Fourteen years after my diagnosis, reflecting on the chaotic search for the right care, the tribe that held me up, and why I’m glad I stayed. The Weight of Untreated Memories
It’s hard to wrap my mind around today, and my heart feels heavy. Facebook memories are an interesting thing. Sometimes they make you reflect on really happy moments, funny memories, or silly things you’ve posted in the past. Other times, they bring up the painful chapters. This time around, I was reminded that I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder around this time 14 years ago. The memories of living untreated are intense. Hearing my diagnosis for the first time, wrestling with the feelings that followed, and speaking hard truths out loud for the very first time—it is a lot to process. Behind the Happy Picture The hardest memory that popped up yesterday widened my eyes and brought tears to my face. Looking at the photo, it looks like a happy family picture from a great concert. But the reality behind it is that I barely remember it because I was so intoxicated and high. I was trying so hard to live on the outside because I was dying on the inside—lost, alone, and drowning in deep depression. Before receiving proper medical care, turning to self-medication was a desperate attempt to cope with a brain that was wired and out of control.
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 My truth about Bipolar I, alcohol, AND why society's refusal to treat co-occurring illness is throwing people awayFor a long time, there was a part of my story I was terrified to tell: the alcohol. When we talk about severe mental illness and suicide, we often stay silent about self-medication because the shame attached to it feels overwhelming. But silence around this reality comes at a fatal cost. I came to the edge of death three times and every single time, I was drinking. I am choosing to share my unfiltered truth today for three reasons:
This is my story of surviving Bipolar I, moving beyond the revolving door, and building a life worth staying alive for. Three Lifelines BrokenThe first time began with a phone call that shattered my last thread of hope. I had finally gotten up the courage to pour my heart out to a resident-in-training at Harvard. When I walked back into my apartment, the phone rang. She said something I will never forget: "Kerry, I am not going to be able to help you." I didn't try to end my life that moment, but I stopped trying to get help. I retreated deep inside myself and into a bottle, using alcohol to drown out the rejection as I spiraled downward until I lost all hope and attempted to end my life.
I remember waking up in the ER with a tube down my throat under glaring, bright white lights. The nurse looked down at me and said, "Lay still. You did this to yourself." When I was finally transported from the ICU to the psychiatric hospital, the doctor informed me he could hold me as long as he wanted after I told him I needed to get back to Harvard to finish my thesis. It was in that moment I realized the truth: I had to lie and do whatever it took just to get out. Lying was a skill I then perfected.  "When I was 17 they told me my mind was broken." This is how I started my monologue as part of the talent portion of competition at Miss Volunteer America, one of the most prestigious stages in pageantry. The Silent Beginning of PsychosisMy dance with schizophrenia began at 15 when I had a visual hallucination in my loft bedroom in rural North Carolina. I saw a deer who spoke to me, telling me I was God and instructing me to post on Twitter. I obliged. Most of the tweets were gibberish, but I found them helpful later on because they provided an exact timestamp documenting my first break from reality. I didn't know what had happened. I had never received a formal mental health education, I didn't know what psychosis was, and I certainly didn't think I had schizophrenia based on the extreme portrayals I had seen in movies and headlines. I just knew something about me was not normal. I hid my episodes from my parents. I grew up with the most supportive and unconditionally loving parents you can imagine, but because of media portrayals of mental institutions, I was terrified of being hospitalized involuntarily. I spent the next two years isolating myself when I felt episodes coming on, or blaming them on severe anxiety if they happened in front of my family. By the time I was 17, the boundaries of my reality were dissolving. During a beach trip with friends, I spent the night locked on a balcony, crying and hallucinating a man trying to take photos of me. One of my friends told me I had "ruined the vibe" of the night. They blacklisted me after that. When I returned home, the detachment from reality, confusion, delusions, and auditory hallucinations grew severe enough that my worried parents encouraged me to see a psychiatrist. The Standard of Clinical Neglect Life doesn’t always happen the way you expect. At 18, I had the world ahead of me. I told myself that by 21 I’d have a career, a degree, and a girlfriend. I thought about travel, kids, and a bright future. But life had other plans. About a month after my 21st birthday, I found myself locked inside a psychiatric hospital for 17 days on a 51/50 hold. I had no idea what a "psychotic break" actually meant, because in my eyes, I was fine. Everyone else had the problem. Not me. Part 1: Surf, School, Sleep & RepeatBefore my mind fractured, life was simple. Aside from classic teenage angst, my daily loop was surf, school, sleep, and repeat. I had friends I loved, a good life, and a general sense of whatever happens, I’ll figure it out. Up until then, I’d been able to navigate life's obstacles and bounce back quickly. It was easy to assume things would just stay that way. There was nothing a good night with friends, a solid surf session, and maybe a little bit of bud couldn’t fix.
My brain had other plans.  This is the third installment of the NSSC In Justice series—a collaborative chronicle exposing the structural failures of America's crisis containment loop. While Part 1 by Carmen Facciolo laid bare the agonizing choice families face when forced to wait for a loved one's catastrophe, and Part 2 by Kerry Martin exposed the terrifying reality of surviving a brain in active psychosis while being abandoned on a street corner, Executive Director Ann Corcoran steps forward in Part 3 to break down the hard, human arithmetic of a system designed to wait. In our first two installments, we argued that mental health reform and public safety reform are not two conversations — they are one. We made the case that America keeps building systems that demand catastrophe before they respond, and that compassion is not standing by while a person deteriorates toward homelessness, incarceration, or death.
That was the argument. This is the arithmetic. When you count the people moving through the system we have built — the jails, the emergency rooms, the encampments, the morgue — one undeniable pattern emerges. We are not running a treatment system that occasionally fails. We are running a containment system that works exactly as designed, and the design is lethal. What "Waiting" Actually Costs Start with the final number. The United States records roughly 49,000 deaths by suicide every year, and about half of those who die have a known mental health condition at the time of death. Major depressive disorder alone is implicated in 50 to 60 percent of suicides where a psychiatric driver is present. People living with bipolar disorder face a lifetime suicide risk ten to thirty times higher than the general population. These are not deaths from untreatable conditions. They follow the same script: escalating signs, a family asking for help, a system replying that the threshold for intervention has not been met. That threshold, too often, turns out to be death itself. |
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