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Type of bind: Paperback
EAN num: 9781583483855
ISBN number: 1583483853
Label: iUniverse Star
Manufacturer: iUniverse Star
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 222
Printing Date: August 17, 2007
Publishing house: iUniverse Star
Sale Popularity Level: 94165
Studio: iUniverse Star
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“I am no longer a poet. I have lost all my words.”
Vibrant, intelligent, and active, nineteen-year-old college student Karla Smith embraces the future with unbridled enthusiasm. But when she suddenly loses interest in everything she always loved, her family is understandably alarmed. Where is the bubbly, optimistic Karla they all know and love?
Weeks go by and Karla hides under her bedcovers, refuses to engage in any of her passions, and returns only a wall of silence to her family’s pleading questions. Eventually diagnosed as bipolar, Karla experiences the illness’s major symptoms of recurring depression and periodic mania. Her parents, Fran and Tom, and her twin brother, Kevin, endure her tragic lows and euphoric highs for seven long years before Karla loses the battle with her illness, committing suicide at the tender age of twenty-six.
The Smith family weaves threads of pain, confusion, grief, and hope into a moving portrait of the challenge and tragedy of bipolar disorder. But it’s Karla’s own story—her brave fight against the debilitating disorder and her enduring struggle for balance, acceptance, and peace—that lies at the heart of this book, offering hope and strength for everyone who suffers from bipolar disorder and their loved ones.
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Rated by buyers -
This book imparts to the reader not only the intensity of the illness experienced by the individual, but the consumption of the entire family. It reveals how for families trying desperately to protect their loved ones from not only themselves but the very dangers of the outside world can be completely consuming emotionally as well a time wise. It shows how the "caretaker" must at all costs, be as energetically manic so to speak in order to keep up the pace necessary to deal with what is coming at them minute by minute. In the end the book also conveys the pain and anguish left behind in a family's heart when they may feel that they have unsuccessfully protected the one they loved so much and who needed them the most, even though the reality is they did all they could do.
Rated by buyers -
[...]
This book is a memoir written Author name: Tom Smith--the father of Karla Smith who took her own life on January 13, 2003 after six years of dealing with bipolar disorder, Kevin Smith-her twin brother who kept a chronological log of her manic behavior and activities, and Karla Smith herself as she tries to tell us about her illness.
As you can imagine, the six years of illness and the loss of Karla have been very difficult, trying, heartbreaking years for this family, and The Karla Smith Foundation has been created to provide hope to families and friends of anyone with a mental illness or who has lost a loved one to suicide.
About the book itself, it is one of the better-written books I have read on the subject of bipolar disorder. Many such books are written by the care givers and deal with their problems, frustrations and pain. What I found of particular interest was Karla's writing and I quote from Chapter 4 - Karla Speaks For Herself:
""In all the memoirs of mental illness that I've read, each author at some point laments that it is impossible to really describe acute depression (or mania, or schizophrenia); the experience itself defies words. This is discouraging. But I want this problem to be a theme of my book, directly addressed and worked through: the very impossibility of writing what I am trying to write. Similar to the experience of an acute episode itself, the causes of the illness are equally elusive. I have to remember the truth that William Styron, in his book Darkness Visible, so plainly declares: "I shall never learn what `caused' my depression, as no one will ever learn about their own. To be able to do so will likely forever prove to be an impossibility, so complex are the intermingled factors of abnormal chemistry, behavior and genetics." There is no accounting for why mental illness strikes some and not others. As Styron says, "Bloody and bowed by the outrages of life, most human beings still stagger on down the road, unscathed by real depression. To discover why some people plunge into the downward spiral of depression, one must search beyond the manifest crisis-and then still fail to come up with anything beyond wise conjecture."
I am so captivated by Styron's book because it combines the details of his own story with more generl discussions of important questions surrounding mental illness. If this book were widely read in the `90's, as I have heard it was, then he has contributed crucial understandings to those who have never suffered from severe depression; for example, he argues that the stigma and shame commonly attached to suicide, the frequent assumption that the person must have been weak, is just ridiculous and must be replaced by a more sympathetic awareness that a person commits suicide because the psychic torment is simply too much to endure.
Like Styron, I want to include some critical comments about the larger world, using examples from my own life as starting points. For example, I want to question the capacity of any institution to administer carefully and correctly to the patient suffering from mental illness, and instead of proposing mere reform, I'd like to envision a completely radical method of treatment (still working out the details of this in my head). I also want to situate my story within a larger sociological framework: growing up in an American, upper-middle class, religious family, with pressure to succeed, and I want to express the "depression-inducing" elements of those circumstances (while still refusing to name a singular cause of my illness). But my story also visits the impoverished underside of society and I especially want to point out the vast difference between hospitals for the rich and for the poor. Along similar lines, I want to look at gender: I want to show how it does, at least partially, make sense that my brother did not suffer depression but I did; how it works in adolescence that so much of a girl's self esteem is derived from her looks and attention from boys, and how hard it is to out-grow this; and drawing largely on Showalter's amazing book The Female Malady, how frailty, dependence, and even madness have been linked with the Western conception of woman since Aristole.""
Karla Smith was a beautiful, intelligent, gifted, well-read young woman, and the above quote is just a small sample of her writing, insight, and plans to write about her illness. In another piece which she titled `To Whom It May Concern' and in which she tries to encourage others with similar problems to find gratitude and to "rise from the ashes" I quote:
"So perhaps you spend most of your time alone, thinking endlessly, and trapping yourself in those thoughts. Most likely there are people who are concerned for you, and stand by helplessly as you grow more and more isolated. You are tired of their trite pick-me-ups, and hollow suggestions, and sugary anecdotes. They ... Read More
Rated by buyers -
Very well written and an important piece of work for those suffering from Bipolar disorder and for their caregivers.
Rated by buyers -
I found this to be a very heart-wrenching, nail-biting, thought-provoking, informative look at a very long yet very short point in time for a family suffering from the effects of Bipolar disorder. Disease and death of one's child are extremely terrible and almost impossible to outlive. I grew tremendously throughout the 48-hour period I occupied between my start and finish of this book. I have marked several passages from the book and intend to quote Tom, Karla and Kevin often in my counseling work.
Rated by buyers -
This is a tragic story of bipolar disease, suicide and the effects on a family. I felt like I was walking in the shoes of the authors as each explained his or her own unique perspective on this perplexing mental health problem. Karla writes from the extraordinary position of one who suffered from this disorder; Tom is the father who desperately wants to understand, help and protect his daughter; and Kevin's journal provides a sometimes minute-by-minute account of his frantic efforts to rescue his twin sister while she was in a manic state. I cannot recommend this book more strongly, particularly for families of those who suffer mental health conditions and/or for families of suicide victims.
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