“Unfortunately I have this story to tell. Fortunately I know how to tell a story.”
–Susan Ralphe
For years journalist Susan Ralphe cranked out newspaper feature stories, unaware that her own tale of misery lurked around the bend. She wrote about a 12-year-old girl whose evil stepfather’s treatment propelled her to live under a highway bridge. She interviewed a poor elderly woman who resorted to a regular diet of canned dog food. And then the writing stopped. Susan she fell precipitously at age 40 into the black psychotic depths of bipolar disorder.
Susan’s disease delivered her to the edge of suicide. A tension-filled kind of mania installed ever-tightening bands in her head. She could no longer think or function.
My Bipolar Backpack traces the start of her disease to kindergarten, where she was a haunted by the fact that her Father was bedridden, and scared that something awful would also claim her Mother, so she ran home from the playground each recess, covering the block and a half before the teacher noticed she was AWOL.
On a manic high in high school, she got straight A’s while joining almost every extracurricular activity. In college her depression became noticeable to roommates and school officials, but unfortunately doctors didn’t connect the dots. Subsequent normal demands of marriage and children brought on bipolar symptoms alternating with happy times as a family. Added into the volatile mix was husband Roger’s alcoholism.
It took four years, two hospitalizations, intense psychotherapy, and trials and failures of one prescription medication after another before Susan’s first psychiatrist got her diagnosis right, treated her with lithium carbonate, and announced that she was “symptom free.” He told her she would never be cured, but her symptoms would stay at bay if she took her meds.
She was never again able to get a newspaper job but found a cause to believe in via desert preservation in Fountain Hills, AZ and service there in elective office on the Town Council. Still later she served on a water advisory board in Reno, NV.
Susan holds out hope to others who find themselves in that same black bottom of bipolar illness and don’t believe life can get better. “Insist on getting psychotherapy, take your meds, and throw away the heavy bipolar backpack where you have been hiding your disease,” she tells readers. “I’ll tell you how I did it.”
The author grew up in Norway, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and graduated from Northern Michigan University.
The author lives in the Portland area, has two sons and nine grandchildren. Her husband died in 2007 after 38 years of marriage.