Scattershot: My Bipolar Family

As a twenty-something in the 1980s, Lovelace discovered that he had bipolar disorder (formerly known as manic-depression), a shattering mental illness shared by both his parents and, they would find later, his younger brother. Growing up, his parents went largely undiagnosed-his mother's initial breakdown was in 1949, the days when ""psychiatrists diagnosed almost all delusional illness as schizophrenia,"" and the only treatment was electroshock. Members of his family spent years in deep, undiagnosed suffering, largely from depression (""Denial wasn't difficult, not yet. No one in my family had experienced mania""), and Lovelace spent years running from his illness through Mexico, South America and later to New York, accompanied by drugs and alcohol: ""I've denied my own illness and I've loved it almost to death."" Lovelace's poetic prose is both matter-of-fact and haunted, capturing the unpredictable rhythms of mental illness: ""Alone in the bathroom I made a smile in the mirror and it strangled my eyes."" Readers will get a real sense of the interior world of a single patient, and a family, on the verge of a mental breakdown.