie Simon

"Everything was perfect...and then I went insane"
	The author's cross-country search for people like herself—young, bipolar and getting their life together—led to her book, Detour, from which this is adapted, and inspired MTV's special True Life: I'm Bipolar
	By LIZZIE SIMON

Posted Sunday, Aug. 11, 2002; 3:31 p.m. EST
It all started the day after I was accepted for early admission to Columbia University. I was 17. I don't remember everything that happened; some events I blocked out. And I suppose it didn't start on that exact day. Maybe it started in high school, or before. At birth, maybe. Or pre-birth.

Maybe it started with my grandfather, who was also bipolar, although our family kept it a secret. He was diagnosed the year I was born. I was diagnosed the year he died. You might say we passed the baton.

What started that day was an episode so horrific that for the rest of my life it would be impossible for me to deny that I had a mental illness.

I was in Paris—my senior year abroad. It was wonderful. I remember thinking that I had never been this happy for this long my whole life. I got the letter from Columbia, and everything was perfect. For just a moment, a few hours really, a morning. And then I went insane.

I remember a little fuzz building in my head. I remember I felt uncomfortable, as if my jeans were too tight and my shoes too big—but in my head. I remember the plane ride home for Christmas. I remember getting very drunk in the last row with a guy who looked like Kurt Cobain.

After that point, things start to fade, because I slept very late the next day, and I just don't remember much at all until memories of sobbing in bed. I was drifting and drowning. The walls swooned, and my journals emitted passages about previous depressions until that was all I could remember: suicide attempts at prepubescent intervals, broken-hearted letters, other tears, other darkness.

I probably cried until New Year's Day, when I went to see a psychiatrist. He sat with me for a few minutes, asked a few questions and gave me Paxil, an antidepressant. I'm pretty sure he said there wouldn't be any side effects.

My parents were nervous about my going back to Paris alone, but I persuaded them to let me. I remember promising my mom that I'd call my psychiatrist when I got there, though I never did. I remember promising to take my pills, which of course I did.

I don't remember anything chronologically, really, until I arrived at a friend's house in Paris two weeks later in a psychotic state. Only scattered flashes remain.

I remember sitting in a café on a sunny day, and standing up and announcing that I was going to walk until I got laid.

I remember walking and realizing why the Mona Lisa was smiling. I was figuring out so many things.

I remember sitting in my bedroom and thinking that there were microphones everywhere. Many nights I spent in the dark, waiting for the killers to arrive.

I thought I was a cat, infested with bugs. I bit down on my hand until it broke the skin. I was about to jump off a terrace when the phone rang. It was a woman who sounded just like my mother, but I knew it was probably the CIA.

On advice from the American Hospital in Paris, I stopped taking Paxil. I was told that the pills proved I had something called bipolar disorder, which I thought meant I was a hermaphrodite. But that still only began to explain to me why I had turned into a cat.

I flew home and, about a week later, started taking lithium.

Lithium. I imagined zombies in loony bins. I imagined wealthy pill-popping housewives. I imagined indie rockers.

I figured my parents would keep me on the third floor and let me waste away. I'd be the crazy aunt in the attic. My parents would have guests over, and they'd bring me downstairs. This is Lizzie. Hi, Lizzie, the perfumed guests would say, and on the way home they would discuss what a shame it was.

But lithium worked for me. Just two days on it, and I was fine by most people's standards: lucid, calm, sleeping regularly, eating regularly—not crazy, not at all. There were side effects for six months, and then they started to diminish until they disappeared.

Lithium gave me a functional brain. But now I had heavy and intense shame, doubts and fears. Lithium didn't know how to take care of that. I didn't either.

You can't just hand a bipolar person lithium and be done with her. I mean, you can—and that's exactly what is done for most bipolar people. But that's not treatment. That's not good care.

I tried to get therapy, but my therapists weren't bipolar. They didn't understand.

I spent my freshman year at Columbia making friends. I was relieved to find that I could. When a fellow student offered me his position as arts director at the college radio station, I took it. When I graduated, I got a job producing music in a downtown theater space called the Flea. Every show we touched became successful. I moved to a lovely spacious apartment in Brooklyn with a big garden in the back. I looked around me and saw success everywhere. I had done it.

Then one day on the subway I saw this poster. It showed a woman in a business suit with the slogan for people with mental illness, TREATMENT IS WORKING, across her chest. My jaw dropped, and my eyes teared. I couldn't believe it. It was so positive. It was so true.

That's where I got the idea for my cross-country book. I wanted to find other bipolar people like me and interview them. I wanted to demonstrate how it feels to be young and bipolar. I wanted to figure out what worked in people who are success cases. I wanted to collect people like me and reveal them to the world.

Look at us. Look hard. We're not who you thought we were. And we're everywhere.

From DETOUR by Lizzie Simon. Copyright © 2002 by Lizzie Simon. Reprinted by permission of Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Inc., N.Y.

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