I found this book in the Dandenong Library recently and it is extraordinary. Kay brilliantly describes the seductive, soaring, intoxicating highs and the numbing, utterly paralysing lows that psychosis can bring. This is territory which I am infinitely familiar with and have myself been trying to capture in words for the past 17 years or more. Maybe this book is more poignant and powerful if you have spent a lot of time in these same places. Here are a couple of sections I found especially moving:

I can't convey it and he can't see it. There's nothing to be done. I can't think. I can't calm this murderous cauldron. My grand ideas of half an hour ago seem absurd and pathetic. My life is in ruins and - worse still - ruinous. My body is uninhabitable. It is raging and weeping and full of destruction and wild energy gone amok. In the mirror I see a creature I don't know but must live and share my mind with. I understand why Jeckyll killed himself before Hyde had taken over completely.

I could not stand the pain any longer. I could not abide the bone-weary and tiresome person I had become and felt that I could not continue to be responsible for the turmoil I was inflicting on my friends and family. In a perverse linking within my mind I thought that, like the pilot whom I had seen kill himself to save others, I was doing the only fair thing for the people I cared about. It was also the only sensible thing to do for myself. One would put an animal down for far less suffering.

Others would say to me, 'It is only temporary. It will pass. You will get over it.' but of course they had no idea how I felt, although they were certain that they did. Over and over and over I would say to myself, 'If I can't feel, if I can't move, if I can't think, and I can't care, then what conceivable point is there in living?

Like everything else in my life, the grim was usually set off by the grand, the grand, in turn would yet again be cancelled out by the grim. It was a loopy but intense life: marvelous, ghastly, dreadful, indescribably difficult, gloriously and unexpectedly easy, complicated, great fun, and a no-exit nightmare. My friends, fortunately, were either a bit loopy themselves, or remarkably tolerant of the chaos that formed the basic core of my emotional existence.

For a long time both before and after I tried to kill myself, I was in the close care of a friend of mine who redefined the notion of friendship. He was a psychiatrist, as well as a warm, whimsical and witty man who had a mind like a cluttered attic. He was intrigued by a variety of bizarre things, including me, and wrote fascinating articles about such topics as nutmeg psychoses and the personal habits of Sherlock Holmes. He was intensely loyal and spent evening after evening with me, somehow enduring my choleric moods. He was generous with both his time and money and he stubbornly believed that I would make it through my depression and ultimately thrive.

When I went home at night it was to a place of increasing chaos: Books, many of them newly purchased, were strewn everwhere. Clothes were piled up in mounds in every room. There were unwrapped packages and unemptied shopping bags as far as the eye could see. My apartment looked like it had been inhabited and then abandoned by a colony of moles. There were hundreds of scraps of paper as well. They cluttered the top of my desk and kitchen counters, forming their own little mounds on the floor. One scrap contained an incoherent and rambling poem. I found it weeks later in my refrigerator, apparently triggered by my spice collection which, needless to say, had grown in leaps and bounds during my mania. I had titled it, for reasons that I am sure made sense at the time, "God is a Herbivore"

A few days after lowering my dose, I was walking in Hyde Park, along the side of the Serpentine, when I realised that my steps were literally bouncier than they had been and that I was taking in sights and sounds that previously had been filtered through thick layers of gauze. The quacking of the ducks was more insistent, clearer, more intense. The bumps on the sidewalk were far more noticeable. I felt more energetic and alive, Most significant, I could once again read without effort. It was, in short, remarkable. I wept for the poignancy of all the intensity I had lost without knowing it. I wept for the pleasure of experiencing it again.

My mother also was wonderful. She cooked meal after meal during my long bouts of depression, helped me with my laundry and helped pay my medical bills. She endured my irritability and boringly bleak moods, drove me to the doctor, took me to pharmacies, and took me shopping. Like a gentle mother cat who picks up a straying kitten by the nape of the neck, she kept her marvelously maternal eyes wide-open and if I floundered too far away she brought me back into a geographic and emotional range of security, food and protection. Her formidable strength slowly eked its way into my marrowbone. It, coupled with medicine for my brain and superb psychotherapy for my mind, pulled me through day after impossibly hard day. Without her I never would have survived.

The complexities of what we are given in life are vast and beyond comprehension. It was as if my father had given me, by way of temperament, an impossibly wild, dark and unbroken horse. It was a horse without a name, a horse with no experience of a bit between its teeth. My mother taught me to gentle it, gave me the discipline and love to break it.

The debt I owe my psychiatrist is beyond description. I remember sitting in his office a hundred times during those grim months and each time thinking, 'What on earth can he say that will make me feel better or keep me alive? Well, there never was anything he could say, that's the funny thing. It was all the stupid, desperately optimistic, condescending things he didn't say that kept me alive. All the compassion and warmth I felt from him that could not have been said. All the intelligence, competence and time he put into it and his granite belief that mine was a life worth living. He was terribly direct, which was terribly important and he was willing to admit the limits of his understanding and treatments and when he was wrong. Most difficult to put into words, but in many ways the essence of everything: He taught me that the road from suicide to life is cold and colder and colder still, but � with steely effort, the grace of God and an inevitable break in the weather � that I could make it.

As I gradually entered into the world of more stable moods and more predictable life, I began to realise that I knew very little about it and had no real idea what it would be like to live in such a place. In many ways, I was a stranger to the normal world.

There are also sections where she offers her thoughts on many of the issues surrounding "mental illness". One chapter is called "The troubled helix" as she talks about research into the causes of manic-depression and what the best treatments may be in the future. She also discusses ways in which the stigma of mental illness might be reduced.

There are literally dozens more sections I could have selected. Overall, I found this book immensely inspiring and compelling. It is ultimately a tale of the healing power of love and the indestructibility of the human spirit. One reviewer said this:

"Quite astonishing � cuts through the dead jargon and detached observations of psychiatric theory and practice to create a fiery, passionate, authentic account of the devastation and exaltation, the blindness and illumination of the psychotic experience."

Anyone who is seeking an insight into what it is like to live with the experience of psychosis will find this book invaluable. She has described the indescribable with remarkable courage and candour.Kay has also written a book called " Night Falls Fast : Understanding Suicide" which deals with the highly emotionally-charged subject of suicide. If An Unquiet Mind is any guide, that book should be well worth checking out also.

I promise to add more when i get around to it ...

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