Product reviews for Bi-Polar Girl

MANY high-achieving people have suffered from bipolar disorder - what used to be known as manic depression. Celebrity victims have included actor Stephen Fry, boxer Frank Bruno, writer Graham Greene, film star Vivien Leigh, comedian Spike Milligan and singer Sinead O'Connor.
But you don't have to be famous or gifted to be bipolar. Gabrielle Blackman-Sheppard describes herself as an 'ordinary' sufferer and she has written a highly accessible, personal account of this often misunderstood disorder, describing the compulsion to live faster and faster and indulge in increasingly high-risk behaviour, such as gambling or sexual promiscuity, until one's life starts to unravel. In the end, she says, you feel you want to kill yourself because there seems little point in trying to carry on.
Although there are many treatments for bipolar disorder, none is guaranteed to work. At one point, Blackman Sheppard was on a cocktail of 16 different drugs. All proved ineffectual.
Her salvation came from a treatment long considered controversial: electroconvulsive therapy, but she stresses that there is no actual cure for the illness. Symptoms will recur whatever treatments are tried, although some can help rein in the worst excesses of both the mania and the depression.
Bi-Polar Girl: An Irreverent Look at Bipolar Disorder, is amusing, highly readable and illustrated by the author's son Greg, who is also a sufferer. I recommend it for anybody who has ever wondered exactly what bipolar is, or who has a sufferer in the family.