My Bipolar Backpack

In this powerful memoir Susan Ralphe employs sharp storytelling skills honed over a

long, newspaper-reporting career to tell her own story of long-term, heart-wrenching bipolar

madness.

My Bipolar Backpack begins shortly before the first of two stays in mental hospitals and

ends as she serves in elective office. Sandwiched in between are incidents from a troubled

childhood, a brain that regularly froze during her college years, employment nightmares,

misdiagnosis, suicide attempts, a marriage rocked by mental illness in Susan and alcoholism

in her husband, and mothering failures.

The first chapter gives readers a snapshot view of how it feels to be under the grip of a

manic attack.

“Without warning invisible bands inside my head often tightened until the pressure

became unbearable. It sometimes worsened almost to the point that I thought my head was

going to explode.

“Simultaneously my thoughts raced as though my brain were continually in fast-forward

mode, while my ability to think decelerated. I vividly pictured my brain curling up

into a fetal position…”

Susan recounts how telling staff at the first mental hospital that her husband was the

one who was “crazy,” landed her in a locked unit, the end of the line for the mentally ill.

Terror greeted her at the door in the form of a young woman wearing a football helmet who

hit and kicked Susan as she walked in, and the nurse behind a tall, plastic enclosure who

ignored what was going on. The author describes her unwillingness or inability to talk about

what was troubling her and her resultant discharge with the wrong diagnosis and red-hot

bipolar disorder boiling under the surface, ready to erupt again.

This is a story of soaring accomplishment alternating with black periods of tenseness,

brain freeze, and despair. A little girl who ran home from kindergarten daily during recess

because she feared her mother was going to die, is transformed into valedictorian of her high school

graduating class, then into a college student who was seriously mentally ill. The next

character is a happy bride and new mother who subsequently falls apart under the weight of

her husband’s alcoholism and her younger son’s asthma.

For most of her life, Susan explains, she carefully hid her bipolar disorder from

anyone she could, fearing the stigma that could deliver a second punch to someone already

reeling from illness itself.

In the pages of this memoir the author summons the strength to share her experiences,

confident that other bipolar individuals can find hope and healing in her tale and that their

families, as well as mental health professionals, can gain knowledge and understanding.

She says she dreams of the day when bipolar sufferers will no longer think they must

carry the heavy “bipolar backpacks” in which they hide their disease.

The author grew up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, graduated from Northern

Michigan University, and worked as a reporter for newspapers in Minnesota and Arizona

including The Duluth Herald and The Phoenix Gazette. She was married for 38 years to her

late husband, Roger, and has two grown sons and nine grandchildren. She presently resides in

the Portland, OR, area.