My parents, scared, took me to a therapist a few years after I was attacked as a teen – I had periods of sadness, complete numbness, intense joy and escape in music. And interspersed, periods of irrationality. I found out later I really scared my friends with my mental constructs. I had some sense that my thoughts and actions were very wrong but I was dragged bodily on a roller coaster with no sense of time or space. I didn’t even ponder where the compulsion and agitation came from – I was just there, on a mission to accomplish something I didn’t truly understand and was powerless to control.

The first therapist told my mother that she thought it might be schizophrenia. My mother tells me it drove her on a secret feverish hunt to learn all she could about the frightening disease.

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