A Memoir of one man’s struggle with Bipolar Illness

The struggle with mental illness I often think of as the silent disease, mainly because one becomes so wrapped up in one’s own internal pain (although it might become a bit exterior as well); that the simple struggle for one’s own existence, one’s own life, becomes a daily set of infinite chores, which can exhaust the mind from feeling deeply suicidal, to (if one is afflicted with bipolar illness) to the heights of a pleasure filled manic or hypomanic episode and then, depending upon the person, can become a mixed form of illness in which it is difficult to decipher just where one is; since one is put through a combination of symptoms covering depression, bipolar or a mixed mood disorder of what I like to refer to as the “The Struggle of Sisyphus.” It is this adventure to the manic mountaintop in which one is constantly filled with joy, pleasure and adventure, knowing full while that there will come a day when Sisyphus loses the battle and usually tumbles back into deep depression. The saddest part of all this was a study done to examine just how many years it can take to get stabilized with the right set of medication(s), and the worst part is that the study shows that the majority of people with mental illness who do not become stabilized in this ten year period, most often commit suicide.

Jack Schauer is an author and singer-songwriter from Fargo, North Dakota. He has recorded and produced four CDs. He graduated from the University of Jamestown, Jamestown, North Dakota in December of 1980. He has two Master’s degrees: one in Liberal Arts, Moorhead State University, Moorhead, Minnesota and Nonprofit Management, Capella University, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Although he has suffered with bipolar illness since he was twenty-one, he has written four books, “The Outsiders,” “Politics In Compassion,” “Maitreya and the Struggle Against Global Poverty,” and the “Rebirth.” His interests, in addition to philosophy, history, politics and issues of social justice and welfare, focus on the teachings of Maitreya, and how that teaching translates in terms of global poverty and global sharing of resources, from an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary set of perspectives.