I Should Have Died Three Times. Instead, I Became a Lifesaver.

My truth about Bipolar I, alcohol, AND why society's refusal to treat co-occurring illness is throwing people away

For 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:

1. To highlight the desperate urgency of care reform: Having survived the system as a patient and worked the front lines on an ACT team, I have seen firsthand how treating mental illness and substance use as separate problems abandons people in their darkest hours.
2. To show how I actually saved my own life: Survival wasn't a miracle or a quick fix. It was a deliberate, agonizing choice to forge purpose out of pain, made possible only because my family refused to let go of me.
3. To offer a lifeline to other families: For every mom, dad, sibling, or loved one watching someone suffer in the dark, I want to share what is actually happening inside a mind consumed by psychosis and depression, and why your relentless support matters even when we cannot reach back.

This is my story of surviving Bipolar I, moving beyond the revolving door, and building a life worth staying alive for.

Three Lifelines Broken

​The 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.

The second time was the brutal, unpredictable roller coaster of Bipolar I at its most deceptive. I had spent three straight months frozen in the deepest pit of bipolar depression. It was a state of paralyzed, agonizing numbness where I stared at a bookcase in my parents' house, fighting day in and day out just to stay alive and convinced my family would be better off without me. But then the pendulum swung. In typical bipolar fashion, I finally broke out of the dark and surged into a giddy, euphoric high. Desperate to celebrate putting that hell in the rearview mirror, I reached for a drink to match the intoxicating high of feeling alive again. I couldn't see the trap. In my giddy mania, alcohol once again reared its demonic head. It hijacked that rising momentum, stripped away my judgment, and brought me straight back to my knees at the very gates of hell.

The third time was a terrifying mixed-state psychosis. This is the most dangerous place a bipolar brain can go, where the explosive energy and racing thoughts of mania collide with the hopeless despair of severe depression, all while reality completely breaks apart. Desperate to quiet the chaotic noise in my head, I again turned to alcohol, believing it would act as a brake. Instead, it stripped away my remaining judgment and disinhibited the impulse to act. The police were called when I stood in my apartment building holding a knife, lost so deep in psychosis I barely remember it. They looked at a person in volatile, visible crisis and decided I wasn't "dangerous enough" to help, then walked away. As the mixed-mood madness continued to spiral, it was my sister who eventually found me outside in the sprinklers in time that night, not the state. Most people don't get someone who finds them in time.

False Refuge of Self-Medication

Three times, I should have died. Three times, I didn't.

I'm gay. I'm bipolar. I'm a three-time survivor. And I'm done being quiet about any of it, especially the alcohol.

For a long time, shame kept me silent about that part of my story. But I know so many people living with Bipolar I carry that exact same burden. We don't abuse substances because we want to; we reach for them when we are drowning in emotional agony and feel like there is simply no other alternative to tame an unruly brain.

Substances don't cause the underlying disease, but they take away the one thing standing between a desperate thought and a fatal action: the ability to pause, regulate, and reach for help. Alcohol lowers inhibition, heightens impulsivity, and turns an active brain crisis into a catastrophic one.

When I worked as a Certified Peer Support Specialist on an ACT team, I saw this exact nightmare play out every single day. The psych hospital takes you in just long enough to perform a quick medical detox, only to discharge you far too early right back into the same environment where you end up using all over again. When you try to break the cycle and find real long-term care, the system shuts down. Specialized addiction facilities routinely refuse people simply because they have a severe mental illness diagnosis, and the rare dual-diagnosis programs that do exist have waitlists months long because there are nowhere near enough beds.

We leave our most vulnerable citizens trapped in a revolving door because society deems whole-person care "too complicated" or "too expensive."

The shame of self-medication does not belong to the person drowning in pain. The shame belongs to a healthcare system that detoxes and dumps vulnerable human beings, a treatment landscape that rejects SMI patients, and a legal system that sees a human in psychosis holding a weapon and calls them "not dangerous enough." Treating severe mental illness and addiction as two separate, disconnected problems fails people every single day. Real care reform must provide whole-person, people-centered, holistic care for ALL.

Forging Pain into Purpose

But those dark moments aren't the story that matters. What I did after is.

I made a decision: if I was still breathing, it had to mean something. I needed a reason good enough to justify staying alive; so, I built one. I decided to spend the rest of my life making sure other people didn't have to survive what I survived. I don't believe in fate. I believe in something closer to karma. Pain, if you refuse to waste it, can be forged into purpose.

That purpose became Hope Xchange, a nonprofit I built for the bipolar community. Our first program, Hope for Bipolars, was an innovative virtual mentoring model, launched well before peer support became commonplace and when local support was strictly in-person. I knew that if I'd had someone who'd survived what I was surviving, further down the road than me, it would have saved me years of hell. We proved it. Our mentors saved lives. Hope Xchange has since closed its doors, but it proved something that can't be undone.

I went on to work for two years as a Certified Peer Support Specialist, until compassion fatigue and a broken mental health care system wore me down. I realized I had to fight this battle on a national scale. So I moved to national policy work. It felt like coming full circle, since I've been connected to this fight in one form or another from the day I first started Hope Xchange.

Lived Experience at the Policy Table

Living through that kind of pain gives you an empathy nobody can teach you. Only survival teaches it. If you've walked in these shoes, you already know exactly why I do this work.

It's why I believe so completely in the R2C Alliance, and why peer voices have to be in the room when suicide prevention policy gets written, not consulted after the fact, but actively shaping the law from the inside. We know what actually works, because we lived what doesn't.

I am honored every day to stand with NSSC shaping policy for my brothers and sisters living with severe mental illness. Too many remain buried under a stigma that treats a brain disease like it's somehow less real, or less worthy of care, than a broken bone. It is a long, uphill fight. Arm in arm, our coalition — and now our R2C Alliance — will climb it together.

A Message to Families: Don't Give Up

To those who love someone like me, watching them struggle: please understand that sometimes we cannot see you. We are so lost in the dark, so consumed by our own pain, that we can't find the energy to reach back. Sometimes, lost inside our own psychosis and lack of insight, we don't even know we need help. I genuinely believed my family would be better off without me. I thought I was doing them a favor, not hurting them. We are doing the best we can, even when it looks nothing like it.

Please don't give up on us especially while we're still surviving. It is a terrifying, isolating place to be. We need you more than we can say. Please forgive us while we find our way back to the light.

Today, I'm "Kewi" to my two-year-old granddaughter, Noelle who is my light, my joy, my reason. I think, often, about everything I would have missed.

We cannot afford to lose one more soul. We have value. We have worth. And every one of us deserves to still be here.

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If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Please do not hesitate to reach out. Call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. Free & confidential.

Author

By Kerry Martin, Bipolar I Survivor | Co-Chair, R2C Alliance | SVP of Strategy & Impact, National Shattering Silence Coalition.